So, last night, I'm relaxing with my huge bowl of pasta, propped up in my bed, watching a Mel Gibson movie, and waiting for my boyfriend to call from the bus station to say he's back in town. He had gone to the coast for the weekend to stay with his mother and her new boyfriend. He expected to arrive home at about 11pm. It was only 8:30, the movie was over, and it was on a tape I had swiped from my mom several years ago. I let it keep running, as I was so stuffed with pasta, I didn't feel like moving. And it felt good to just veg out for a while. After a few minutes of taped ShoTime commercials while I stare at the ceiling I hear it. The boink-boink music of soft core porn. I look at the television at see a smoky black intro, with a blond woman holding her finger to her lips in the International Symbol for "Shhh!" only this was supposed to be a sexy shushing, not like someone at the movies trying to tell the obnoxious teenagers behind them to shut up. More of the bow-chicka-bow-bow music. Playboy presents: Women's Stories. It was this half-hour soft core housewife fantasy show. The acting was unbelievable. The plots were even worse. In the first episode, a woman falls in love with the apparition of a Mexican bandit that she knew in a former life. In the second, a married woman takes on a job as a high-priced hooker for a writing assignment, and likes it. I kept thinking, "Holy Shit! My mother taped this!"

After those shows, a movie started that was called "Under Lock and Key." Or something along those lines. Women in prison and the drama and nudity that goes along with it. Incredible! Who knew that my mom was interested in this sort of, ahem, stimulation? Well, I was fascinated and so I had to watch it all. It wasn't really doing anything for me, but hey, it was entertaining, and bad porn is better than no porn.

At about 9, halfway through the prison movie, I heard a jingling of keys and a general bumping around outside the front door. I got out of bed and opened the front door to see what was going on and yay! Chris was home! But so was his mom! And her new boyfriend!

I ran back into the bedroom, which is right off the entryway, and turned off the incriminating sounds of the women guards interrogating some of the naughtier prisoners. I popped back out into the living room in a flash, no problem, just a little flustered at what a close call it was.

I'm shaking hands with everyone, meeting for the first time, and I notice Michael looking at the coffee table with solemn interest.

I look down with him and see the Playboy a friend had given Chris for his birthday glaring up like a light in a darkened room. It was nothing, really. It was the issue from the month and year Chris had been born, and in the early seventies all they showed was a little boobage, nothing too flammable. But these people were Mormons, meeting me and seeing our house for the first time.

Pushing my panic down, I nonchalantly moved my backpack to cover the possibly offensive magazine and sat down on the coffee table to futher hinder any investigation into the items on it.

Chris presented me with a pair of dish-washing mittens with the sponges built in. I loved them, but was obviously distracted. What else was lying around the house, waiting to be discovered?

Everyone moved into the kitchen. New pictures of Chris' dad and stepmom had just come in the mail, and they were prominently displayed on the counter. Unfortunately, there weren't any of Chris' mom anywhere to be seen. Ack!

He was showing them the pictures on the fridge, one of which was taken on the night my mother got drunk at a drag show and vomited all over downtown. It was a long night. The picture is of me, my sister, and my mother with the star of the drag show, Darcelle. Chris' mom looked at me and asked if the large woman in the picture with the huge glittery blond wig was a relative. Chris started laughing and backed away. I had to say no.

"He's, um, an entertainer in town? He does, like, a burlesque show?" My voice had taken on that annoying thing where everything gets turned into a question.

They stayed all of five minutes, but between the two-pronged porn fiasco, no pictures, and the fact that I'm almost 30 years old and am still terrified of parents, no matter whose, it was probably best that they didn't stay long.

Chris and I watched the rest of the prison movie together after his mom and her boyfriend left, drinking soda and laughing, and my life didn't seem so offensive anymore.

He hobbled around the circular floor plan, leaning heavily on his cane, light blue cotton pajamas stained in the crotch from a few 'accidents.' he'd lived his whole life never thinking, never suspecting for a minute that once he reached an age where he'd be free from the shackles of work to do anything he wanted that he'd have to spend most of his time running to the bathroom. If he didn't make it, his wife helped him change his pajamas and put the wet ones directly in the washer, but lately she'd been leaving them in a damp heap at the end of the bed. It was a gesture that made him feel uneasy in a way that he couldn't quite pin down, but that he didn't feel like dealing with.

He continued his circuit around the house, clutching the old-fashioned incense burner with his index finger as best he could, waving his arm through the air after he steadied himself with his cane, shuffling in his sheepskin slippers, the ones his son had made for him in 4-H. He slid his legs far enough apart to hold him still. When the smoke had gathered in a thick cloud, he sighed and wandered creakily along.

The cheap Turkish incense obliterated the smell of the rosemary chicken he had made earlier for Sunday dinner. He still insisted on doing the butchering himself, even though his wife said that it was really a job for his son now, as the main able-bodied man of the farm, to choose and kill the evening meal. But he held onto it because it was his routine and he didn't know how to let it go. He wanted to feel useful, and now, at 66, with no job and his granddaughters old enough to not need constant looking after, the best thing he could do with his days was make it from sunrise to sunset without wetting himself.

"Goddamn golden years my ass!" he said to himself, and thought about how that evening's chicken had struggled in his hand as he grabbed it by the scaly legs and flopped it onto the chopping block, soft feathers already coming loose and floating around them both, like snow, like soap flakes.

He entertained no anthropomorphic ideas about the animals on his farm. He discouraged his granddaughters from naming even the rangy barn cats, who prowled the back woods for commission in rat carcasses.

"No use naming something you're going to eat for supper. Same goes for those cats. They're meaner than anything and they'd just as soon bite you," he'd say. The girls would listen solemnly and nod, then not only name them, but capture and dress them in headbands and put bows on their tails.

Something about that night's chicken had given him pause. His fluid practiced motions had seemed clumsy. The chicken's frenzied squawks unnerved him. He struggled with the iron piece that fit over the bird's head and neck. It didn't slide easily and made the process seem cruel.

When he finally held the small ax and delivered the blow that sent the tiny feathered head to the floor, his hand was shaking. He released his sweaty grip on the headless body and it tumbled to the ground, ran into the wall, backed up and did it again.

He felt tears welling up in his rhuemy eyes and blinked back their burning humiliation. Crying over a chicken wasn't for him. Not ever.

so i've been invited to be in a show at pacific switchboard for the month of december in which artists who normally eschew drawing as their main mode of operation will draw three-panel comic strips and then show them to the greater metropolitan area.

last night i finally finished my drawings: three pieces with three hand drawn "polaroids" of a monkey puppet on vacation in CA. based on a series of real polaroids by my friend annabelle. my process for cutting and pasting is pretty weird, as i just realized this morning. i sit right in front of the television and put on a hollywood blockbuster that i've seen ten times and just listen to the dialogue and spread gluestick around or whatever needs to be done. last night i watched fight club, the game, and part of election before i started to nod off. i finished the monkeys, my new zine, and all of my sewing projects. pretty goddamn exciting stuff.

i'm really getting anxious for november to start so i can begin the nanowrimo novel. i don't feel like i should start any other writing projects this week because they're just going to get forgotten for the next four weeks(or longer).

so i just keep jogging my leg up and down and web surf.

anyone who wants to keep up with my novel progress for the month of november can visit getdivorced.blogspot.com. i do not apologize for what will surely be a thinly veiled version of reality...

the sweater that i'm wearing smells like dimestore perfume. no, highschool locker room/'love's baby soft' or maybe 'exclamation!' and it is killing me. i bought this sweater used and of course i washed it, even added on the extra rinse cycle, just to cover my bases. i laid it out to dry and this morning, when it should have been scented with nothing more offensive than the tattered dryer sheet that has been floating around in the dryer for months, it instead reeked of adolescence. not that teenagers smell badly on purpose. but i remember the deadly combination of body spritzes and cafeteria lunches mingling daily in my clothes. and sweat. anxious sweat. christ, i was soaked through all the time. i had to put deoderant on the insides of my thighs to help squelch the smell of fear that oozed out of every pore on my body.

so now i'm not sure what to do about this otherwise great sweater...run it through the washer with every load of clothes until it becomes tame? hand wash it in baking soda? try to resell it?

the good part: the day i bought it, i took 10 things with me into the dressing room. my hit average in a situation like that is about 10%--on a GOOD day. but everything worked. not just 'well, it fits alright and maybe i could rip off that stupid patch,' but really worked. my ass looked great in every pair of jeans. the sweaters weren't itchy. the black t-shirts weren't cropped above the navel. perfect. the only thing that didn't work out was a purple sweater that didn't match the purple in my hair. and it's important to coordinate a little bit with neon hair. so i walked out with 3 things on one finger that i couldn't quite justify and 7 on the other and the attendant reached for the larger group of hangers and i shook my head at him and handed him the smaller bunch and he gave the a google eye and i nodded and smiled a smug little smile and he said, 'wow, that never happens.'

things that are making my suppressed rage threaten to boil over:

1) they stole my goddamn motherfucking plant off of my front porch, not fifteen feet from my sleeping head. we are light sleepers, and neither of us can believe that we did not wake up when they, the insidious "they" decided they wanted my sick, scraggly ficus that i had put outside for a few days to see if i could revive it enough to justify repotting it. so i walked around the neighborhood, looking to see if i could spot my plant in a strangers yard or on their porch so i could deliver my version of swift retribution (ie-calling my sister while staring at my plant(if it were indoors) and talk about how great it would be if i had the balls to throw a rock through their window and make off with what was mine anyway, or(!), if my plant were outside, simply walking up and running away with it, which would be sort of hard to do no matter what because it's a pretty big plant, not easily movable, which just makes me even more upset, because, like i said, one of us should have heard something.). of course i didn't see my plant, although i know where some people who like to kick dogs for fun live and it's probably them. also, walking around, i saw meriad other things on other people's porches that were way cooler and more easily takable than my sickly plant. grr...

2)the overwhelming smell that is the potpourri of the public building that i work in is absolutely over the top today: a mixture of rotten milk, halitosis, BO, insincerity, and the notorious 'waft and walk.'

3) cramps. blindsided by my womanhood, i always forget how bad it can make me want to rip someone else's hair out by the roots and then make them eat it.

4) who(m)ever is stealing our mail. i will find you, one day it will happen, and we will lock eyes and you will run to escape my wrath, but all that will happen is you will run into the path of an oncoming bakery truck and have both of your legs broken in the accident, and also your neck, and you will pay mightily for your sins against me as a postal customer. asshole.

inventory of foot locker underneath the television set in the bedroom:

animals, stuffed and ancient; with wind-up musicbox bodies that play sad lullabies that used to make me weep inconsolably when my mom would put me down for a nap: 2

teeth, puppy; from my dog jake-the ones i could snatch before he swallowed them and the one i found in his water dish: 3

yearbooks, highschool; in which my dorky photos will remain buried: 4

diploma, highschool; emblazoned with an otter wearing a graduation cap: 1

journal, leatherbound; stolen from some store in Minneapolis when i went through my post-adolescent klepto phase and still haven't had the heart to use, really: 1

coins, old baggie of; also containing an estee lauder solid perfume case shaped like a miniature handbag that belonged to my grandmother and that i keep thinking will eventually be worth a lot of money someday: 1

bank, piggy; stainless steel, filled with the "new" quarters my exhusband started collecting and a wad of crumpled $2 bills: 1

seed beads, boxes full of hideous: 3

sheet music, pilfered; from my high school choir room, lining my dream of becoming the choir's accompanist: 35

letters, envelopes of; from friends and boyfriends, kept because i thought i would need them someday to "remind me of the time when i used to have friends" (ugh!): 10

childhood, plastic horses from my: 0 (where did they all go? do you know how much money those things are worth now?)

negatives, ring binder of; mostly taken in my graphics design class in tenth grade, real quality work: 1

album, photo; containing like, 8 rolls of wedding pictures, kept in this box because what kind of person keeps wedding photos from a failed marriage within easy reach, and conversely, what kind of person throws away wedding photos of any kind? i mean, i have photos of my parents' wedding and i even like to look at them. they seem so happy and ignorant of what the next 25 years will bring: 1

photos, incriminating; where my nosering is clearly visible, back when i insisted on wearing one of those huge rings. my mom would still probably bust a lung over most of them as she's not a fan of facial piercings: 4

hair, dyed-black braid of; kept from the first time i ever cut my hair above my shoulders, a traumatic experience: 1

wisemen, plastic chinese; stolen from a garage sale, and jesus, you'd think someone would have caught me taking some of this stuff, i mean, i wasn't good at it or anything: 3

top, wooden; origin unknown: 1

journal, trip; blue and fuzzy, recording everything about my trip to hawaii with my husband and his parents except for the fact that i thought i was pregnant and therefore wouldn't let him take a helicopter ride over one of the volcano craters because it cost something like $200 and i figured we'd need all the money we had for, you know, dealing with the baby or whatever, and then getting my period in the middle of the night in our sweltering motel room where we were sleeping on the couch because his older sister and her husband called dibs on the bedroom and so i woke up with disabling cramps lying in a pool of my own blood and my husband took the bloodied sheets and my pajamas and washed them while i sweated and moaned on the deck and watched the roaches climb around on the railing, and you know i don't think i ever really said thank you to him for that moment of kindness: 1

the other day i dreamt that my boyfriend bought a bike for his ex and rode it over to her house, but crashed on the way. later, she called me to tell me that she thought it was so sweet that he wrecked himself and the bike on the way to her house, didn't i agree? i mean, she had always wanted a bike. i woke up feeling quite sick.

to the asshole in line behind us at the sushi place last night in sellwood:
thank you for pulling in the parking lot behind us, screeching your tires as you parked, jumping out of your car and sizing us up.
thank you for racing us to the door but acting like you weren't, looking away whenever i tried to meet your eye.
thank you for seeing that there were 12 tables waiting to be seated in the hour before they closed and then crowding us into the corner so that we couldn't see what was going on.
thank you for snatching the clipboard almost out of karen's hands as she put it down to look around and see if waiting was a good option.
thank you for pushing her out of the way with your twice as big steroid made body.
thank you for making sure that we left, pissed off at you and still hungry.

we went to a different sushi place with no line and no assholes where we could sit comfortably and not feel rushed. i hope your dinner was akin to lining up at a feed trough. may you have eaten some bad eel and crap in your pants today.

thank you again.

pleurisy. i've got it. my lungs ache, my heart aches, it hurts to laugh, to breathe, to move quickly. the first night i knew something was wrong wrong wrong i thought i was going to die. sure i've said that before, but i had never really believed it. my heart hurt and i was dizzy, hot; thought i was having a heart attack. i was at my boyfriend's rock show in an overheated, smoky bar and i leaned over and felt like i had been kicked in the chest. with a pointy-toed boot. with a fork on the end. i insisted that my friend eddy take me home and moaned the whole way, feeling my swollen potato heart causing me agony with every breath. no, not a potato. more like a sausage in the microwave on high. you know what happens then. it bursts. chris and eddy assured me that i wasn't going to die, but i knew it was a massive coronary event or a blood clot, and sure enough, the next day when i called the advice nurse she looked at the long list of medications i take and said, "Yes, it's possibly a blood clot." and "It's incredibly difficult to diagnose heart problems over the phone. You should come in to the Urgent Care Center as soon as possible."

and so chris and i drove there in silence and checked in. then we waited. and waited. after two hours i was finally allowed to see the triage nurse. she apparently didn't think i was going to die either, though i begged to differ with her, and we waited some more. the turnover in the e.r. waiting room was complete. i had visions of my possible blood clot reaching my heart, introducing itself, and then killing me in an impressive display of gore right there in the uncomfortable chair. i imagined my eyes popping out and blood spilling out of my ears, my heart simmering in an unfortunate nurse's hand as she chased it around the floor slippery with my blood and vomit.

after three hours, i got sent back to a smaller room to wait (half naked) for a doctor to eventually come and see me. when he arrived, he was small and furry, like a marmoset. but friendly. he ordered a breathing treatment right away for my asthma, which i definitely did not want, because i could breathe fine, i thought anyway, and all that albuterol makes me shake like a strung out junkie. but i dutifully inhaled the adrenaline vapors and swooned from the combination of that and the needle-sickness i get whenever i get blood taken for anything. then a cute lady came cruising in with an ekg machine and told me she would have to "expose me" and asked if it was okay if "that gentleman sees." chris raised an eyebrow and i gave her the go-ahead. so polite. hooked up like a cyborg, punched full of needle holes, and toking on my medicinal bong, i felt myself traveling to la-la land, but chris kept shaking my foot and bringing me back to reality. curses!

ekg=no heart attack
blood tests=no clot
breathing treatment=dizzy but clear-lunged
x-rays=AHA!

so it seemed i had developed a case of pleurisy. what the hell is that? you ask. it sounds like something your grandmother would've put a poultice on, right? yeah, that's what i thought too. pleurisy is an inflammation of the lining of the lungs, usually the result of an underlying infection or virus. having both asthma and pleurisy is like having two evil embryos fighting in your chest to see who can make you feel the shittiest. it's really hard to tell who's winning. the 1800mg of ibuprofin i am taking a day to relieve the inflammation in my lung lining is making me wheezy, which makes me use my inhaler, which makes my chest hurt and my head spin.

and so i feel like i am going to die. i wrote down my final instructions for my sister(i.e.-here's the money for helping with the bills, move my box of vibrators before mom comes in the house, cremate me and sprinkle me someplace pretty) and it depressed me. i really have so little. my sister read the list and looked at me over a plate of eggs and bacon. "This is your legacy?" she said, and i knew what she meant. So sad. So wheezy.

there was a smell coming from the cupboard. a beety, tangy smell. i had been noticing it everytime i opened the door to get my glass or to find a bag of tea for the last two weeks. since i share the cupboard with the other 200 people working in my building, i figured it was just something that had gotten spilled and forgotten about, as will happen. but it kept getting worse. so the other day i finally decided to just be a man, if you will, and clean up whatever was stinking. i got to the top shelf and all the way in the back in the corner was an open carton of milk. i picked it up, and yes, it had something in it. the something was no longer liquid, though, and i recoiled from it even as i went to open it to look inside. i just had to know what was making that smell. ugh! green and fuzzy, black in the deep crevices, a lumpy looking shape now occupied the space where once a delicious beverage had been. the odor actually made visible lines as it rose up and out of the cardboard container. i gagged. eddy, who had been standing all the way across the room, gagged. we both reeled out of the kitchen, our lunches temporarily losing their luster in the face of that green atrocity...

so my question here is: who put the milk in the cupboard on the top shelf in the corner? was it a momentary lapse in thinking clearly? did they also put their box of cereal in the fridge? or was it malicious? the fiend rubbing his/her/its hands together as they cackled with evil delight in the gorges they would soon make rise?

a list of things i may tell you about:

eddy's birthday party-
wherein i only drank 2 martinis but ate three orders of crab and cream cheese wontons, then waxed philosophic to eddy's chagrin about the fact that he is old enough to be my father.

the annual erotic party at david and trish's-
wherein i wore a dress made out of bubble wrap and had a drunk woman grab my breasts with a death grip in order to pop the bubbles there.  they had already been popped, big surprise, but she didn't seem to notice and cackled loudly in my face as she realized she was grabbing another woman's boobies. 

wherein chris and matthew played dj and fielded requests from drunk people wearing expensive pvc/latex cat suits in various states of undress to play eighties music, when, as we all know, eighties music and an erotic party are not a match made in heaven. 

wherein my sister was talking to a guy named randy until he started to trace over her neck with his index finger, like in some cheesy porn movie, and breathed in her ear that all he wanted to do was to kiss her neck and she said, "okay, you're done." and walked away.

wherein our host david wore only a fishnet body stocking, a pair of high heels, and a mask.

my weekend in bend to visit my friend carl-
wherein he informed me that my exhusband(and his best friend) was getting remarried, with the intent to start a family like, right away.

wherein i took this information and simmered it in four martinis and some bad squid and then had to be piggybacked out of the bar early to avoid a drunken public breakdown.

wherein i had the best eggs benedict the next morning, eaten sheepishly with a pitcher of water.

printing out everything i have written since the year of our lord 2001 is starting to take its toll. my i-mac was one of the first off the line, teal and self-contained, so much so that it only has a cd-rom drive. no disk drive or exterior help of any kind. i have not hooked it up to the internet. and so my i-mac and i are adrift on this lonely raft with no provisions and i am thinking about eating it. or maybe just throwing it overboard so i don't have to watch it staring at me with that eerie teal glow anymore.

i have all these rough drafts of stories and final drafts and lists of ideas and a journal blah blah, and there is no way to transfer the information to any other os. so i am printing out a copy of everything on my hard drive, scanning it, and then filing it in a real live folder that coincides with a virtual folder in my runty teal box. when chris builds me a new computer, i will have to make a decision about whether or not i should RETYPE all of that crap into the new machine, or if i should just let most of it go and re-enter, say, only the good stuff or what.

so far, the only thing worth reading in my journal was that i referred to a friend of my ex-husband as having a "chum-bucket personality." that's it. three years of forcing myself to record the minutiae in my life and that's indeed all that it is. excrutiating minutiae. there's no way to make any of it interesting although there's maybe a brief flash of interest in that chum-bucket remark. but how can you use that more than once? you can't really.

but so anyway, i'm only into about hour three of this tedious process and i'm bored out of my mind, filing activity nonwithstanding. so i pull the plug and crawl into bed with my bill bryson book and fur pillow and almost immediately begin to drool and make asthmatic snorkling sounds as i dream of tossing the computer with all of the crap inside over the side of my raft.

chapter 3- in which jake tests our patience and then yaks up his dinner

i've got the dog for an extended weekend visit and he is busying himself by pacing back and forth and whining continuously. there is nothing we can do to comfort him. we take him for a walk, give him food, water, treats, love, what have you, and two seconds later he is up and running, sides heaving like an accordion, producing a whining shriek that sounds like we are torturing him. i guess if "torturing" him means rubbing his belly and sharing a peanut butter sandwich with him, then yes, i am. so we go for a walk to poop him, which he does not. poop, that is. he merely sniffs every bush and tree, lifts his leg to some of them, and nearly takes this guys head off who waves his ice cream bar in jake's face. i hear his girlfriend say in a voice she thinks i can't hear, "rob, next time just KICK the dog." i attempt to suppress a murderous rage which will come out next week in a torrent of tears about something inconsequential and undeserving of a full fledged break-down. jake is clueless and back to sniffing. my feet start to hurt so i steer him back in the direction of our house. it is clear that jake will not be downloading anything for me to pick up and carry back with us. we get back and i notice his food bowl is empty. did i forget to feed him dinner? no wonder he won't take a crap. i pour him some food and go to watch chris play silent hill 3. a few minutes later jake comes by and stands in the doorway to the bedroom and looks at me. i look back. "are you going to throw up?" i ask him. he cocks his head and then leans over and regurgitates all the food he has just snarfed down. chris says "i think jake just threw up," and goes to the kitchen for paper towels. i take a look at what is soaking into the carpet and notice that it isn't even chewed. whole dog food pieces and some slobber. now i better understand why my father always made our dogs outside pets.

the next morning as the first tendrils of sunlight are filtering in through the venetian blinds, jake sticks his nose under the covers and puts his tongue up my nose. it is 5am, much too early for this shit. but this is his schedule at home with his dad, so i get up and walk him around the block in my bathrobe, bedheaded and scary of breath. he will not let me go back to sleep either, instead, he starts to play his infernal internal accordion again. not wanting chris to kill us both, we go out into the kitchen and eat peanut butter and talk about me taking a shower without being serenaded by the aforementioned instrument of his choosing. i wash my hair, take him out for a more brisk, lengthy walk, and leave to catch the bus, picking the innumerable jake hairs out of my hoodie as i walk. what a wonderful day!

guy came up to my desk at the library today, asked for a certain 306.766, which is, to those of you unlucky enough to work outside a building filled with books ruled by the dewey decimal system, the gay sex encounters section. that's right. smut masquerading as legitimate social science. i am not, in any way, freaking out about this. i happen to love gay sex porn in all its many many forms(with a sharp spiky interest in gay vampire porn, but for most of you reading this, it is a fact that you are well, well aware of. i digress.). but so anyway, the guy does not look like what you would call an upstanding citizen. he looks like an unemployed, unshaven, slobby addict of some kind, and he's asking me to find this book for him cause he can't find it over there on the shelf. i look it up and lo! it is a collection of gay travel "erotica" that i myself have checked out right now. without thinking about who i am talking to and where i am, i blurt out-"i have a copy of this at home!" so glad am i to have a kindred prurient spirit in front of me that i do not even hold social decorum to any height, nor my dignity, for that matter. as soon as the words have escaped my lips, i realize what i have done and clear my throat, hoping he will not have heard what i said, but he has indeed locked onto it like a stray dog with a shank of beef. he is now raising his eyebrows sort of rhythmically and making weird noises in his throat. he tells me he likes my hair color, that purple is his favorite. then he makes more weird noises that sound like bad pop music being played far away. i stand fully erect and inform him (very professionally) that he will need to leave and come back to check with me in 10 minutes and that i will hopefully be successful in locating his materials for him in that amount of time. he is easily run off, my authority is restored, and no one has to know. except you.

i set chris' pillow on fire last night. i had moved the lamp from the nightstand to the pile of magazines i was gutting and got up and left the room, knocking it over so its honed lazer-like light bulb was right in the middle of his pillow. a few moments later i ran in the bedroom to grab my glass and whoa! behold! there were torrents of smoke, chemical-scented tendrils from hell, or so i thought, as i grabbed the superheated appliance and threw it off the bed. a few brisk strokes of pounding and the damage was not as bad as the smoke led me to believe. thank god the pillowcases are black, you can't even tell...

full catholic mass wedding yesterday. i took communion with everyone else and was not rooted out by the priest, did not burst into flames when i took the wafer and let the wine wet my lips. i did break into a cold sweat waiting for the priest to look me in the eye and say, "this is the body of christ, given for you..." thinking that he would know that i was lying, not really believing that some crusty bread cake could 'become' the body of a man who lived 2000 years ago. ack! i hadn't been to confession...what would i say anyway? where would i begin? the only thing i haven't done is kill someone, and of course i have in my mind. "forgive me father for i have sinned. it has been 18 years since my last confession. i have fornicated, lied and cheated. i have stolen things i did not need from people who didn't need them either. i have rolled my eyes at my mother and wished that my father would just keel over and die already. i have divorced. i have smoked bushels of cigarettes to look cool and drank copious amounts of alcohol to get happy and have eaten more than my share of food that isn't good for me. i have looked at people less fortunate and then looked the other way. i have made fun of fat people. i have been selfish and rude and have kissed a girl. i have taken the lord's name in vain. i have envied my neighbor's possessions and relationships. i have peed in a public swimming pool. i have lived in sin with men i barely know. i have taken drugs to change my personality instead of trusting in god to know what's best for me. i have led people on to get attention and have slept away the most productive hours of the day. and that isn't even half of it! this represents only what i can remember in the last five minutes. and of course, i don't believe any of this crap, father. so tell me, is it hopeless? how many hail marys to atone for all this selfish shit? and i don't really want your forgiveness, i just want to stop feeling so guilty for doing what comes naturally. can you help me out with that?"

a quick rundown of the inanimate objects in my house that have become anthropomorphised because of my proclivity to form unhealthy attachments to things rather than normal, productive relationships with people:

fur pillow- he is a fur pillow, as you might have guessed by his name, made by my sister in her first attempt to sew fake fur(which is really really hard, btw). he is approximately 1.5' by 2' and lives on the futon in the living room. he is so soft that when i put him on my lap, i can't stop stroking his fur until he is forcibly removed from my grip. this is how he came to live with me. every time i went to my sister's house, i would pick him up and pet him until i left, ignoring betty(a real cat) the whole time. finally, my sister just told me to take him home with me. there may have been a degree of disgust in her voice, but that's okay. i love fur pillow.

tim- another "male" presence, tim is a body pillow that i bought at target. i figured that since i draped my leg over him every night that i should name him. 'tim' is one of the few male names that doesn't instantly bring up bad connotations for me. i like his corduroy side the best.

sleeping bag- again, not really original in the name department, but it's functional. sleeping bag is my boyfriend's sleeping bag, but i have sort of co-opted him for the time being. i like to get zipped up in sleeping bag at all times of the day and in all locations. i have camped out on the couch, in bed, and on the floor of chris' studio. that time i had fur pillow with me also. you can never have too many fuzzy friends around.

spooner and mr fuzzy- these are stuffed animals. i admit it. i have stuffed animals. i am a freak. and yet i love them. i am not ashamed of my love.

moping on a national holiday:
memorial day was spent zipped up in chris' sleeping bag(to which i have developed an unhealthy attachment) watching movies with the sound off so i could read my trashy novel. i ordered a pizza from pizza hut and as i waited anxiously for the delivery person i prayed hard that no one i knew would see them come up to my door. i felt like i had ordered out for some crack. embarrassment level 4. the guilt of spending almost $20 on something so disgusting also weighed heavily on my crack-addled mind. after i slunk back into my bedchamber with my junk food, i lit a bunch of vanilla candles to start the odor-masking process i knew would need to happen. after two hours of being locked in a room with those 2 smells, they sort of mixed and became each other...the original spicy meat scent had begun to tango with the soggy cardboard of the pizza box, and the candles lent everything a skanky, cloying edge. i hopped, still ensconced in the sleeping bag, to the door and flung it open. i spent maybe five minutes contemplating taking out my newly acquired violin or maybe getting started on a draft of a new story and quickly put both of those productive ideas down, as i wouldn't be able to continue to stew in the sleeping bag and do either of those things.

i hopped back into the bedroom and collapsed face down on the bed. i did not roll myself over, but fell asleep like that for over an hour. i woke up to the smell of vanilla marinated pepperoni emanating from the now almost liquefied pizza box about an inch from my head. i blew the candles out.

this morning i bought a violin. i do not know how to play the violin. i have never even picked up a guitar. but a year or two ago i had a dream in which i was a tragic gypsy woman with twisted caramel hair who wiled away the evening hours in front of an audience of a bonfire and a horse playing tragic gypsy pieces on her one material possession: a violin. okay, so i'm embellishing the great hair detail and the horse being in the dream because i've always wanted beautiful thick buttery hair and it goes without saying that i have always deep down in my heart of hearts wanted a horse because i am a girl. yes, yes, i realize it's a stereotype about girls but it wouldn't be a stereotype if it wasn't a little bit true, right? but i digress. so my dream self was so able to express herself by playing this instrument that it sort of resonated into my consciousness. i woke up feeling like if i picked up a violin, the sadness of the girl in front of the horse and fire would come spilling out in the vibrant tones that i heard in my dream. why i felt this to be true as opposed to say, me waking up with the sexy hair that i've always wanted is, i suppose, related to the fact that i assume that the physical world is going to be the same when i wake up as it was when i went to sleep. there is a mathematical term for this but i'll be diddled if i can remember what it is...hmm... anyway, i understand that there is no such thing as santa claus or the toothfairy and that my hair will be the same fine, purple clump that doesn't quite hit my shoulders because i understand that hair doesn't just grow two feet and get lustrous overnight unless you've got a kick ass fairy godmother, which, as it happens, i don't. my fairy god mother is drinking in front of an all day monster movie fest in her birdhouse or wherever it is that she lives and is staunchly ignoring my presence.

the same thing applies to the horse. i know that in order to unlock that secret desire, i'd have to win the lottery, move to the country and wear dungarees, actually have to go out and BUY the horse, blah blah.

so, knowing that i'm not going to be nuzzled awake tomorrow morning by a mare searching for the sugar cubes i keep under my pillow, i turned my inner cretin, always hungry for fantasy and something to put her grimy little bit of faith into, to the violin portion of that dream.

i have heard stories of people suddenly stumbling upon their life's calling. horsing around in the public swimming pool with friends and taking a dare to dive off the highest diving board and fuckin a'! you're a natural! you plip back into the water, toes automatically pointed, body stick straight, barely a ripple in the water where you disappear. and so it is because that "these things happen" that i am able to justify spending $150 on an instrument i don't even know how to hold. i am not expecting to pick it up tonight, rosin the bow, and whip out a concerto, although that would be nice, and certainly i did feel like it was possible the day after i had that dream. but i do feel like if i hunker down and spend time with my new wooden friend every day that i will eventually be able to reconnect with that gypsy dream self of mine.

i've also sent a letter to my mother requesting that she raid my cedar chest in the attic and send me all my model horses from when i was a kid. that way when i find myself playing for the druggies under the esplanade i can plant one of my little horsies in the dirt by my feet and my dream will become a reality. maybe i could even get a wig.

i now have, um, purple hair.

the bugs in my bathroom are springtails, and now that i know what they are, i have been able to back burner my obsessing over them and boil some other interesting tidbits that have for too long not seen the light of day. like the tiny fine hairs that grow around my belly button. why do they grow slightly darker there? and why do i feel the compulsion to rip them out by the root? social conditioning? medication withdrawal? why?