On the whole, a shitty day...

Click "Submit Abuse" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

Cancel

I hate that word: shitty. The word itself makes my sister go nuts: there's a sense of a great rage, heaving breasts, rustling skirts, maybe a rolling pin. A 19th century fit coming right at you. She never actually does anything, but she leaves you feeling that she could be serious bad news.

My mother on hearing a single declared shit would leave the room hurriedly looking pale. Saying "shit" in my starchy Scot-Presbyterian-lawyerly family was...I don't know what it was like since I didn't know that many bad words. I thought "ain't" was a really bad word. And it wasn't like all this repression kept us from having foul, filthy mouths, although my sister keeps it clean. Like my ex-Navy dad, I swear 24/7.

"It's so relaxing," my husband told me one afternoon, when I apologized for unleashing a cartoon style string of awful words: &@#%$v9+##a6&^&."I never have to watch myself with you," he said happily enough, which is the relaxing kind of guy he is.

But some days, it's just shitty out there and no other word will do.

It's been drizzling rain so much the yard is squelchy and the cats are pissed at me. They think I control the weather and why wouldn't they? Me with the mighty light switch; me with the roaring faucets.

The swine flu settled in my chest and like a real dope, I loaded up on Mucinex last night and realized too late I was completely jacked on guiafenisen. I stayed up for the second night in a row, coughing up chunks of asphalt, old hubcaps, and greasy car parts. Then I put on a faceful of makeup, really tight jeans, and my black leather jacket and set out for Baylor, in a decidedly foggy state. I hadn't seen my boy in a while.

Thing about Baylor is it's a monster of a hospital that lives between some really good real estate and junkie-land. As I mumbled along north Washington, praying to that old bastard, God, I realized that the guy in front of me was incredibly drunk and tilting into the passenger side. The guys behind me...I guess they were guys...the windows were so darkly tinted and dirty I couldn't tell, but they seemed glued to my bumper and were driving a serial-killer van. The cops pry these fat ancient vans open after a good long lawless chase and scared kids with their underwear inside out topple out on the pavement.

But so be it. That's the way God had ordered the world this particular day. I went to the wrong rehab center first, and while the receptionist tried to call up Lynn's records, a tiny East Indian man on a glucose drip and a catheter came up to me. Blease, miss, he said politely, I need to bee. I tried to smile gently, but I know all about the need to bee and the ways of catheters. Lynn's had two bladder infections in as many days. I couldn't do a thing for my tiny Indian and this dawned on him as the nurse practitioners closed in like wolves and took him off to bee.

But another thing about today that made it unusually shitty, is that I cried. I hate crying, but if crying is called for, like over my dead cats nearly two years ago, then I will cry. I would still rather throw up in public than cry, so obviously I have all these Grief Issues. But it was today that I realized that Lynn could really die and that God, who has already gobbled up my parents, an ex-husband, my painting teacher and my two very dearest friends, might decide to grab Lynn while he's at it.

Later on I kept crying and wept over the phone tonight at my dear couple-friends. He could do it, I shouted, God could take Lynn and why not? And if God takes Lynn, I am going to be one angry bitch. The way I have to go about Acceptance is to imagine God doing his goddamn worst on me, at me. And that means I have to know Lynn could die, despite Baylor, despite me writing our way out of this mess, despite all my hopes and idiot plans, Lynn could still die. I have to really fucking know this, otherwise I'll have no peace. This may sound like a five-year-old's idea of church, but it's part of the way I write and practice. I try to imagine things as simple and stupid as they really are.

So Lynn could die.

I hate this, I yelled at my two very dear friends. He's lying in bed, looking like bleached catshit and no one has any idea that he's a really astonishing painter, and for thirty-one years, he's made me laugh every single day. To Baylor, he's just some old guy, who looks pretty fucked up. And I hate crying. I'm not a goddamn girl.

You're really not, the husband agreed calmly. You're not a girl at all. But you're a good fighter.

And I am. Except there's nothing to fight right now. There's just a bunch of events I'm trying to figure out, while my boy lies on his back, bored out of his skull.

I'll go tomorrow and see what medicines he's on, find out how to get this bladder thing licked and I'll tell him, Fuck rehab. I'm not impressed you can sit in a wheelchair and you shouldn't be either. The point is to get you out of that goddamn wheelchair. So you're gonna have to be smarter than any of these jokers. And I'll find him some of that good dry shampoo while I'm out.

We've been here before and it's a real pig of a rodeo. But it's the only one in town.

It was a really shitty day today. I'm sorry Marty, I'm sorry Mama, but some days you've got to call it just the way it is.

And it's shitty.

This Spaceship Thing We're In

Click "Submit Abuse" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

Cancel

The Spaceship Thing

Five years ago, it was my good fortune or not, depending on how Zen you are, to be mugged at four in the afternoon on a very bright April day. It was April 17, in fact, and I remember it well because it was one of the few times I didn't file for a tax extension.

"Hell, let's just do it right now," my income tax guy said, and we did indeed file a return on time, one that seemed a little too loosey-goosey to me. So on April 17, I'd just come out of a big box store, swinging a couple of cheap artichokes snug in their plastic bag, mostly worried about getting audited. And then I heard the sound of running very close to me, then I felt hands clamp down on my shoulders, then I was spun around to face a nicely groomed guy of about 19. To grab hold of my bag, he knocked me down and that's what broke my hip.

I remember I had a lot of thoughts lying in the parking lot, as the thief and his bf sped away. A bunch of those thoughts are still crammed in a wordy article I wrote right afterwards, because writing is what I do to keep from going nuts. My longish pensee on violence, big cities, and the importance of loud screaming was tentatively accepted by one magazine. Then, like some kind of fainting maiden I was suddenly overcome by a weird incompatible combo of exhibitionism and shyness. So I yanked my article and stuck it in a file drawer, where it still lives today.

But I can remember one of those thoughts I had on April 17: how I hated that for the next days, weeks, and months, all my conversations were going to be about This. I'd been one thing and now I was This.

It's something my husband said to me in the hospital and I knew just what he meant. "This one thing happened and now I'm all different, but I'm really not," he said through a maze of plastic tubes. He was still in ICU, wired up like a NASA project, everything bleeping, counting, and eeping.

I crawled up onto the bed. "I dunno if you are or not," I told him. "Your spaceship is kind of dented. I better check." So I looked into his eyes which, trust me here, are the exact lovely blue of old old denim. "Yeah," I said. "You're the same guy."

You need someone to tell you you're the same guy. It's something I remember.

I remember what it was like: being a collection of symptoms, being a typical This, or an atypical This, and being surrounded by lots of people who'd like you to just settle the fuck down and get with the program: being This. One of my therapists, a well-meaning woman, kept urging me to decorate my walker with plastic flowers. "Are you high?" I'd always yell. She took my horrible tempers very nicely, I must say. But then, she didn't know I was at war.

Getting well is war and don't let anyone tell you different. If you believe otherwise, you might wind up on one of those motorized chairs, cruising through the big jolly supermarket, your hair perfectly done, holding a canned ham on your lap. But that's just my idea of hell. I bet you've got your own. Whatever it is, hold onto it like a mother, swear you'll kill yourself in some forlorn ditch and let wild dogs devour your flesh before you turn into This.

And so, today, after dancing by myself to Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain, crying while I did, because the last time he and I danced was maybe the last dance we'd ever have, I thought to myself: Just quit being such an asshole.

Then I marched out to the car, drove up to the Walgreen's and bought every pen, marker, dry board, sketchbook, and flouresent felt tip I could find.

"This for you?" the clerk asked, checking me out. He already knows about the stroke. I told him yesterday.

"Nope," I said. "It's for him. He used to be an artist. It's time for him to get off his ass and be one again. And by the way, your Etch A Sketch is strictly for pussies."

We both looked at the pink Etch A Sketch. "Yeah, it is," the clerk admitted, "You still want it?"

"Sure." I said. "Any Etch in a storm."

"Did I ever tell you I had Bell's Palsy?" the clerk asked me, smiling shyly.

"Nope." I said, "And I never would have guessed."

Luck...

For no reason I can fathom, when I was young I considered myself lucky, using the term vaguely as when we say someone, generally very old or rather homely, is attractive.

Actually, the fact is that no one in my extended family is lucky, or ever has been lucky, with the exception of a single cousin. He was considered so because he managed to pay for his Yale medical training entirely through his poker winnings, was the only survivor of a horrendous car crash, married a millionaire's daughter, had six sons who each had a million dollar trust fund, lived in a cantilevered glass house in Marin and had his own vineyard. He is also stunningly handsome and extremely nice. I count him one lucky son of a bitch and I don't think too many would argue with me.

So it's a mystery I can't quite divine, this foggy sense of luck I lugged around for so many years. Perhaps, as many young people do, I confused being lucky with not being unlucky. I came from humorous intelligent parents who liked to read, which, to my way of thinking, is enough to constitute perfection. I had nice enough boyfriends, a series of terrific dogs and many good cats, travelled a bit, was a size 7 most of my life, and had naturally wavy hair. But then, as I've said, I was young.

I had not yet seen my mother die by inches of breast cancer, I had not yet lived in a freezing bewilderment as my first husband went nuts, I had not been mugged yet and gotten a titanium hip as a result, and my father had not yet fallen over with a massive heart attack.

Quite simply, life had not happened to me. Yet.

Since then, I've sat at a number of death beds, lost friends to terrible diseases, and had my own share of Bad Things but why go on? It's life, as we always say, rather oddly I think, since it's more often death. There is a consolation to all this grimness that starts piling on in middle age and just keeps coming. The consolation prize, and a good one it is, is that not much scares you. Not anymore.

So last Saturday, a week ago, in fact, when my husband of 31 years said, I feel really strange and, when I looked at him, I saw he was having a stroke. In my memory his skin is entirely gray and one half of him is pulled down like something from a horror movie. But I know enough to distrust memory. At that moment, I only knew he was having a stroke and that we didn't have much time. He could talk but not walk or use his left arm, and he didn't want me to call 911 because ambulances are so expensive. Thirty minutes had gone by with the ambulance conversation and I decided fuck it and dialed 911. Right now I'd give a lot to get those 30 minutes back. But it is what it is, as we keep saying to one another.

It's not luck exactly. But he's alive. And for me, that's quite enough.

That's a lot.

Living with the weird.....

Not what you think...

Contrary to what you might believe, when you start working the Google on "alien abductees" or just "extraterrestrials", you don't fall into a big roomy universe. Instead, you find yourself hunched over in a small airless world that probably smells like Fritos.

Yesterday, after a brutal day of looking at awful pencil drawings by abductees and patently rigged photographs, I got the uneasy feeling I could know everyone on the UFO-alien-Roswell circuit by name. Plus I saw the the same bewildered people, and rotten outer-space art, photo proofs, and those goddamned crop circles repeated unto eternity in various posts and websites. F'rinstance, in the extraterrestrial venues, the photograph above seems to be forever new and is always published as exciting actual proof of aliens: aliens among us, autopsied aliens, aliens who'll probe you, and aliens who come in peace. Actually it's a special movie effect, a head that floats bodiless in cyberspace, and at least it doesn't look slimy. Clammy, yes, but that's okay, and I really like its ears.

I did happen in on some unnerving 12 Step Groups though. There's the 12 Steps that will keep you from being abducted by teaching you to project a Christian white-light bubble around yourself. The drill's the same as with booze and dope: you admit you're powerless (over aliens), that your life has become unmanageable (what with the abductions), and you've come to believe that Jesus will protect you (from alien abductions) if he is sought, etc. Then there are the unfortunates whose parents somehow got knocked up by an alien, and wuddya know, had this big green kid. Eventually, due to social awkwardness and autistic habits, the offspring stumbles, as I did, into Adult Children of Alien Abductees. Same Twelves Steps, but instead of a generic higher power, they look to Diquad. There wasn't a picture of Diquad, but then there wouldn't be, would there?

Just my opinion, but the Adult Children of Alien Abductees seem like genuine froot loops. However, alien abductees do not. If anything, they exude a kind of mid-western Indiana-ish calm. One psychiatrist noted that they seemed oddly ordinary, if such a thing could be. Having lived in Iowa for six years, I know exactly what he meant. And, I remind myself, that most couples who "swing", ::wink:: wink::, also reside in the big blank prairie states.

Where little happens except the weather, and the population is stolid by nature, a vacuum seems to form, one that demands a high-pitched inner excitement. What might be cured by a crime wave or a good indie movie, instead converts to into peculiar longings. And it's such yearnings that can lead to sitting in rooms with other tattooed souls, praying to Diquad...or taking bondage photos of your wife wearing dog chains and a ball-gag.

So beware of boredom--especially the excruciating kind.

When they come for you...

Alien Abduction Lamp

Pretty cute lamp, isn't it? It's just the way I figure it happens when you get slurped up by outer world invaders. It reminded me that there's lots of info floating around in the atmosphere that I'm placidly unaware of: stuff about Miley Cyrus, Brazilian wax jobs, celebrity chefs, and destination weddings. It's when I get curious about some corner of the universe that I discover all these thorny problems lurking in the most benign places.

F'rinstance, it wasn't until I started poking around into extraterrestrial aliens, that I got reintroduced to the whole abduction scandal. About fifteen years ago, the same time that nursery school kids were being snatched for satanic rituals, there was a huge uptick in people kidnapped during their REM sleep and spirited onto space ships. Since I'm easily distracted, I was paying a whole lot more attention to the reported hordes of devil-worshipping toddler-eating ghouls, and pooh-poohed the sad-sack alien abductees.

I'm here to say it's still quite a problem, this getting grabbed by guys from outer space. What happens is...well, I'll let Michael Menkin of http://www.stopabductions.com website explain:

Since we are being invaded by an alien force from another world, we have a different kind of war. Our war with these beings is one of mind control, mind scan, and telepathic control... Until now, the creatures abducting us could do so at will: they could "switch off" people or render them powerless, manipulate people's thoughts and cause them to move against their will, project mental images to us, masquerade as a friendly or sexually attractive human, and scan our entire minds.

A big problem for all of us, Michael thinks, a veritable War of the Worlds. Michael, however, has come up with a solution for those who are repeatedly abducted, taken to a space ship, and then wake in the morning, all bruised and bleeding from odd places, and he has the testimonials to prove it. Check out this happy camper...

ALIEN ABDUCTEE FROM AUSTRIA WEARING A THOUGHT SCREEN HELMET SHE MADE FROM DIRECTIONS ON THIS WEB SITE.

She goes on to say that she's been abducted for years, but that the thought screen helmet has definitely raised her quality of life. And then there's this gentleman...

ALIEN ABDUCTEE FROM KENTUCKY WEARING A THOUGHT SCREEN HELMET

"Since trying Michael Menkin's Helmet, I have not been bothered by alien mind control. Now my thoughts are my own. I have achieved meaningful work and am contributing to society. My life is better than ever before. Thank you Michael for the work you are doing to save all humanity."

I feel the same way. If a thought-screen helmet is what it takes for this guy to get out of bed, it seems pretty cheap and easy. What I always miss in these and other non-mainstreamy accounts is all the little stuff. Like, did the guys at job site give him a hard time the first time he climbed into his Caterpillar Paver, wearing his thought-screen helmet? Haw! Haw! Haw! Check out the WWI pilot! Whaddaya think you're driving? Did the Austrian woman's family sigh with relief when she sat down to dinner in her helmet? And what did she say to Bub, Sis, and Dad? No more pesky thought-grabbing, my cherished ones! And whatever happened to the classical foil-lined baseball cap? (Actually, I found out that foil-lining is so 1950. And with the advanced technology aliens are using, aluminum foil doesn't stand a chance.)

This alien abduction business, it's a rich vein all right.

More to come...

No progress here...

Combining The Cute And The Topical

Yesterday I shlepped downtown for jury duty at the same elephant-gray courthouse where Lee H. Oswald met his end. Glancing around, I sighed with recognition because, in the main jury room at least, it was still 1963. Oh, there were a few aggressive 40 and 50+ ladies with BlueTooths in their ears, and some impatient semi-retired guys with cellphones, but mostly we were all of a certain age, and all of us were reading. Some folks even had newspapers. No one was texting, no one was flipping through his iPhone apps, and everyone, I noted, had used lots of hairspray.

I begin this post with a fond backwards look since I've discovered that extraterrestrials belong to those dear dead days too. In researching men from Mars, alien abductions, and aliens in general, I'm sorry to report almost no progress in the appearance of creatures from outer space. Dating before the 1947 Roswell incident, extraterrestrials are generally portrayed as big-headed, skinny, bug-eyed, slot-mouthed beings with a greenish tinge. Although I did come across a picture of something that looked like a jelly-fish. It didn't have any arms though, so I couldn't see how it could grasp those bizarre shiny instruments aliens use in probing abductees.

Looking up "Roswell" on the Google, I looked at pix from A Real Alien Autopsy with something less than fascination. The alien in question lay on the slab, huge-headed, and with big googly eyes, while the "photo" itself looked a lot like those blatantly doctored up pictures of Bat Boy in the Weekly World News. Thinking of Bat Boy made me nostalgic all over again, so I went to the current online issue and came upon an article that listed 11 HINTS YOU MIGHT BE DESCENDED FROM ALIENS! The author, Erik Van Datiken, says in his flatly declaratory lede that humans and aliens intermarried 8,000 years ago, and so their descendants live among us now: http://weeklyworldnews.com/alien-alert/11451/11-hints-you-might-be-descended-from-aliens/2/. Check it out, if only for the heavily photo-shopped illustration showing that aliens evidently have evolved in some way, since they don't have noses anymore.

Among the 11 clues that spell out aliendom are: blue or green eyes set wide apart, narrow feet with longer than normal toes, big ears etc. In other words, sort of fetal-alcohol syndrome-ish, and looking mighty like the same old boring aliens we know so well. Ho-hum. I was way more interested in reading about the DUCT TAPE CAT and THE GIRL WITH X-RAY EYES. The story titled DALAI LAMA FIST BUMP and the one about Tom Delay's dancing with the stars, however, convinced me that the difference between actual journalism and the Weekly World News is: not much. The last two stories could fit comfortably in The Washington Post.

Dumbasses +1, Civilization 0.

The Ick Factor...

And isn't it time?

Given these troubled times I think we need to get back to basics, and by that, obviously I mean aliens. Yeah, those kinds of aliens. During the 90's, I'm sorry to report, my appetite for things extraterrestrial became dimmer and dimmer, until it was extinguished utterly. This had nothing to do with Clinton, and everything to do with The X Files. Used to be that stuff from outer space (with the exception of The Blob) was relatively clean and dry. Guys from other planets looked a bit leathery and green or, at the far end of the spectrum, they might have some scaley parts. Generally speaking though, you could count on a low ick factor (IF).

Much as I liked the two X File stalwarts, Scully and Mulder (Scully more, Mulder a lot less), the two of them found the stickiest extraterrestrial glop I'd ever seen. Sometimes the whatever was covered in a coat of slime, sometimes it was just a blob of cosmic goo and, every time I could stand to look, my stomach would heave precipitously. After too many shows starring various types of gunk, mire, mucus, and sludge and despite my girl crush on Scully, I had to abandon the X. I couldn't stand one more autopsy scene, with Scully and her rubber gloves bent over some spotlit nameless pile of ooze.

Is this an alien evolution? From dry well-groomed 1950's Roswell cast-offs to the slovenly gummy outer-space guys of the late 20th C. and early 21st? If so, give me the retro stuff.

But lately, in my insomniac throes, I find myself up to the armpits in Monster Quest. I love watching crytozoologists measuring huge plaster footprints, and nodding affirmatively. Sasquatch lives! I just knew it. Sasquatch not only lives but s/he attacks! Cue the shaken locals who spotted him/her/it peeking at them through the kitchen window. It's something I'll never get over, says Mary Smith, 72, a spry homemaker from Manitoba. Cut to the remains of a half-eaten steer. I don't care what the experts say. Wasn't man or beast did that.

So far, despite motion sensors, tranq darts, and cages that drop out of trees, the cryptozoologists haven't caught Big Foot, a mutant canine, Birdzilla, or Stalin's Ape. But it would be totally okay with me if they did, since all of these creatures have an extremely low ick factor, except maybe the Giant Squid. Even Nettie, the Loch Ness Monster, appears to be a jolly rubberized leviathan.

So given my happy hours of goggling at the Swamp Beast and Creatures of the 4th Dimension, what I think is, I might be wanting me some aliens.

But not the gooey kind.