#TBT

The waifish young girl with the delicate hands holding that so over it baby is not a waifish young girl at all. That's my Dad.  Which is reason number 9,803 why I will always be a daddy's girl.  That and just this week he brought me candy corn like I was ten.  I am loved.
And yes, as a matter of fact I do still make that face, but I don't have those PJs anymore.  Kinda wish I did.
Happy. Thursday.

Out On the Streets and You Could Hear From Inside...

I've always had a certain sixth sense about things.  Not in every situation, but often enough that I am aware of and trust it. Maybe it's just that I'm a little more observant than most, maybe it's the sloppy mix of Gypsy and Jew in my blood--I am named for a book of mysticism after all. And my dreams tell me truths about the people around me, give me a tiny glimpse of what might be about to happen. Deja vu happens to me all the time. I see places for the first time that I've already seen. I meet people I already know...

On September 11, 2001 I woke up early, I jumped in the shower, I washed my hair.  And the thought hit me out of nowhere--what if someone blew up the White House?  What kind of chaos would ensue? What would we do as a society? Why am I thinking about this in the shower on an early Tuesday morning?  

I had a roommate at the time, and as I stepped out into the kitchen I yelled to him, "I just had the most fucked up thought. I was thinking about someone bombing the White House."  I got no answer, but I could hear the TV from the other room. I walked in to find him pallid and terrified.  We watched without really talking, trying to process what was going on, and then word came that a plane had hit the Pentagon.  Too close to home, and too close to what had happened in my head an hour earlier.  

And then the dreams came. A little girl in a desert, about 4 years old I think, blonde in a pink flowy dress.  There were ruffles.  She stood alone, nothing around her but sand. Everything was sort of orange/yellow.  She looked right at me, and then turned to white dust. Anthrax.

It soon came out that roomie had actually been terrified of me that day.  It changed us.  My next Rolling Stone came with an American flag pin on the cover.  I had friends who got married soon after, claiming 9/11 put things in perspective for them.  Two months later my youngest nephew was born.  And my mother began her long, slow flirtation with death.  Life went on.  It still does.

I've known two survivors of the WTC attacks, and countless friends and connections affected in the city. I've observed moments of silence with the white noise still buzzing in my head. I brag that my Dad volunteered at Ground Zero. And I wait for the next mass hysteria, the next scene of human tragedy that will feed our insatiable appetite for carnage, and our need to feel connected to something.  And life goes on.

#TBT

All along I've told myself the point of this blog and most of my creative endeavors in my current life is to work myself through/hash out the struggles of my maturing, adult self. Well, I found an old post from about seven years ago. And interestingly enough, some things really never do change:


Current Listening: Rufus Wainwright
Hours of Sleep: 3.25

I came home early last night though I was having a lovely time with some of my favorite boys. I decided that Monday night was a good one to put the night life on hold and try to catch up on some sleep. I didn't. And the drugs don't work anymore.
People tell me I should write while in the throes of insomnia. And I do, but I don't think those people understand the complete incoherence that goes along with lack of sleep. Just because I'm awake doesn't mean I'm clear enough to work on a diabolical plan to take over the world like some genius artist cutting off his own ears. Actually, I'm usually not even clear enough to tie my own shoes even when I am sleeping well. So now we're looking at a rough schedule of what goes on in the middle of my nights when I'm not otherwise engaged:

12:15 ish: in fabulous bed that everyone I know is jealous of
12:45 ish: tossing and turning in bed that is becoming less fabulous
1:30 ish: reading in wretched bed
2:30 ish: reading on fabulous sofa
2:45 ish: paint nails, color: Cranberry
3:30 ish: sleep
4:45 ish: eat Froot Loops in embarrassing quantity
5:00 ish: watch The Patty Duke Show
6:00: hand wash dishes with newly painted nails
7:00: pissed at pretentious personality lacking local weatherman, flip channels
8:15 ish: bored to tears by the year that changed Diane Sawyer's life, sleep
10:00: call to schedule manicure for ravaged, suffering, newly painted/dish washing hands

So now with Froot Loop regret and stunning fingertips I am thinking of who I should see tonight and how late I could possibly stay out on a Tuesday. I probably won't make it through dinner... 

If you're not into yoga, if you have half a brain...

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Jesus Take the Wheel...

So this morning I found myself in the middle of a four car pile up on the highway during the a.m. artery clog of gotta get to work traffic.  There I sat on a 70 mile an hour highway minding my own business when here comes one of those standard white work vans (probably had a body in it) veering off to the right--to avoid the traffic sitting at a dead stop, I assumed.  He hit me and sent me into the Lexus I'd been staring at for the last 10 minutes. Turns out a small, elfish 20 year old in a small, elfish Prius started the whole messy chain of events--at least according to Serial Killer Van.  I always thought people who cried whiplash were just being dramatic, but now I'm pretty sure it's a thing. Nobody panic though, I managed to make it through the day.
Then I got home to find something from my doctor's office in the mail, only along with the usual info on the envelope the words "Geriatric Services" had been added. Awesome... It was a bill.  A really big one.  For a routine vagina inspection. This is reason number 6,832 why I recently changed jobs. Shitty insurance and even shittier people available to answer questions about shitty insurance. But I'm a government employee now, so hopefully that means the only tinkering around down there will be done by an elected official from now on.--Actually I did get ogled at Petsmart this evening, maybe I should've asked him if he wanted to take a look at my kitty while I was there. It would have been free and probably just as thorough. But that may have been misuse of a state seal.
Anyway, it's looking like I'll be on the phone with insurance companies for the rest of my life. It goes without saying I will be tucked into bed as soon as I hit "publish" here.
But I do have two things going for me tonight.  It's kid's week on Jeopardy so I'm almost guaranteed to win at something, and I have a little something doing double duty for me in the freezer.

The Weekly Walk With Me

I hit the road again this weekend.  I walked out of the office at 3:30 on Friday and decided to head a little further east.  Where I'm from the "river" is where you go to break beer bottles and let your dog shit on the rocks on any given Tuesday. The "rivah" is where you go to get away and get drunk on expensive wine in places that serve molasses for hoecakes and have bologna burgers on the menu.
The artists aren't starving here, they are the bored wives of successful men.  They are retired District Attorneys who took up watercolor.  It's the kind of place with constant contradictions. A place untouched by time: a Main Street, U.S.A. with flowing American flags just screaming for a story line on Dateline Saturday Night Mysteries.
I slept in this glorious old lady bed in a boutique hotel:

With this giant old lady clock that sat on 4:20:

I walked the town and down to the water with a naked face. I let my feet get dirty and sunburned.  I sat at a local bar and was force fed mojitos through a bendy straw by a complete stranger.  I met a boy who talked about strong beer, his bluegrass band, his friend's pedophile roommate, and his former professor's scandalous affair with a student.
I spent money at places that sold dusty old dead things like this:

In the same room with works by known artists with price tags like this:

I didn't buy it...

I let my phone die on Saturday night.  And woke up on Sunday morning to have breakfast at a biker bar before I took the long way home.

But they never told you the price that you pay...

I've never been so happy to see a Monday.
The first week of August has become a mindfuck roller coaster in recent years.  There are more birthdays and anniversaries than should be crammed into a seven day stretch.  This week has become as reflective as it is celebratory.  Even my dog had a birthday--she's 15 now.  As heartbreaking as it is amazing.  And on August 6, it was one year ago that my wife and I lost a friend to cancer.  Just a month out from our wedding and on my bachelorette party weekend, we sat at the funeral of a 36 year old who only weeks before had been planning his party wardrobe.  But this is still too fresh to eat at me--time has moved so fast it's as if I haven't had the time to process it, like I haven't been able to put our story in the right order. So it's someone else that I haven't been able to stop thinking about lately.
He was boyish and pure and kind.  He laughed easy, he smiled big, and turned a little pink every time he did.  I saw him angry once in almost 10 years. He was actually good.  He rarely drank, so I would make him mocktails with bitters and cucumber slices.  We would talk about life and women and the way the world worked.  One night we went for a long drive after dinner so he could tell me something important, something he hadn't told anyone and had only vaguely hinted at with his family.  He was nervous and couldn't find his words. I just knew he was finally going to come out. Instead he told me he was forgoing a military career after college to become a priest. His family, though Catholic, didn't support it.  So I did.
But it didn't stop me months later--on Halloween--from taking him to a house party and then to a member's only after hours bar.  We drank. We celebrated. We got separated.  The next day we met for lunch to see with our own eyes that the other had made it out alive and in one piece.
"Last night was crazy," I told him, " I took a boy home."
"Me too," he said.
So that was that.  The priesthood was out, but he wasn't just yet.
He enlisted as an officer in the Army.  And did three tours in Iraq.  We emailed through every one of them so I would know he was OK. When I would realize the weeks had passed a little faster than usual and I hadn't heard from him in a reasonable amount of time, I listened for his name on the news, looked for his name in the paper.
But he came home.  Just as I was leaving for another state and he was a about to be stationed in Kansas for a while we met face to face for the first time in years.  He wasn't boyish anymore.  He was a man now--broad, brow furrowed.  His laugh was still easy but there was a weight in his face.  No pink in his cheeks.  We drank a few rounds, he told some stories, talked about how he wasn't sure if he could sleep in a clean bed, and how he wasn't sure what to do without sand in his boots.  And then we went on our way with calls and texts and emails...
In July 2012 I moved back home.  He called me when he heard the news and told me he was heading to Korea the next day. He would be there for six months, and after would be coming home too.  He had requested to be stationed here.  He was ready to be back with his family and friends, someplace he could be himself.
Three weeks after that conversation, he was crossing the street and was hit by a bus.  After surviving three tours in Iraq, he was dragged through a busy city street in Seoul, Korea and died.  The papers said he was with a male friend.
There was no sand in his boots, no fleas in his bed.  No reason why.