For Meriweather

She just pretends to be clumsy, so she can grab mens' packages as she falls. She's done it twice today already, once at the coffee shop, where she fondled a young, brainy bike messenger type. The second time she was entering the elevator where she worked as a receptionist in a law firm. She spotted on the of senior partners in front of her and sprinted to catch him. The opportunity was too good to pass up. She often used speed as a guise--she was running too fast and slipped over the threshold, or she was flailing to catch the bus and bumped into some obstacle, usually a trash bin or potted plant.

The surprising thing was how differently each man would react. For example, the lawyer pretended not to notice. Or maybe he really didn't notice, his package shrivelled with disuse from too many long nights curled up with a law journal instad of his wife. Married men--she could tell by a quick glance at their left hand--seemed to enjoy it. They would always yell out something like, "Hey! Watch the goods!" with a wink and a snicker.

It was the men her own age who got mad. They'd shrink from her touch and scowl harshly yelling "Watch out!" or "What the hell?"

"The technique" as she had come to call it, was a method of quickly achieving a very intimate knowledge of a man. Whether one side was bigger than the other, or one side had been removed, or there were piercings--she knew something about that man that few others knew. It was a kind of power, because they didn't know she knew it. They would adjust themselves and walk off, never guessing that a complete stranger had peered into the depths of thier lives, like a ten year-old peers into a hampster cage, observing the way the hampster nibbles on pellets or runs on the wheel.

She considered trying the technique on women, but it seemed that groping a breast or pubic area wouldn't return the same kind of information. Maybe she was less objective, being a woman herself. Or maybe women were just less puzzling in general. You could already read so much about a woman from her handbag, her hairstyle, or the way she glanced (or didn't) at her reflection in a shop window. Men hid their secrets better. It was only after giving one a full, body-checking grab that he revealed himself.

There was one man, however, that she hadn't been able to get a read on. She'd see him frequently as she would walk to her bus stop after work. He must have worked downtown too, or perhaps lived nearby. He would always be wearing khakis and a non-descript, plaid button-down. It was the male uniform--what men wore when they really didn't care about clothes, but still believed what their mothers had taught them about looking decent in public. These were the same sort of men who happily stripped down to their boxer shorts at home. She see him everyday at just about the same spot. She would be walking past the newsstand, and he would be coming in the opposite direction.

One day, she saw him approaching and purposely lingered to look at the headlines. He was three steps away from her when she turned and caught her foot just-so under the newspaper rack. She made a wild gesture of swinging her arms wide to the side as if she were trying to catch her balance, but her oversized handbag swung out just enough to pull her over, depositing lipsticks and old receipts onto the sidewalk at the same moment she extended her arm and cupped her hand.

And then she had done it, but felt nothing. No spark of intuition, no glimpse of soul. Just spongy flesh that yielded to the side. He was silent, and looked straight ahead in a blind manner. He didn't even seem to notice she was there.

She scrambled up and made her standard apologies while collecting her purse. "Oh...I'm so sorry...two left feet..." and moved down the block. On the bus she closed her eyes and tried to get a sense of him. There was nothing. "Maybe he's an alien...a zombie...a pod-person," she wondered.

And so today, she decided she was going to do something she had never done before. She was going to try the technique for a second time on the same man. She knew she risked revealing herself because the clumsy act would only work once. But she couldn't free herself from thinking about him until she was certain there was something there, or he really was as blank as she first sensed him to be.

All day, she obsessed about how and when she would do it. She needed to position herself in a way that would produce the optimum read. It needed to be something that would give her the maximum amount of contact time and allow for the greatest surface area to be covered. Halfway through the day, she noticed she had been doodling penis shapes on the "While You Were Out" notepads she used to give phone messages to the lawyers. And then it came to her: she was going in from behind.

After work, she waited at the newstand once again nervously fingering El Pais and the New York Times, and looking for him out of the corner of her eye. When finally he passed, she counted to five and then took off after him, carefully keeping far enough behind him that she wouldn't be too obvious. He was wearing a grey t-shirt and shorts today, which seemed out of character for him. He was looking ruffled, a little grungy even. His pace was brisk, and she found herself taking two steps for every one of his.

They walked two blocks and then he started to slow down. His hand entered his pocket and he pulled out a ring of keys. She saw him sifting through for one and knew her moment had arrived. This was where he lived. In just a moment he would unlock the door to this squat, brick apartment building and dissapear. Her chance would be gone. So she sprinted and lept head-first, like a baseball player diving for a fly-ball, both arms outstretched, palms exposed and fingers wide. She grabbed hold of his crotch, closed her eyes tight, and clenched her grip.

And she felt nothing, except the scraping of her own elbow against the pavement and her ribs making a heavy thud as she hit the ground. She realized he was screaming in pain and writhing on the ground in front of her. Her hand was still between his legs. He kicked her in the head and she let go. She felt no pain, just blind confusion. Nothing. Still nothing.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he screamed. She could feel people staring at her as they walked by. She had just outed herself to the world, all for nothing.

She sat up, and looked at him. He was breathing hard and his shirt was stained near his shoulder where he had hit the concrete. He struggled to sit up, and faced her. He loomed in and she braced herself for a slap or punch. She deserved it. But all she felt was a wet touch on the lips.

He had kissed her? She opened her eyes and looked at him. And then she saw it, the thing she had been waiting for, the feeling she had been waiting to feel, a tiny object placed on the horizon, so small it was hardly there, and just a movement away from vanishing altogether. She found she was staring at herself. Like standing between two mirrors, where the reflections were endless, she had felt nothing because he had been thinking of her. He pulled away and looked hopefully at her.

"Ya'll are fuckin' crazy!" she heard someone say. They both turned and saw a grizzled man with a plastic bag full of empty soda cans watching them, one hand still searching the garbage can. She couldn't help but laugh, and was happy to see that though he was still holding himself, he was laughing too.

A meditation on Louis Armstrong

I
Louis would have felt awfully awkward at dinner with my family. Mom would have put spaghetti on the table--the kind with the big chunks of stewed tomatoes in the sauce--and his grin would have gone away. His mouth would no longer be like an ear of corn with big, juicy white kernels, but pursed lips like a pert lemon.

Maybe he would have liked mom's pork chops and apple sauce better. But if spaghetti was what we were having, then he better eat it. And on top of all that he'd have to make small talk with my dad, and try not to smack me across the table for staring at him--his big gold ring, his jaunty checked cap, cushy merino argyle socks so proudly ending in a pair of fine leather shoes.

"How nice, how nice..." he'd politely say in response to my dad's bad jokes, or my mom's attempts to make him eat more greasy garlic bread.

II
You are what you eat. As if teeth are corn kernels, and eyes are lemon leaves. I could eat myself outside in. Begin with my licorice hair and saffron eyelashes. Nibble off my potato chip fingernails and feast on my pudgy little vienna sausage fingers.

It's not an attractive fantasy. I'd rather my doorknobs become chocolate-covered almonds and my stairway transform into slabs of peanut brittle.

I'm such an American. A consumer. The world is more attractive as a place for me to gorge my appetites. Perhaps as an Iraqi suicide bomber, the idea of my lips as a sour lemon feels like a better idea. A bright, shiny fruit for God alone.

III
juicy fruit is gonna move ya
chews so soft it gets right through ya
juicy fruit the taste the taste the taste is gonna move ya

The worst of me

40+ hours a week and I arrive home with only the worst parts of me intact. The food hoarder, beer guzzler, bitch, sloth, whiney parts. The better parts get spent uselessly on clients and co-workers, coffee runs, and e-mails.

I walk in the door and my priorities are drink, shit, eat, sleep, leave me alone. Leave me the fuck alone.

I thought this job would be better. It is. But I'm still exhausted. I'm still unable to cope, addicted to caffine and alcohol, craving space from telephones, friends, and family.

It's not them. It's me. I've sold my brain to someone else for the past 10 hours and I just got it back! I want to keep it to myself before I have to consider their thirst, hunger, exhaustion, sickness, whatever it is they want to me to take care of. And there are animals, and mail, and unanswered phone calls, and oh yeah, better exercise so I don't get fat (I'm getting fatter every day, fat ass).

I spend time with friends and I barely hear what they say because I'm thinking I only have two hours and then need to go back to laundry, groceries, oil change, cat food, drain cleaner, garbage. I eat food and forget I'm chewing. My mouth is full and I taste nothing. The only time I am truely happy is tucked in bed, the lights still on and slightly drowsy, I have seven blissful hours of nothing in front of me with space from my life, my fat body, my dissapointment.

The bee-hive having

I love this letter from our "bee-keeper"...

Pam and Tony,

On thursday, I took the whole hive apart again. I couldn't find the queen but there was lots of brood and I'm sure she is in there lost in the piles of bees that are present. I did make another split, so I unloaded a few more of those bees and brought them over to my place to requeen.

My earlier attempt to requeen the first split failed. The queen was released but killed. Don't ask me why but I placed her in the hive too soon and the bees were still stressed while in transport and relocation. At $14.00 a queen, I'd say its something I need to get better at.

Your hive shows no signs of wanting to swarm. It is an extremely strong hive that is ready for the honey flow to start. My next move will be to add a honey super in about 10 days. I have great expectations as everything is primed and any swarm tendancy has ended.

A couple of guard bees slipped out of the split hive that I was trying to load into the car and a bee nailed me in my left lower eyelid. When I woke up this AM, it felt and looked like I had been in a barroom fight. My left side of my face was really swollen. That happened at about 4 o'clock, and I hoped that you weren't returning soon. You must have noticed something was up.

I left the feeder in the entrance but they don't need to be fed. At least, not in any time soon. Talk to you later. Give me a call if there are any questions......Thomas

Sense of place

As long as we stayed outside, we could live in our own world. Inside, the adults made the rules and we became the kids we were instead of the people we wanted to be.

We didn’t have any money anyway, so the Globe Hotel with its fish fry and cigarette smoke aroma was off limits to us. Hanging out behind the Aurora Theater was as much a thing to do as seeing the movie inside. There were always packs of skate rats, hair hanging over one eye, doing ollies and grinding their boards across the cement of the theater parking lot. That was usually where things got started. Rumors of parties floated like pollen. But mostly there was nothing, and we’d stay until the adults rolled out of the theater and drifted through the parking lot to their cars.

Other kids would go to the Boys Club at night. Kids whose parents would likely pick them up in a minivan promptly at 10 p.m. I went there a few times. Its gym and the game room didn’t appeal to me. There weren’t any dark corners where my secret life could be led. It provided a choice between basketball or foosball, but what I wanted was to make up my own rules.

We’d move in a huddle, down Main to South Grove. Hamlin Park was there for us, with its canopy of trees and the swings that beckoned like our own version of a living room. Sometimes it was the train tracks. Sometimes the corner of Sycamore and Linden. Going home wasn’t an option—even though for all of my fantasies of a game of Mexican hide and seek—nothing ever happened. It was important to be there in case Sarah did go off with Jason, or Pete’s parents did go away and that meant that he and Amy would go to second base. Or in case, that night, he did notice me.

Found Poem

The meadow sweet, the beehive cluster,
a nebula of blooms in sequence.
One, two, three cherry blossoms
in an ancient orchard,
so reddened and subdued.

Wear thick eyeglasses,
for red flower
robin's egg
bright forsythia
is risky to the eye,
like a red hot penny in the hand.

A wide angle lens will try to tell you,
"North is up."
But there's merely an edge
moving to swallow midnight into day,
a volcanic surge, a rising planet,
a gathering glow eclipsed in dull red
as dawn approaches.
Be sure to squint, or you might fall in love.

Inspiration

From Being Perfect by Anna Quindlen:

"Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason ever to write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time ever has. That is her own personality, her own voice. If she is doing Fitzgerald imitations, she can stay home. If she is giving readers what she thinks they want instead of what she is, she should stop typing. But if her books reflect her character, the authentic shape of her life and her mind, then she may well be giving readers a new wonderful gift. Giving it to herself, too."

Advice for 15 year-old girls from an older woman

I'm using full names in this one. Fuck 'em.

If only I had known....This was the topic of Dan Savage's column this week, "Advice for 15 year-old girls from older women." The advice that struck me? "Just because a man wants to fuck you doesn't mean he likes you."

Ah yes. Those men. Pete Rooney. Chris Schavi. And there are others.

I've always preserved my self-dignity by believing some unseen obstacle got in the way. Maybe he did like me, but then he changed his mind. Maybe the time and circumstance wasn't right.

Let me clarify a bit, there wasn't actual fucking with either of these men (if you can call them that). But there was pursuit. Attention paid. Physical co-mingling. And on my part, emotional attachment. Hope. Expectation. Dissapointment.

Chris lived across the state. I remember looking at his town on a map and wondering what it was like to live there. He played hockey, which seemed so foreign to me. The boys in my town played soccer. I sent him a birthday card, and received no response, despite including my phone number. Nothing in the entire month between encounters. When I saw him again, I expected him to be happy to see me. It was awkward. He didn't acknowledge me in any special way. I boldly went to his room and acted chipper and nonchalant. He would barely look at me. I think later that weekend, as I was standing by myself, he approached me and said something lame. I surely would have looked at my shoes and said something like, "Yeah, whatever."

Pete Rooney. He would have like to fuck me. What a conquest that would have been for him. Gaining attention from the shy, pretty girl that had avoided him all semester. How powerful that would have made him feel. Unfortunatley, he drank too much champagne and passed out.

When I read the Dan Savage article, as hard as it was to admit it, I knew it answered all my previous questions about what happened. My earlier questions were easier on my ego.

1. Did he really like me all semester, but just not show it? (Try to remember bit encounters that would reveal a clue.)
2. If we has hooked up earlier, would it have turned into something real?
3. Why did he get so drunk?
4. Did he really pass out, or was he pretending?
5. Was there a bet? Did he make a bet about me with that ass, Brian?
6. What was that bashful call the next day all about?

The high tea. It was horrible. He ignored me. The girls he has spent his whole semester with were there. Those kind of girls. Beautiful. Rich. Loud. It was as if he couldn't switch over from the persona he had developed all semester. And neither could I. At least not in front of those people. It would have been like thunder--hot and cold air colliding and everyone would have heard the crash and smelled the static in the air.

What I never realized before today, was that both the encounter with Chris and Pete has something in common. I was abandoned by my friends afterward. With Chris, all my friends roomed together and left me out. I was exiled to the uncool girls' room. The fat girls, the not-so pretty girls, the kind-of-psycho girls. With Pete, I got stuck sitting with Amy C. at the tea. There was no room at the other table for me. She was a meek mouse of a girl. Sweet, but we had barely exchanged two words all semester.

But was it me or them? Did I purposely push away from them, as if to say "I'm different now"? Was I punishing myself? Was I exhiling myself, suddenly feeling like a cast-off? Or did I just need a break from my friends' prying questions and piercing eyes? My friends knew what had happened. The unpopular girls didn't.

Tell me

This weekend, my partner and I had the chance to celebrate the Passover Seder with my friend Brenna and her family. I'm still recounting the experience in my mind, but I was immedately taken with the tradition. I'm trying to figure out what sets it apart from other religious traditions I've celebrated like Christmas. There's the same family aspect, special foods, prayers, rituals. Is it the commercialism that surrounds so many Christian holidays? Even the significance of Easter is overtaken by a bunny with chocolate. I'm not a religious person at all, so why was I moved by this ritual?

And it struck me. It's the story. Whether you believe the story of Passover or care about it, if you participate in a seder, you're a part of the story. It's the talking and listening, the questioning. Brenna and her family are very relaxed about their traditions--and even poke fun at them. How nice though, to have a reason to sit and remember what binds you as a family. The tensions leave the room? The disputes fade? You eat the crappy food and remember how crappy it is, and that you do it every year with these people.

What a great way to pass something from parent to child. What a great way to communicate who you are as a person who you are in relation to everyone else in the world. My parents and I don't talk about these things much. It's like they fade as people into base for-the-moment humor and shopping. They are cut off from the world.

Things I love about Passover:
1. The Afikomen. (I kept thinking of Kofi Annan every time this word was spoken.)
2. The wine. (We did not drink Manischewitz, but lots of other great wine.)
3. The singing and stories, especially the impromptu ones.
4. Leah's version of the Haggadah, which has been used since the 1950's and still had the penciled-in names of her sisters, brothers and parents. (Mort!)
5. Opening the door for Elijah.

Things I do not like about Passover
1. Gefilte fish.
2. Matzo (unless it had jam or chocolate on it).
3. The angel of death.

SR-14

Leaving work at sunset,
I wind my way down a gray stretch
of road. Scraggly brush and litter at the side
of a swampy ditch--a small metal shed catches
the sunlight just so and is transformed into a brilliant
monolith, like a doorway to another universe.

It's as if there's power in the universe
to remake all of us at sunset
into something better, more brilliant.
I can feel myself changing, stretching
out like a phoenix to catch
what’s left of the light I still have inside.

Some days, I feel like I've been turned sideways.
It's not as if I'm the only person in the universe
to feel this way. Amidst the rubble we strain to catch
a warm flicker of fire before the sun sets,
sending us into the night--darkness stretching
out before us in sable brilliance.

The trick is to not let the brilliant
aching of monotonous routine sidle
up to you. To keep the days from endless stretching
out like a ticking clock. To remember that the universe
has more in mind for us. Like a metal shed at sunset,
we are both glowing and dim, and mostly caught

somewhere in between. The catch
is to remember that brilliance
can happen near a swampy ditch, or a in car at sunset.
That whoever you appear to be on the outside,
you are more like a streaming comet, circling the universe
than cold metal, by a long stretch.

It's the space between your ribs as you stretch
that holds oxygen to fan the fire. Release the catch
on the door, and breathe into the universe
a sigh that strains forth, brilliant
in its desire, exhaling and expanding inside,
a glowing sphere of fire at sunset.

The sunset, a blazing pink so brilliant
it catches the tree tops and makes them glow, stretching
out besides me like a fiery sign from the universe.

Root

This is a screenshot from one of my new favorite websites the Visual Thesaurus. It visually maps out a word and its synonymns. There's an "autopilot" setting where it moves through a chain link of one word to the next. It's amazing to see how you can get from "rug" to "lilac." A little wordy six degrees of separation for ya.

Things I wore that now embarrass me

I used to experiment with clothes. I came up with some really cool things sometimes. (I painted a monster on pair of jeans with a hole in the knee to look like the hole was the monster’s mouth; I made some Jackson Pollack-inspired Chuck Taylors, I had these awesome yellow and white classic Hush Puppies that I’d love to have today.) Sometimes, my experimentation didn’t work out so well.

1. Fifth grade ultimate outfit. I wore this outfit every M, W, F, as if no one would notice just because I was alternating on T, Th with different clothes. A yellow Icelandic-style sweater, and pinstriped jeans. (Remember those?)

2. Sixth grade mish-mash outfit. I think I put these three pieces together because they all were in the same color range. A pair of melon-colored Esprit cropped cargo pants, that were really ballooney. A button down shirt, also melon-colored with green and yellow (?) stripes. On cold days, I would layer a pinkish mohair cardigan over the button down. I believe the cardigan was originally my mother’s from the 60’s. I think I spilled maple syrup on in at some point because I remember it smelled maple-sweet.

3. Earrings that I made from two halves of a ring that broke in two (it was made of cheap metal. I was wearing these when I had my 7th grade class photo taken.

4. If my mom would have let me, I would have taken one of her silk scarves, wrapped it around my waist and fastened with a safety pin, and worn it as a skirt. I really would have. I’m so glad she caught that one.

5. In our school, an 8th grade middle school tradition of sexism was that the boys’ basketball team would play against the teachers during a school assembly. Several of my girlfriends and I decided to be cheerleaders during the event, and we made t-shirts that we wore during the game. I think Brian Logel’s name was scrawled across my chest, and other weird stuff that made my infatuation with him apparent.

6. This strange outfit that consisted of two polo shirts, a red one layered OVER a yellow one, tight khaki pants, and red Chuck Taylors.

orange hatty

1986

I knew exactly what to wear: my black shirt with the big white polka dots, and my white pants with the little black polka dots. My mom had bought them from RAVE, my favorite store. My hair would be just perfect, and I had the best make-up idea from Seventeen.

I dialed my pink phone.

“Hello?”
Hi, Heather?”
“Yeah! Hi !”
“So what time are you going to pick me up tomorrow?”

We were going out to Akron, the town she had moved from just three months ago. It was the kind of place where kids went to 4-H meetings and wore cheap clothes from Ames. Heather still went to 4-H in our town, but at least now she had a sweater from The Limited.

“What are you going to wear?”
“ My pink Limited sweater.”

She was psyched when I told her about my polka-dot outfit.

“That’s so cool! Laura is gonna die!”

Laura was her old best friend from Akron. I imagined her with long, feathered hair, blue eyeshadow and really tight jeans. Heather told me that Laura already had a boyfriend. His name was Mike and he was older and had a job and a license. I bet he drove a Camero or something.

“So like, when we get there, what are you gonna say to Laura?”
“Oh, I dunno. I kinda thought I’d act all normal. But just talk about how cool Aurora is and be like, ‘Akron’s gay.’”
“Cool. We should act like we have boyfriends.”
“Yeah! Mine’s name will be Tim. What will yours be?
”Matt.”

Heather and her mom picked me up the next morning for the long drive out to Akron. I wondered if the highway would end and we’d have to drive down a dirt road or go past cow pastures. But Angie’s Roller Rink and Game Center was on a normal looking road with a bank and a Burger King across the street. Heather’s mom dropped us off and promised to be back at two.

Inside, there was a giant fluorescent Pac-Man on the wall and a disco ball in the middle of the skating rink. That stupid song by Jefferson Starship was blaring “We built this city….” I hated that song. We got our skates.

“These look dorky with my outfit.” They were totally spoiling my look.
The other kids there looked pretty normal. The girls were wearing stirrup pants and baggy sweaters, the boys weren’t skaters like the boys in Aurora, but they were cute.

Laura was in the corner with a couple of other girls. She was slight and pretty with long blond hair. I was at least five inches taller than she was.

“Hi Laura!” Heather said.
“Hi!.”
“This is Pam.”
“Hi!”
“Hi.”

I felt like a monster. I was still wearing my big winter coat because there was no where to put it. My hair had turned out frizzy and stupid. It was awkward.

“Come on, Heather. Let’s skate.” I said.

“Laura, do you want to skate with us?” Heather was trying to be nice, I didn’t know why though.

So the three of us make our way to the rink. Michael Jackson’s Thriller came on.

“Aw man, I love Michael Jackson!” I said. I started to skate backward.

“No way,” Laura said, “Boy George is way cuter.”

“Heather, I can’t believe you used to live here. I said. “There aren’t even any cute boys, like Tim and Matt.”

“Who are they?” asked Laura.

“They’re our boyfriends. See? Look at those two boys over there playing Asteroids. They’re like the cutest boys in here and Tim and Matt are waayyy cuter than that.”

Laura said she was tired, and went to sit down. We kept skating.

“So like, Heather. Do you know those boys? Do you liiiike them?”

“Ewwww. No! The one in the baseball hat, that’s Brian. He was in my class. And that’s Phillip next to him.” Brian was pretty cute. I kept looking over there every time we skated by. I thought maybe they were looking at me a little too.

We went to get some pop. Heather’s mom had given her enough money for two small pops, but I really wanted some candy too. It sucked.

And then I saw Brian get in line. He was getting pizza! I didn’t want to look over at him, but I really wanted to see if he was watching me. I could feel my cheeks getting red hot. I felt like I was standing strangely, like lopsided or something.

Heather ordered two small orange pops and I was embarrassed. What if Brian heard her asking for orange pop? He would think I was poor or something. I tried to act really cool as I took my pop from the concession man. I wanted to look like I didn’t even care about the pop. I stood up tall and tried to swiveled around on my heel and walk away. But the man wouldn’t let go! I gave him a dirty look.

“Say “thank you’,” he said. He raised his eyebrows and waited.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

I got away quickly and sat down. Laura and some other girls must have seen the whole thing. They were whispering and giggling and walking toward the video arcade. Heather didn’t say anything.

“Oh my god, I’m sooo embarrassed!”

“No one saw,” she said.

“I’m going to die! Is it almost time for you mom to get here? I hate this place. It’s boring.”

“It’s only one o’clock. We have another hour.”

I hated my outfit, I hated my stupid hair. I hated this stupid town. I wasn’t even sure Heather was the greatest friend. She only had one Limited sweater after all.

The remarkable mundane

I'm reading this book, _The Hours_ which was turned into the recent film. It is a great book--and very spooky, because practically every paragraph contains something that I've thought before. Like, just this week, I was at the library downtown,and standing in the vestibule, just beside the door, but not in the way of the door. I was putting on my gloves and thinking "This is what normal people do...they stand to the side and put on their gloves and take out their umbrella. Glad I got that covered, and accomplished it so normally." Because, really, don't you feel sometimes just on the verge of madness? What is keeping you from throwing yourself into the bushes, or grabbing the stranger walking by? It feels like an act sometimes--and you're simply mimicing what other "normal" people do (Judith Butler, thank you very much). And so the books goes, "On the steps of Hogarth House, she pauses to remember herself. She has learned over the years that sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one's own convictions." So...yeah...sometimes just the act of walking down the street in a regular fashion seems a remarkable feat.

Barf

"Name's Barf. I'm a mog. Half-man. Half-dog. I'm my own best friend."
Spaceballs, the Movie

Always on the couch. The new couch. My first piece of grown-up furniture (“grown-up” equals not a hand-me-down and not purchased from a second-hand shop). It’s as if the mishaps of the universe are intentionally directed toward the nicest furniture.

Not even a week after the couch was delivered, we had a wine scare. Erika. On couch with red wine in hand. Bela, excited by a new person in the house. Jumps on Erika. Wine spills on couch. I must proudly admit, I could have gone into convulsions on the floor, but I kept it together. Some warm water vinegar, and a whole lot of salt later, the stain was miraculously gone. Disaster averted. Friendship with Erika maintained. Dogs banned from sitting on the couch. (They ignore this rule when we are out).

Last night, it was barf.

And not just your average barf. Bee barf. Let me explain.

About a week ago, Tom, our friendly bee-keeper came to check out our hive. It is doing wonderfully. It is so healthy in fact that we may have to divide the hive into two and re-queen the original. Lots of new baby bees in there. Also, lots of honey and beeswax.

Tom scraped the frames and left pieces of beeswax in the grass. Neat! You can pick up the pieces, pocked with honeycomb chambers. They smell like honey, of course. Lovely evidence of the ingenuity of insects.

Bela obviously appreciated the bees' hard work too, because she ate the beeswax. How do I know? We came home last night to piles of oddly chunky barf. Imagine melting your favorite Crayola crayons (in maize, gray and sepia tones), letting them harden, and then cracking the wax into hundreds of tiny bits. That’s what the barf looked like. And the dead give away...there were dead bees in it.

She bee-barfed her way from the couch to the oriental rug, catching the hand-crocheted afghan in between.

The dogs are now banned from the living room altogether. I vow to never spend another evening daubing at the couch.

The experience and my reaction to it is proof that I have entered the adult world. Now I know why my mother was such a freak about the furniture, the cabinets, the rugs, curtains, pillows and everything else. I hear her voice when I scream, “Good god! Can’t I have anything nice around here?!”

Doodle

Templates, ink plates,
tin cans, red hands, summer tans,
plumbers, morticians, x-ray technicians,
dumb luck, nip-n-tuck,
awe-struck, give a fuck,
drink a shot, pick your snot,
leave to rot, fucking cock,
don't you knock?
Full sail, gun whale
locked in jail, bound to fail,
dog fart, donkey cart,
saucy tart,
but is it art?
Meth-head, fall out of bed,
king is dead, she said he said,
Q-bert rock, eat my sock,
dumb jock,
Dark sable, kitchen table,
Clark Gabel, Tower of Babel.

A Story I Shouldn't Have Written

"She’s like a colt," he thought. Standing across the room, he watched her shake her long, brown hair. She was surrounded by men, a manhattan in one hand and a fist in the other. She was pretending to be a prize fighter, delivering the knockout punch. They loved her bravado and it was clear she enjoyed the attention.

He sipped his martini. He pinched himself so that his swelling erection would be less noticeable. "She’s brash. A young, female lawyer who’s out to prove she has balls just like the men."

She saw him watching her. "The stupid, fat fuck," she thought. "He just shovels those hors d’oeuvres into his gaping maw like some sort of retard. I wouldn’t be surprised if he started drooling." She was used to getting attention. "Look at me, I’ve got three of the most powerful trial lawyers in the city laughing at my jokes."

“Oooh. Better get out the taser! Kelli’s in the house,” she heard one of them say. They loved it. She wasn’t afraid to be a bitch and they ate it up.

‘Oh, come on, Mark. You know I can kick your ass,” she threatened.

All the posturing, the brawling. It was more than just an act. It was a tribal ritual. An admission price. Sure, there were senior women lawyers in the firm, but they were tokens. They had succeeded by adopting the motherly role. She had seen them working late nights and had witnessed the sacrifices they made. But they never had access to the real power. They never participated in the raunchy, brutish conversations that happened behind closed doors. Those women were teaching younger lawyers how to be good little attorneys while the real decisions were getting made by the men.

She saw him coming toward her, pushing his way into the circle, his martini slopping over the rim of the glass.

“Hey, Kelli, great party! The firm really goes all out for Christmas!” he said.

“Yeah, Dave. You’re lucky we let you come.” He was oblivious.

“They have Stoli, which is great, because I only drink martinis with Stoli vodka.”

Everyone was abandoning her. She was trapped alone by this Homer Simpson look-alike yammering on about vodka. Not even a very good vodka.

“How’s life? You got any interesting cases?

“Oh you know. An asbestos class action here, a lead poisoning case there. How are you? How’s your little harem?” She noticed him wince. He was a special breed. One of those men who was never really in a position to conquer the king, so he established his own little fiefdom. He surrounded himself with pert young women, hiring them just out of college. He gave them titles like “specialist” and “manager” to fool the firm into thinking he had brought them there to do work rather than what was obvious—he just wanted to swing his dick around.

“My harem? Oh.” He gave a knowing little laugh. “You mean my staff. They’re good girls. Working hard.”

He saw her looking past him impatiently. Her drink was still half full. He knew she was groping for an excuse to abandon him for the bar, so he lept. “Oh yeah. My harem. They’ll do just about anything for me.”

“Oh really? They’ll do your laundry for you?”

“Actually, one time Stacie did bring my shirts to the dry cleaners and picked them up for me.”

She could see that his shirt had rings of sweat beneath his armpits. She had to get him to go away. “Wow, Dave…how about your coffee?”

“Grande Americano. Everyday.

“Well, well, well. Sounds like they do just about everything but bend over.”

He giggled nervously at her remark. "A six-foot giant who giggles like a little girl," she thought. “Dave, you can’t be suggesting that you’re getting it on with them.”

He couldn’t believe it. She was flirting with him. "A little sly banter, some sexual innuendo...." He could see the lace of her bra from his height. She wore the same power suits as the other female attorneys, but buttoned her dress shirts low. He had heard some of the male attorneys talk about the way she dressed. They would laugh about taking a break from billing for a peep show in Kelli’s office.

She drained her manhattan. “Well, Dave,” she drawled, “I’ll tell you what. You prove that you got one of them to sleep with you, and I’ll sleep with you myself.”

His fat paws clung to his martini glass. She wanted to rip it from him and smash it over his head.

“How can I prove it?” he choked.

“Like they do in the movies, you big stud. You gotta bring me some panties.”

She backed away from him slowly and made her way to the bar. She sat down next to a and ordered another drink. “Two cherries this time,” she said loudly, and looked over her shoulder at him.

And though he was now standing by himself in the middle of the room, he couldn’t move. He saw the girls on his staff sitting in the corner of the room. They had each brought a date to the party—some young kid with a hot car and a low paying job. They were all shit-faced. Silly little girls. He hated to seem them go off with those punks, drunk and helpless. "I’m like a father to them," he thought.

He had the outdated notion that they’d be off to neck somewhere in the back of a car. Things would maybe go a bit too far. What kind of panties did they wear? Could he pay one of their dates to bring him a pair?

The next day was excruciating for him. People were clearing out early for the holidays. His girls rolled in late, bragging about who had the bigger hangover.

He saw her in the lobby several times, always with clients. She didn’t look at him. He had brought a pair of his wife’s underwear with him that morning. They were in his pocket, and he fingered them as he watched her. She would have to make good on her promise. He fantasized walking into her office, closing the door, and dangling them in front of her face. Would they do it right there? Would she insist on a hotel room?

He walked by her office once every hour. Every time the door was closed. At the end of the day, he shoved the underwear in an interoffice envelope and placed it in the mail.

When she opened the envelope the next day, she pulled out the underwear. It was gray and stretched thin, the elastic sagging. A post-it note was enclosed. It read, “Your place or mine?” and had a smiley face drawn in the corner.

He was called into the managing partner’s office that afternoon. The envelope sat between them on the desk. “Since you’ve been harassing not only attorneys but your employees as well, you’ve are no longer welcome at this firm,” the managing partner said. “You should know she’s considering some sort of legal action. You should think about retaining a lawyer.”

The underwear were just visible from where he was sitting. They were stuffed at the bottom of the envelope. He was hoping he could get them back. Would his wife notice they were gone?

“Besides, Dave, what were you thinking? Don’t you know that Kelli and I are together? I’m divorcing my wife. Kelli and I have been living together for months.”

He could barely breathe.

Strangest Dream

I've told many people about this dream, but can never remember the details as I'm telling it (dreams are like that). The good thing is that I wrote the dream down in my journal, right after I dreamed it. Here's the entire thing, from start to finish.

I was a young asian girl. I fell out of a high-rise and into the the ocean below. As I was falling, I prepared myself for the shock of the water. I swam to land, through a canal between high buildings. There was a team of divers, with fins and gear all swimming to shore. I yelled to them for help, pulling on their legs when they ignored me. They were deaf: smiling but unhelpful.

I got to land and there was a man there. There were many children with him. He might have been a teacher. He asked me what had happened, and I told him I had just swam from Canada to the United States. (By this time, I was myself and not an asian girl.) He offered to give me a ride, and I got into his car. I was dripping wet. He left the children behind. His car was an orange gremlin and he turned the wheel very gingerly as he backed out of the lot.

Along the way, we passed a woman with a suitcase. She was wearing orange high heels and looking miserable. She was walking in the opposite direction with a squirt gun in her hand.

As were were driving, all of a sudden these animals came up behind us. There were dozens of them. They looked like a cross between a wolve and a kangaroo. They were moving very fast and passing us, but going in the same direction. Next, came these long, tall flowers. Uprooted and passing us too. They were menacing, a sign of something gone wrong.

The man told me that the woman in orange heels had predicted this. Her squirt gun was to protect her from the flowers. She was a prophet and everyone had thought she was crazy.

I looked in someone's house to see if people were taking notice. They were watching television and talking on the phone.

Then I noticed a big field and a crowd of people standing there, looking up at the sky. That's when I noticed that the sun was black and bloody. I said to myself, "oh my god, it's judgement day."

Then I woke up.

Stuffed

We took the birdhouses down from the garage roof and cleaned them. We took off the roofs and saw each house was stuffed full of feathers and grasses. There was hardly room for birds. A tiny space was left in which a family of four could snuggle in for the night. How long had it taken? Had they spent years getting the layers just right? The perfect mix of lint and string, feathers and weeds? Or did they spend each spring cleaning out the old and bringing in new?

We emptied the stuffing and repainted the little houses. We replaced the rotten wood with new, strong boards. This weekend, we'll put them back up and a new family can move in. They will have a lot of work to do to get it just right.