Viewing entries tagged
loss

WHEN MY MOTHER WAS RIGHT

WHEN MY MOTHER WAS RIGHT

Every once in a while, someone says something that at first listen sounds absolutely preposterous, but after a beat of time passes by – a beat where time itself ceases to have anything resembling a reality or a rhythm – the sentiment you so easily discarded just seconds before begins to make real sense.  This is not to say that the bit of truth that’s just been verbally tossed your way will suddenly make your life better.  No, my friends – accepting something to be valid that only one moment before seemed nothing but insane is bound to fuck you up at least a little bit.

AUGUST 17th

AUGUST 17th

August seventeenth.  

I’m fourteen years old and I have been gone for the entire summer, shuttling around the country on a luxury bus with forty other teenagers.  I walked the starkness of Alcatraz and gazed at the height of Mount Rushmore.  I camped in tents in Nebraska.  I rode a horse named Caramel in Bryce Canyon and went waterskiing in the glow of Lake Tahoe.

Everywhere I went, I had with me a bulky camera and a notepad that turned into a journal.  I wrote down what I saw and how each thing made me feel.  I bought postcards and scrawled happy messages on them and mailed them home to my mother and my father.  The postcards were sent to different places since my parents hadn’t lived in the same house for almost a decade.

BOWLING FOR SANITY

BOWLING FOR SANITY

Is there a woman out there who hasn’t once emphatically believed that a once promising relationship plummeted headfirst into the mucky black abyss due to the size of her thighs? (If someone somewhere is now staring at her computer screen in puzzlement while caressing her perfectly sized thighs, I hope she knows that it’s her terrible breath that always ruins things for her.)  The truth – usually, unless you’re dating a complete douchebag – is that a couple of pounds are probably not the reason things died a horrible, screaming death in the love department.  Something else went wrong between two people and it takes a very special kind of human being to attribute the totality of the misery only to a growing tummy and then meet on camera with a holistic trainer in the hopes of reviving a relationship that looks more like road kill than the dead possum I saw on the side of a highway last Tuesday.

LEGITIMATE LOSS IN ORANGE COUNTY

LEGITIMATE LOSS IN ORANGE COUNTY

As much as I enjoy entertainment that involves both frigid chills and terrifying thrills, one thing I have never been drawn to is gratuitous carnage.  And it is with that aversion in mind that I have decided to start a petition to remove Shannon from The Real Housewives of Orange County before her head goes spinning off of her neck and gains real height and then bursts into a pink pulpy mess midair like a psychologically-damaged watermelon.  Now, I know what you’re going to say:  Shannon makes for good television with her array of crazy – and I wouldn’t argue with that – but I also genuinely believe that we are watching a woman implode from within and the whole thing has started to make me feel just a little bit grimy.

Shannon is an adult.  She is not thirty.  Yet somehow during all of her stages of development, she managed to leap over the stage where she should have learned the skill to at least appear differently on the outside from how she actually feels on the inside.  As a result, she lacks the total ability to ever really come off as cool or calm – and fuck collected; she never comes off that way.  And tonight she brings the crazy quickly.

THE PLAN

THE PLAN

Remember this, I told myself right then.

I memorized the exact location of the paint chip on the wall and filed it into that place in my mind that is sometimes where I sprint to for comfort but, far more often, it comes running towards me as though intending to cause me some harm.  I memorized how the cords on the television were somewhat hidden from view.  I put it somewhere deep inside of myself that the toilet paper in the bathroom was always put on the roll in the opposite way than how I do it in my house, with the flap on the bottom.  He placed his the same way my mother did; I think I found that almost comforting.  I leaned over then and felt once again that spot on his head that almost seemed misshapen, the one I’d smiled at quietly the first time I touched it because it reminded me of The Coneheads and because it also made me realize that you only find out those kinds of things about someone sometimes.

The symbolic card cataloguing of variables and quirks was part of my plan, the one so ill-formulated that I didn’t even know then that it was a plan.  But I knew enough to know that I should definitely have one.

GHOSTS

GHOSTS

I don’t believe in ghosts but I do believe in the stories of my friends have who have experienced what I guess I’d call ghostly encounters.  And that dichotomy between not personally believing but believing that others do confuses me.  I’ll just add that bit of confusion to my ever-expanding list of that which I can’t fully understand.
 

DESTINY

DESTINY

It was that moment during my lesson on the mythic hero’s journey when it was time to talk philosophically:

Some potential heroes are reluctant to answer the call to adventure.  There are reasons to feel that way – sometimes really good reasons.  Perhaps they don’t feel prepared to go slay the shark in Jaws.  Maybe they believe that there are other far more qualified scientists who can destroy the asteroid that’s hurtling towards Earth in Armageddon.  Sometimes they feel comfortable in the complacency of their ordinary world, like Billy Madison.  But part of being a hero is that it is that person’s destiny to answer that call and to go take that journey and achieve that quest.  How many of you believe that our lives are in some manner preordained and that everything actually happens for a reason?

The entire room was suddenly filled with hands raised far into the air – and my entire mind was suddenly filled with the realization that I am just not like everybody else.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Starting on the snowy eve before I turned one – and continuing on until the night before my thirteenth birthday – my father wrote an annual letter to me.  After writing each one, he would place the paper into an envelope, seal it, scrawl his signature across the flap, and then write the date of the letter across the front.

On the night of my thirteenth birthday, he and I embarked on the event that I’d looked forward to ever since my sister had experienced her very own thirteenth birthday extravaganza.  We went to dinner at The Four Seasons and sat so close to the pool that I could have stuck my fingers into the water and I don’t remember what I ate for dinner, but I know that I ordered the Chocolate Velvet for dessert and that they also brought me a cloud of cotton candy with some ice cream hidden beneath the perfectly formed fluff of sugar.  Afterwards, we went to see a Broadway show – Penn and Teller.

The whole thing was glorious, in spite of the fact that I was wearing a white satin drop-waist dress that had fringe all over it and my hair was asymmetrical and curly, giving me the appearance of an unfortunate looking hedge.  Holy shit, did my gawky stage suck, but it didn’t matter later that night when my father and I sat on my bed and I was able – finally – to open my letters.

BUFFALO

BUFFALO

Just a short time ago, I watched a new television show for the first time.  Love Prison is the delightfully-named new reality show that airs on some channel – I have no idea which one since I wasn’t wielding the remote – in which two people who met online and have been corresponding for an extended period of time finally meet.  

Each person is greeted separately by a stoic-looking woman who introduces herself as one of the producers of the show.  She hands over a typed set of rules to the hopeful participant and she refuses to crack a smile while the list is read out loud so the viewers at home get an opportunity to hear that these two people will be shoved into a house on an island and that they will only get one hour a day of “yard time.”  The rest of their stay is confined to the indoors.  

Everything will be recorded.

THIS IS TODAY

THIS IS TODAY

This morning at 2:03 AM, my sixteen-year-old dog crouched on the pillow right next to my head – on the cotton-white colored pillowcase I just changed yesterday – and pooped out what very well might have been her small intestine.

I was already up, courtesy of the unstoppable motion she created as she walked in circles around the bed for the few minutes prior to the big event.  I had been hoping that they were I-can’t-get-comfortable circles or perhaps I-need-a-little-cardio circles, but no.  They were I’m-sorry-you-spent-a-great-deal-of-money-on-bedding-but-I-am-going-to-the-bathroom-right-here-and-now circles.