''Just say the word and tell me that I'm forgiven''

Alright FF, if yesterday's happy song jerked your tears, I can make no guarantees about today's sad song. I promise that one of these meme categories will soon provide me with a funny, upbeat memory, but not today I'm afraid.

Day 4: A song that makes you sad: Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes

I remember the day we went to pick up my mom's ''new'' little red Camaro. She had pointed out several times on the street what kind of car she was getting but she always pointed out one that was shiny and new. "See that one right there? That's a Camaro. That's the kind of car mommy's getting. A red one.''

I was surprised at the used car dealership at how chipped the paint was, how the interior smelled like an old ashtray, how the visors hung badly, and how the stuffing was coming out probably through a cigarette burn in the dark upholstery that was stained with unidentifiable liquids. I touched the car while I peered inside the window and quickly withdrew my hand. It was summertime in Mesa, Arizona, the air was thick and dry and almost burned your lungs going in, and you could easily fry an egg on the hood of that car.

Mom was starting over. My dad, far away in Albuquerque, was no longer holding her back and neither were we: me age 7, the Huta kid age 4, and the Chulster age 8.

Mom had a new job working on the assembly line at Motorola. That and the dealing of weed to a few friends and relatives paid the bills and allowed her to spoil us just enough when we visited her. It paid for her new apartment.

That apartment. It was a tiny duplex on a corner near a car wash with a tree that was good for climbing and oleander bushes that filled with bees. Most of the neighbors had covered their windows in tin foil to reflect the sun out. There were no garages on our block, just carports filled with junk and yards with grass that was yellowed and dried and patched with dirt.

You would never guess by looking at the inside of her place that it was just on the border of the projects, that most of the neighbors on our street were on welfare. Inside the apartment was a twenty-something single woman's oasis of independence, a hideaway where she could reinvent herself in a world unhindered.

She had painstakingly decorated the place in her hip, youthful 80s way. Everything about it was a statement of creativity. Restaurant menus she had nicked and hung up carefully on the dining area wall every which way seemed the epitome of funky and fun. Her bedroom was a den of seduction where she had hung Chinese umbrellas upside down over her bed, covering the light and creating an aura. On top of her dresser she had her own swiveling earring rack filled with big cheap earrings, just like the ones in shops that I loved to spin round and round until I was told to stop. She had covered a lamp in a romantic black mesh which was surely meant to kindle something I knew that I didn't know much about. Her negligees hung from the expensive kind of silk padded hangers, not the wire ones that tangled themselves up on the closet floor impossibly at my dad's place in a mess of dirty laundry and shoes. Those negligees probably fit her nicely now with her new boobs. Her designer friends she met in her photography classes came over and as they listened to my mom's Sade album on the record player, in their cracked voices of holding in a drag from a joint held tightly by a roach clip, they would comment on how creative my mom was and how great her apartment was and how happy they were for her. She must have lay in bed alongside my dad and dreamt for months about how she would decorate her own place once she got away from him and his grandmother's hand-me-downs that filled their joyless home.

But back to the little red Camaro. That car, like the apartment, represented a break from the prison of family life or the prison of my dad, from the ugly long brown family car he had humbly accepted when his grandmother passed, since he was worse off than any of his eight siblings. This was supposed to be a happy day for her, a day of confirmation that everything was going better for her now.

We stood around restless while my mom closed the deal: Chulster, with her signature summer sun scowl and her orange popcycle stained lips, the Huta kid covered in a layer of sweat and grime, with her golden baby curls and pouty red lips, and me, with my stringy thin braids going down the sides of a face over-populated by wreckless freckles.

She paid for the car in cash, shook the dealer's hand, and her three little sweaty girls crammed themselves into the tiny hot Camaro that now had her name on the title. The hairs near our ears curled from the heat and our faces flushed and as she reached over the front seat to roll down the passenger side window, she warned us not to touch the metal trim on the windows because it would burn us. She awkwardly put the keys in the ignition, not used to exactly where it was. The engine started up and we were off. Mom could now tick off another item on her to-do list for making a new life.

The hot breeze gushing into the non-air conditioned car was welcomed with relief and she turned on the radio. ''I was as wrong as I could be, to let you get away from me, I'll regret that move, for as long as I'm living..."

''Mom?'' the Huta kid asked. She scooted her tiny body up to the edge of the hot red velour seat. ''Mommy?''

''Shhhh!'' the Chulster turned around from the front seat and hissed angrily. ''Mom's sad.''

''I'm never gonna let you go, I'm gonna hold you in my arms forever, gonna try to make up for the time I hurt you so…''

I could see the back side of my mom's profile and could tell her cheeks were wet. She switched lanes furiously while wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

''Mommy?'', the Huta insisted in a worried small voice. ''Mommy, ARE YOU CRYING, MOMMY?''

''But if there's some feeling left in you, some flicker of love that still shines through, let's talk about, let's talk about second chances…''

''Mommy is this the 'Never Gonna Let You Go' song?'' Huta urgently needed to know while tapping on my mom's shoulder.

''Yeah honey, it is.''

''Does it make you sad, Mommy?''

''Yeah honey, it does''.

''Is that why you're crying, Mommy?''

''Yeah.''

Huta looked around at the three of our tear streaked faces and confirmed, ''Me too. I'm sad too, Mommy.'' She looked down and her bright red lower lip protruded outward and then she proceeded to carefully examine the rest of us for clues on how to be sad from a song. ''Never gonna let you go...'', Huta belted out in her tiny voice, to sing along with the rest of us who were singing it softly under our breaths.

I was heartbroken because even at 7 years old I knew the song was a lie. She was letting go, of him and of us, she was only going to hold us in her arms while we were here visiting from Albuquerque, not forever, like the song said. There was no flicker of love that still shone through and there were no second chances and she didn't have any regrets like the guy singing did, otherwise we would all be together again with Dad. So why was she crying? Because she wished she felt like the guy and girl singing? Did she wish that for our sake she didn't need to face life as a huntress just one last time?

From time to time I'll be at a the mall or in the grocery store and I'll hear this song on the musac and there is no amount of time that can pass between my seven year old self and my adulthood to make me not feel as confused as my sisters and I did that day in my mom's little red Camaro.

StumbleIt

I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is smashing my neighbor's stereo

So, you guys didn't really believe it was going to be 30 songs in 30 consecutive days, did you? Come on, cut me some slack - I can barely remember how to type a sentence.

Day 2: Your least favorite song


1995 was not a good year for me.

I graduated from high school in spring and was due to start college in the fall. I didn't know why I wanted to go to college. I only knew that it sounded slightly better than working at Dairy Queen and I had heard that this was what successful people did, so I went with it. I had no real aspirations of what to study and minimal interest in anything other than trying to look cool and listen to music that I though affiliated me with cool. The more obscure the band, the more attractive I thought I became to people with this particular brand of cool, but the shit couldn't be too obscure, otherwise I would lose touch with the whole coolness barometer altogether. By the time I graduated from high school I had a good, trained grasp of the fact that anything liked by the masses, with a few exceptions, was automatically suspect, even though I knew very little about what really made music good.

I was heading to a state school. My parents had lacked the cultural capital required to know what went in to exploring a college education for their kids. There were no trips to the nearby PAC-10 schools or out east for interviews or campus visits. I was never encouraged to do things that might look good on a college application. My parents didn't know the first thing about looking into scholarship options. The only time I ever remember my mother talking to me about college was to say that her dream for me was to go off to college and marry an older boy that was about to graduate which would apparently secure me a worry-free future sustained by a college boy salary. Great vote of confidence to get me started at college, eh?

I thumbed through the housing options catalogs and was sold on the idea of 'getting the most out of an authentic college life experience' where I would have an 'important networking opportunity' and would likely establish relationships that would be memorable to me throughout my life.

This was a golden opportunity to try out new versions of myself. I had a clean slate and was heretofore unpigeonholed. I could change my hair, my clothes, my interests, and my taste in music. I could redefine the coolness barometer altogether to fit with the real me. The trouble was, I wasn't comfortable enough with myself to determine what it was I really liked and felt lost without a reference to see how I measured up. I looked around me and was overwhelmed with trying to determine where I belonged.

In high school I had barely been within the margins of the cool crowd. I didn't get asked on dates or to dances a lot, but I got invited to parties and was generally good at tethering myself to people that were well accepted. I was carefully perceptive about what kind of belts were being worn at the time, just how worn my levies should be, and the minimum acceptable number of earring holes required to be part of the crowd. So even though I was a few notches down on the pretty scale compared to the girls I most admired, I fit in with the scenery and didn't draw too much attention to the fact that I had no business being there or anywhere really.

But in the college dorm environment, I couldn't clearly identify the alternatively cool anti-mainstream crowd I had elbowed my way into in high school and I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of stunningly beautiful, rich women in their prime that were rushing for sororities, whose parents had shipped them off to sunny Arizona from the east coast. I looked around and knew that being on the margins of cool wasn't going to cut the mustard. But I didn't have the confidence to attempt to be accepted at the sorority level. So I duly linked greek life to the claim that it was all just a bunch of bullshit and that I hated it, while I secretly browsed the catalogs of the sorority houses and imagined what it would be like to live in one of them.

I was lonely as fuck at a time when I was unable to appreciate aloneness. I became friends with some of the girls that weren't really into the sorority thing. They were nerdy and smart and knew things like that U of A had a top notch medical school and what your GPA had to be to get into law school. They were all so sure of what they were studying and spent hours at it, while I wandered around bored, with my books barely cracked open. I hung out downstairs on the cement benches where people with obscure t-shirts that seemed integrated and happy and cool smoked cigarettes, but I was too shot down in my loneliness to approach them, only able to muster up occasional eye contact in the hopes that someone would come talk to me. The few fleeting relationships I managed to form made no impressionable impact on me. I don't remember a single person's name of the people I shared months living alongside.

This Alanis Morissette song was popular at the time and the girls in the room in front of mine blasted it multiple times a day with their door wide open for the entire first semester. Every young 18 year woman - nerdy, hippy, alternative type, sorority sister - sang this song from the top of their lungs while clutching their hearts or wrapping their arms around other like-minded women and they all felt like it was written just for them. They were all high but grounded, sane but overwhelmed, lost but hopeful, baby. They knew it was all gonna be fine fine fine. I guess they all had one hand in their pockets and the other giving a high five and I hated them all for their camaraderie and their college life experience that I felt so disconnected with.

Besides, the song is just dumb. Who puts one hand in their pocket while the other one is playing the piano? Please.

I left U of A after one semester.

StumbleIt

''You know I could never be alone"

Jesus it's dirty in here. Sorry I didn't respond to all of your comments in the last post. They were nice and made me happy.

But the crusty laundry is piling up in this place, I've got a sink full of dishes with the remnants of food on them that I don't even remember eating. There is a layer of grime and dust on the creative parts of my brain, I haven't mopped in months, and the sheets haven't been changed in god knows how long.

The thing is, the filthier this place gets, the harder it is to throw the moldy cheese away that's on my counter no matter how sick I realize that is. Unfortunately, I'm the type of person that unless I can organize the place down to color coding my spare buttons and find the time to iron my damn sheets, shit's just gonna get moldier.

But today it was as if someone had walked in and I felt ashamed of the unidentifiable smell exuding from the fingerprint-tainted refrigerator and I decided that if I at least throw out the stinky shit and DO SOMETHING, I will be a better person for it. So I'm here to prove to myself and maybe to other awesome people I won't mention because they know who they are that I am not a moldy cheese type of person.

I'm a storyteller, dammit.

And I'm intrigued by a damn meme. Because it allows me to tell you stories and show you how cool I am because of my taste in music is all at once. Either that or it will make you once and for all realize we really have nothing in common.

So it's 30 videos in 30 days, so help me fucking god.

Day 1: Your favorite song

Alright, so unfortunately I have a problem with this meme already. How can I possibly pick a favorite song? It's too much pressure. So I'm already changing the category - I'll pick a song that brings me back to a time when I was one of the most favorite versions of myself.

After days of wandering around Madrid in a state of awe, I met Fernando. Fernando had creamy 18 year old skin with dark sugary eyes, longish black hair and the teeth of a toothpaste model. He spoke with the perfect boarding school English of an Argentinean that had been born into just the right family. His charming, educated manner and his nuanced table etiquette contrasted with his wrinkled heavy metal t-shirts and his black and white Pakistani scarf, symbols of rebellion against his family that was pressuring him into an aristocratic life he was nowhere near ready for and that his favorite songs and books told him was the enemy.

He too was lost in this new place. We had both just landed on this strange continent without a friend or a plan, but Fernando had the language down with an accent that made me drooly and he carried a thousand US dollars in cash in his underwear and a knife to protect himself from the unexpectedly benign world of European youth hostels. I was as naive as he was, if not more, with my water droplets which I thought were going to make the Spanish drinking water potable (turns out it puts Phoenix tap water to shame). We clung to each other in our foreignness and naivety and maybe without being fully conscious of it, our refusal of a mold other people had made for us without our consultation. We both seemed acutely aware that this was temporary, that we would be forced to fit into some tight box soon, but now everyday represented a refusal to be anything but what we wanted to be that day.

We had nothing to do except catch trains to Toledo in search of old graveyards to creep around in or lay lazily in the sun on a rowboat in Retiro Park letting each other listen to our tape collections with our headphones. Fernando was way more into harsh metal shit and didn't know any of the blues or Dylan or Dead or indie stuff I liked, but we coincided that day in the park with this little Rolling Stone's number.

As much as I enjoyed Fernando's company during those couple of weeks, my head was full of all the people I wanted to meet, places I wanted to go, languages I wanted to master, books I wanted to devour, new music I wanted to hear and having anyone glued to my side the whole time would have been a burden. Besides, we already had conflicting ideas about how to travel. The money in his underwear had to last him six months and he had to be careful. He started his day with mate for breakfast and skipped meals. He followed me around while I ordered food and claimed he wasn't hungry. He was proving to himself and to his family that he could make it in the world without them and I respected that, but I had two freshly cashed student loan checks in American Express travelers checks and a study abroad program that included my room and board so this was spending money, baby and I wasn't wasting any time or thinking about tomorrow.

My 21st birthday rolled around and I had only one person to celebrate it with, and I wasn't having any of that frugal bullshit. I needed someone to not think about the future with me just for a day and I reeled him into my quest of finding a bottle of wine from the year I was born and ordering it no matter what the price. We walked for hours, soaked in the pouring rain, in and out of expensive looking restaurants and bodegas to see if they had anything from 1977 without any luck (or maybe with a lot of luck, Jesus, what was I thinking?).

We finally settled on a nice expensive but not outrageous wine, and I told him to order anything from the menu, it was my 21st birthday, dammit. He ordered a plate of octopus and I ordered the paella. We sat next to a window overlooking a side street off of Puerta del Sol and if I close my eyes right now I can be there in that moment and hear the sounds of the street down below, the noisy clinkering of glasses and silverware and the chatter of the Spanish lunchtime crowd and the suits and white tablecloths. I can hear the accordion player trying to lure the pesetas from the tourists seated under the beige umbrellas just under our window.

I know that moment by heart because I mapped it into my guts and brains and the thickest, most fibrous parts of my soul. I must have closed my eyes and feared that if I opened them it would all be a dream, that Fernando and Spain and the accordion player and the octopus and me, the me I had always wanted to be would all disappear. Actually, Fernando and the rest of it could have very well disappeared, but I wanted to open my eyes and still be the me I was right then. The one that was confident for the first time in my life and looking to nobody else as a reference for how to behave, for what kind of music to like, for what I wanted to look like, for what I should think. The one that was open to experiencing things for the sole purpose of someday making my own good stories that were more mine than any other belonging I could ever own, that I've unfortunately gotten shitty about sharing. The one that saw the world as a never-ending series of open doors with mostly good things beyond them. The one that didn't feel even remotely dampened by a future unknown, and that appreciated the fleeting effervescence of life in its most vivacious and ripe stage - the now. The one that felt the intense heated color of gratitude - a feeling I knew then, that I lost touch with for some time and that I have found once again today.

I had to take off for Seville and I made it known to Fernando that he wasn't welcome to tag along on my adventure, we were parting ways. He was a good sport about it and didn't take it personally and was ready to venture off somewhere else himself. We kissed in the rain and I was surprised at how his long face bounced off me with an indifference I had never experienced before, especially for someone that would have at another time turned me to butter with a glance. He said he was sad that if we ever saw each other again it wouldn't be like now. I smiled, because I didn't regret it at all. I would still be me.

StumbleIt

Stepdad

I stared blankly at him from across the table and examined his giant orange peel nose, his melanoma-speckled forehead, massive and red - the shore of his baldness which had morphed at some point from athletic-type buzz cut into old man head. Years of golfing weekly with no sunscreen and hair loss can do a number on a good looking man.

As usual, he wore a tie-dye collared sports shirt, one of his shirts -- the ones he'd been dyeing and selling for 20 some years, having started his business in our garage with our own washing machine. Together with his shorts and runners, his whole ensemble perfectly represented both pot-smoking hippie and jock that had molotoved him into one hot conservative Republican mess. He was on his third tequila sunrise (requested in a tumbler lest he be mistaken for a ‘faggot’) and we hadn’t even had our appetizers yet. His green eyes peered through sagged eyelids that appeared to droop down so low they almost folded over themselves and nearly touched his eyeballs while a few still remaining eyelashes pointed almost downward, emphasizing the tired, pigeon feeder Grandpa look about him. His squarish fingers were spread out as he monologued, his thumb naturally in a position of hyperextension.

I suppressed eye-rolling, groaning, or feigning an epileptic fit. We were, after all, in a restaurant for god's sake. I drifted in and out of listening to avoid the worn shoe of confrontation.

"...So anyway, we was the kinda kids that would break anyone's ass that got in our way. I mean it..."

Jesus Christ he’s old, I thought, and at 56 he’s still talking the same shit about growing up in Wisconsin. Maybe he read my mind because he stopped, turned his head ever so slightly, smiled goofily, and sweetly uttered one of the many nicknames he had for me. His cracked tooth that had greeted my giggling face so many times over the last 25 years reminded me of the beautiful man behind the worrisome sun spots, the political diatribes, and the days of old before he was a joy-sucked middle-aged adult whose better days were far behind him and who watched way too damned much Fox News.

".....I dated Margie back then -- she had the biggest tits. But anyway, that's not the point..."

I pretended to be intensely interested in the wine list and buried my head in it, while I breathed in my mother's tangible, thick embarrassment. A familiar parcel of family dinner failure was about to arrive without warning. But she only scoffed and then shoved a vodka tonic into her face.

"...Those fucking people. They don't know how to work. All they know how to do is cash their welfare checks and use their food stamps. And I'm gonna work my ass off and pay for their health insurance? Uh uh..."

Food stamps, I thought, and had a faint recollection of using a food stamp for postage to a letter to Santa Claus. This is the man that rescued my mother from standing in line for blocks of government cheese when I was eight years old. Maybe his politics were more nuanced back then.

"...Fine. I'll shut up. Can I get another tequila sunrise please?"

From my eight year old point of view, he was like a large freckled child – unlike any other adult I had ever met. He was a massive muscular man testifying to the hours he spent boxing, wrestling, running, and in general trying to maintain the youthful body that would eventually escape him. His patience for kid hyperactivity was inexhaustible. He would chase me around the couch until I fell to the floor in utter euphoric exhaustion where I would be doomed to a tickling session until I cried out for my mom gasping for air through my roaring upheavals of laughter. Then, fully clothed, I would get tossed into the pool as I squealed in a mix of terror and delight, but mostly delight. On occasion, he would then pretend to walk casually and step fully clothed into the swimming pool, as if just walking about. La di da, he would hum, for my amusement. He would take out his wallet soaked and ruined and pull out the sopping wet money and pretend to pay for something while I doubled over in pre-adolescent hilarity.

When he wasn’t acting silly for the sole benefit of getting me to snort and snicker and squeal, he was working himself to the bone, reinventing some way to keep the wad of Benjamins he always carried in full supply. He couldn't go back on a rescue attempt. He knew my sisters and I would be needing synchronized swimming lessons and Guess Jeans and trips to Disneyland and trampolines and cars insured for 16 year old garage mishaps.

"...We're losing our house..."

I snapped back from my rescued childhood, replete with everything I had ever wanted and more and stared at the man that now had an IRS freeze on his checking account.

No, no, no, no. You got it all wrong. You are the one with the piles of cash everywhere and the Christmas presents that fill an entire room, see? You're the one that knows about mortgages and investments and the stock exchange and interest rates and how to check the oil in my car and how to file my fucking income tax return, and how to interview for a job at Dairy Queen. You're the one with all the answers who knows how to solve everything. I'm the one that needs a girl scout uniform and flute lessons and braces for my gnarled teeth and someone to pay for my college tuition. I'm the one that needs help paying my rent and that can't afford to get my wisdom teeth pulled. I'm the one that crashed my car and can't afford the $2000 repair job. Remember me? You're the one that went into a trance and punched the fuck out of a punching bag in the garage. But I'm the one that has always needed you punching. You're not defeated. You can't be.

My eyes flashed between his sad eyes and my mother's uneaten plate of pasta and I wrestled myself from the ridiculous grips of self pity and the selfish solitude of realizing that there was no one left to hold my life together if I were to fuck it up. I allowed myself to grasp, however superficially, his disappointment, loss and sense of years wasted - his own personal Waterloo. How much graver and more psychologically destructive is it to, at 56, lose everything you've ever worked for than to, at 33, watch your childhood superhero become merely a man?



I flagged down the waiter and ordered another margarita while I calculated if I had enough money in my checking account to pay for dinner.

StumbleIt

Gum and Madge

I pulled the car up to the same house I'd pulled up to countless times before. My eyes scanned the yard where Easter egg hunts had taken place, where tag-you're-its had gone down with hurried breathing and where hide-and-go-seek boundary rules had been defined. My sister Huta got out of the car seemingly free from this assault of memories. Her surroundings don't change as much as mine do. She's in the thick of her memories more often than I am. Intensity and attachment to memories must be a function of absence from their triggers. I felt like taking her ass down her on the lawn and tickling her so she'd remember too. Please remember like I do. But I gathered that would irritate her somewhat, and since I'm no longer inclined to fuck with the Huta, I restrained myself.

"Grab the food", I hollered back as I walked up towards the gate. I pulled it open in what seemed like slow motion and recalled the time my tiny body clung to it while someone pushed me back and forth on it. The bougainvillea next to the gate that was usually in full bloom and full of bees on the white adobe wall was all shriveled up, a barren skeleton of a plant, dying of thirst in the Arizona sun. What the fuck? That's not how I had remembered it. I was inside a traitorous memory; instead of the clear colors and hugeness of it all, it had all been violently downscaled, shrunken by my adulthood, and weeds had germinated through the cracks in the patio and the paint on the door frames was now chipping away. Things are always much better kept in memories.

As I turned the doorknob to my grandparents' house and let myself in as I always had before, I half expected to find my Grandpa Gum clad in his favorite checkered button down shirt and his jean-like slacks, standing on a ladder fixing the ceiling fan or sitting in his chair poring over his history books with his glasses at the edge of his nose, his long slender legs crossed like a woman, just as my dad's legs do when he sits. I expected my grandmother to be in the other room re-wallpapering the dining room or baking 20 dozen peanut butter cookies for the church bake sale.

The scary grandfather clock that used to haunt me as a child stood tall in the foyer, but not quite as tall as it should have stood. I knew just where the key to it was hidden -- on top of it on the back right corner. I could easily reach that key now. I wouldn't need to stand tip toed on a chair if I wanted to open up the grandfather clock and peer into it with my heart pounding. But I ignored the urge to do that. My Great Grandmother´s Lladro statues sat unshined and dusty, but right where I remembered them. The pink silk couches, the same couches that have been reupholstered half a dozen times were exactly where they ought to be. The place, as always, had the feel of a cold museum, filled with untouchable icy artifacts with museum-keepers that were not much warmer.

Instead of standing on a ladder, Grandpa Gum was struggling at a snail's pace with a walker to make it to his chair so he could rest. I kissed him despite how uncomfortable I knew it probably made him and said hello. I tried not to let on that I was surprised at his frailness, his strong frame withered into a stoop, his once clear and sharp eyes sunken into his skull with the glossy fluid look of an aged gaze. He barely moved or said a word, a smile being more than he could muster these days, incapable of giving a warm hug. It didn't matter. He had never been capable of giving a warm hug before, even when he could.

"Why hello", my grandmother said, putting her arms around me with a smile. This tenderness...it's new. Added to the chipped paint and the short grandfather clock was this strange affection I hadn't seen before in her. It betrayed my memories of her.

"Where should I put this Grandma?" my sister asked referring to the take out food she was still holding.

"Oh, just put it anywhere." My grandmother waved a careless hand.

"How are you Grandpa?" I asked him as I took a seat next to him near the giant fireplace that for some reason was as scary as the Grandfather clock.

"I'm great. I'm just waiting to die," he stated, matter-of-factly.

I stared into Gum's emotionless eyes and in a moment, no longer than a couple of seconds, I saw a man that had fought in World War II, a man that had made it through law school with fucking narcolepsy, a man that had married the woman of his life and had had eight children with her. I saw him receiving the news about the death of his son in Vietnam. I saw him anxiously waiting in hospital rooms for news good and bad. I saw him starring at the Great Wall of China and Stonehenge and the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest and the Egyptian pyramids. I saw a man that was appointed to serve as a federal district court judge by Jimmy Carter. I saw him, dressed in legal garb, starring into the eyes of the worst of humanity, along with the wrongly accused, the framed, the exploited. I saw his blunders in Tibet and his winters in fucking Siberia. I saw him dancing and speaking in other languages and kicking any one's ass at a crossword puzzle or backgammon. Old Gum had out read us, had out bred us, had out travelled us, had out earned us, had outwitted us, had out fucked us. He had stood firmly inside the panopticon of human experience and had seen the best and the worst that life had to offer and check mate, he was fucking done. In his flat reply to my question regarding his current state of being, in so many words he told me that he'd be damned if he was going to will himself into another five years of this diaper bullshit he was currently putting up with.

Unsure how to reply to his death wish, I said nothing to him at all and I turned to my grandmother who was in a much more pleasant state of denial regarding her own deterioration.

"So, how're the kids?" she asked me, politely inquiring about the offspring I wasn't aware I had. It dawned on me for a moment that maybe the reason why she was being so unusually warm was because she was confusing me with someone from her church. I brushed it off.

"You mean my nephews, Grandma? They're good."

She looked at me, and confusion momentarily crossed her beautiful blue eyes, through her rhinestone-rimmed glasses that sat on a perfect nose, above gorgeous cheekbones covered in gentle lovely wrinkles. She smiled, showing the teeth that had made it all these years, but furrowed her brow trying to sort it all out and I noticed how her snow white hair shifted forward.

Huta, uncomfortable, and possibly wanting to speed up this grandparent visit stated, "Well, our food it getting cold, so why don't we have dinner now".

"Oh we can't have dinner now, I'm afraid." Grandma replied.

"Why not?"

"Well, because my granddaughters will be here shortly and they're bringing us dinner".

Ah, Fuuuuck.

"Grandma," my sister said in a gentle whisper, "That's us. We're your granddaughters."

This time the perplexity lingered longer and was a bit more disheartening.

I glanced over at Gum, who I believed was contemplating finding some hidden strength within to take us all down with his walker. He glared at whoever looked his way.

The doorbell sounded and Aunt Eunice made her skinny appearance with her tattooed eyebrows and a tub of ice cream under her arm. Thankfully, she was quickly recognized by both her parents, taking a bit of the burden off of us for feeling like intruders in a home we had spent so many Christmas Eves, so many birthday parties, so many Thanksgivings.

After awkward two-pats-on-the-back hugs only serving to remind us how thin the threads to the fabric of our family are, we sat down around the table with paper plates and plastic forks and passed around the Olive Garden take out.

"Why, this meal is delicious. I don't remember the last time I had pasta," Grandma graciously exclaimed.

Gum's shaky hand wasn't allowing the noodles to stay on his fork long enough to reach his dentured mouth. I stole a glance at Huta and knew we were both regretting the Olive Garden decision. I began to worry about his hungry looking limbs and digits that weren't cooperating to help nourish themselves.

"Gum. Put your fork on your plate like so and turn. See? Like so," Grandma instructed. He pretended not to hear her and went on trying to shovel a shaky fork full of unstable noodles into his mouth. "Gum. Down and turn. Like so," she repeated in an increasingly irritated tone.

"Leave me alone," he eventually growled at her with his mouth full of what small morsels had made their way there by chance.

She gave up and turned to me, "So, how is Spain?"

Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief that she still knew who I was as I answered, "It's great, Grandma, we're doing really good. Just working. You know."

She stared at me, questioningly. "So, are you from Spain?", she asked me with that worried crinkled brow.

"No, Grandma. Remember? I was born here." Her confusion didn't have time to linger, because my Grandfather interrupted her.

"Madge? What happened to Bob's ashes?"

Aunt Eunice audibly choked on her Fettuccine. "Bob's ashes?" she blurted out incomprehensibly with her mouth full of food. "What are you talking about? Uncle Bob died?"

"Yes, Uncle Bob died," Gum calmly replied to the inquiry of his dead brother. "Bob's wife is bedridden and she had his ashes sent to Madge and me to handle them."

"My god", Aunt Eunice replied in disbelief, "When did all of this happen?"

Grandpa turned to Grandma, "Madge? Do you recall when all of this took place, because I don't."

"Oh Gum, I don't have the foggiest idea."

My Grandfather with a steady voice and no movements stated flatly, "I suppose it was a couple of months ago now. Madge? What did you do with my brother's ashes?" He asked her again as if he were inquiring about the location of his favorite pen or the crossword puzzle he was working on.

But Aunt Eunice was already in a fury, frantically calling her siblings and informing them that "we have situation here and I think you had better come over to Mom and Dad's. Were you aware that Uncle Bob died? Well he did. Two months ago. They have his ashes but they don't know what they've done with them. They were supposed to have arranged a service and apparently forgot to."

Huta and I gave each other knowing let's-get-the-fuck-outta-here looks and began to clear up the dinner mess. There were upset tones and minds that were in disarray and we no longer felt we should be there.

So goodbyes were said with bewilderment and frustration so palpable I could feel it and suddenly I realized that this might be the only time I had ever been able to pick up on any emotion whatsoever from my grandparents. But there was something else there besides the confusion and fear when my Grandmother grabbed my hand and gazed into my eyes and pleaded slowly, "Do come again," maybe with waves of knowing who she was even talking to but with certainty that there was love between us somehow.

On our way out I closed the door behind me. I walked through the carport I'd walked through so many times before. My grandmother's car used to sit right there, the one she used to pick me up in to take me to the ballet or to a play when I was a child because she was concerned about my status as the child of divorce and didn't want me to feel neglected. In her frosty, restrained way, she had loved me. And today, even with her not knowing precisely who I was, had marked the first time I had ever really felt it as an adult.

I noticed that the laundry room door was ajar and the light was on. I peaked my head in and remembered a favorite hide-and-go-seek hiding place. I smiled, turned the light off, and shut the door. Weeks later my grandmother would be found by my aunt in that hot laundry room in the middle of the scorching summer heat, with nothing on but her underwear, completely dehydrated, mixed up and distraught, unsure of how she got there or how long she'd been in there. When things calmed down and my grandparents had been fed, hydrated, and bathed, their pride had effectively withered to the point that they were finally willing to have a look at those pamphlets of Aunt Eunice's on assisted living.

===============================================================

Fuck was that ever long. If you've made it this far, you deserve some kind of reward for reading that. This story is not entirely true. It's based on several true stories, not all of which happened directly to me, but my point was to recreate them and experiment a bit with description and dialogue. Thanks for making it to the end. Critical feedback welcome.

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Jumping Bubble

This post is inspired by and written for Gwen.

I grew up in a bubble; a thickly-walled, strong, soapy bubble, like the bubbles made from some kind of industrial run-off, with the swirled rainbows of contamination in them; transparent, but distorting everything outside of them.

Ours was a bubble of religion, enveloping us in a particular brand of millenarian Evangelicalism that my father became involved in upon my parents' divorce. This religion crept into our lives and, almost overnight, filled every crevice of neutrality, every hole of gray, every crack of on-the-fenceness, every fissure of the no-man's-land of morality, leaving no aspect of life outside of its comprehensive judgment. Things that were seemingly benign before like television, music, games and toys were suddenly reinterpreted and their intrinsic evil became prophetically revealed to our family.

When I was eight years old, our television was sold. My father was going to protect us from the evils of the secular world, you see. He read to us at night, when normal families were watching television programs. He read to us about the miracles of missing limbs growing back at worship services, about people who had been blind their whole lives suddenly seeing, about the economically troubled suddenly finding an envelope filled with cash with their name on it.

Religion encased us completely and the only oxygen allowed to fill our lungs, to run through our blood, was scripture. Our giant beautiful, truth-giving, enclosed sphere was a gift to be grateful for. And we floated beyond the world, only needing the word of God and God himself to tell my father what to do.



God told him to marry Pam, a widow with three small children, aged three, six and nine. Pam's husband Jim had died just a few months before from colon cancer. Based on my recollection, my father and Pam barely knew each other and I remember that when I met Pam and her children, their marriage plans were practically already decided. Apparently, God had spoken to them and told Pam that she didn't need to grieve her husband after all. Other members of the congregation confirmed the voice of God telling them that they ought to wed, despite the situation of sorrow and heartbreak that her three young children found themselves in.

So my father married Pam, a woman who just a few months before had refused to bury her dead husband, because she and other spirit-filled members of the church were laying their hands over him, waiting for God to raise him from the dead, because they thought they heard God say that Jim would be healed.

As it turned out, they heard wrong.

For days my step sister and step brothers' father remained unburied in their house. They waited, hopeful that Jesus would heal Daddy Jim and he would get up from where he lay and embrace them again. They believed. They believed so hard. My blood boils when I think of how those little three believed.



As our family grew by four people, our giant glistening ball of truth got even thicker, even harder, seemingly unbreakable as it floated through the empty space of reality. Pam made it so. She thickened our bubble somehow and made it rise far above the rest of the bubbles it had previously bumped into and reflected off of in similarity.

In our high flying globe I could look through to the other side, but what I saw was always twisted like a scary fun house mirror. I saw demon-filled people and lost people and underlying darkness disguised in a sham of false goodness. Occasionally the distortion would subside and I could see people out there that looked good and happy -- but they were not like me, I was told, because they were outside the bubble of faith, true faith. I was warned that if I got too near to them, I would be vulnerable to them pulling me out of our bubble somehow, unless I managed to pull them in. I shouldn't be fooled -- outside of the bubble there were no shades of gray, and there was certainly no light.

But I ached to poke my head through -- just to see. Followers stronger in faith didn't need proof, didn't need to see what was out there to know that the air supply was cut off and the oxygen of Christ would cease to reach the blood flow. But I knew there was something that wasn't right about our household being run like a fascist dictatorship, where I was under the constant control of the thought police. "Honor thy father and thy mother", was the only explanation for why I could not read Christopher Pike horror books for teens but could read other types of horror books that could terrorize me for weeks, months as I lay in bed at night. "It's worldly", was the simple reason why Debbie Gibson was not authorized audio entertainment. But this type of music was encouraged (Go on, listen to the lyrics. If you can control the shivers, like I am incapable of, I commend you).

Normal PG or G rated movies were also off limits because of "hidden messages from Satan" unless they had been previously approved by the rod-bearing parents/police or by other trusted members of the bubble. Even seemingly harmless movies, because they did not contain a Christian message, such as Disney movies, were all under suspicion because they might infect the minds of the children. On the other hand, movies like this were encouraged. When I see that clip my face becomes red with anger and shame. Knowing that they truly believed that they needed to prepare their children for the rapture does not make me any less angry with them for allowing me to see this as a young child.

There was constant discussion among my parents and their closest friends about what was and was really not inside the bubble. Family members, friends, even entire churches that were once considered inside the bubble were suddenly proclaimed to no longer be, due to differences in the interpretation of scripture or due to God having spoken to my father and his wife. As I grew older and more anxious to meet boys, church youth group services and activities were suddenly suspect. Such co-ed activities encouraged by so-called churches of God were actually the devil's playground where the demon of lust had fertile ground to blossom. My father and his wife had hopes that they would eventually find a man for me from within the bubble and we would court each other until everyone agreed we would wed -- at a very young age, of course.

And the bubble drifted and floated and got further and further away from other sorts of bubbles, like my best friend's Methodist bubble, or my grandparents Mormon bubble. Our bubble - the true bubble-- was increasingly less populace as good Christian schools were replaced by homeschooling (which I escaped thanks the protests of my mother who still had a say in my upbringing), and Wednesday night, Friday night and Sunday morning services became replaced by "home fellowship". We were officially weirding out the people that once shared a place in our bubble.

As I got older, and the bubble got higher and higher into space, the oxygen inside the confined space didn't seem to satiate my lungs any longer. I looked through its translucent walls and the images stopped looking so deformed and twisted. As my doubts about what I saw outside grew, I knew my bubble was becoming more permeable. My hand could just slip through to the other side and could feel the light of the world where religion didn't pervade every aspect of life, where demons didn't hover around every possibility.

I began to feel a world where people didn't have fits of crying and laughing on the living room floor during fellowship, a world where tears were not constantly rolling down their faces every time they had a Bible study session with a bunch of other strange bubble people, culminating into a massive mess of hysteria and emotion and tension. It was a place where people didn't scream out, "Praise Jesus. Shun duh duh hun duh maka laka dali shi shi maaaa....praise God, thank you Father. Shallalalalala malaki hunda mana chi ki laki. Blood of Jesus! Blood of Jesus!"

Soon enough I dared to stick my head through the soapy wall and saw all of the other bubbles floating around below.



I hung out on the edge of the bubble for awhile, stepping out completely but leaning up against it still, letting it support me and comfort me and feeling those family members gripping at my limbs with all their force and pulling to keep me inside.

"You stay away from those liberal universities," they hollered from within the bubble. "All they do is instill doubt in the minds of the faithful. Satan will get a grip on your mind there and make you doubt. You stay with us and you won't need to go to college because you'll find a god-fearing man to become your husband and you'll discover the joy of serving your spouse and giving him children."

But it was too late, because my mind already doubted, already wanted to jump and as I turned to take one last look inside the bubble I realized how very very small it was and how very dark.

I landed with a hard and painful thud on the ground just like the law of gravity said I would, from those science textbooks they tried to keep away from me. And I looked up and saw the bubble getting smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker among the millions of other tiny bubbles floating all around, all stemming from what I perceived to be the same effluent waste.

"Twisted World" by Jeff Kubina from Flickr.
"Lightness" by clydye from Flickr.
"Bubble symphony" by bricolage.108 from Flickr.
"Esferas doradas" by * Cati Koe* from Flickr.

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The story of Huta

I just love reading about large combustion plants all day and the current document I'm working on is just making my eyes bulge out of their sockets while I shart in my pants from excitement. The task of changing the word phosphorus to phosphorous twenty bazillion times a day makes me violently playful (hello, can't you freaky academics have your asses peer reviewed into proper adjective formation?). I'm afraid to bring this beautiful piece of literature home, for fear that it will keep me up at night and not let me put it down and get some much needed sleep. The suspense of how Annex VI on monitoring standards might end is just killing me right now. That is some good shit right there.

But there comes a time in the middle of the day when I'm supposed to be reading mind-numbing nonsense and I'm about 200 pages behind schedule and I just say, fuck it, I've got to put the red pen down, turn away from the arousing chapter on fugitive emissions (which actually sounds rather erotic), and look out my window and think of Dublin.

Yes, Dublin.

You see, not all of my internet uselessness amounts to nothing. My fantasy vacation planning actually landed me a flight to Dublin in October for 60 euro bucks. Not bad. Let's not get into why I'm planning a weekend away in October and it's barely July right now, but it might have to do with fugitive emissions and procrastination.

But Dublin, of course, makes me think of my sister, Huta. Welcome to my tangent-story about Huta.

Huta and I always hated each other. Well, not always. There was a time I remember, a short time, maybe a summer when I was 9 and she was 6 when I took her in and loved her and there was room in our little make-believe world for each other where our imaginations melded together in perfect harmonious child play-- our imaginary worlds of playing house and dress up and school. Before that time and after its short duration, we were separated, our sisterhood (or lack thereof) was at the mercy of divorced parents who could not bear to be separated from all of their children at once, so they decided to separate their children from each other because their empty hearts were more important than our togetherness.

We saw each other on odd weekends and spring breaks and such. We never learned how to deal with each other. We probably barely knew each other. When we coincided living together again we were both too old for imaginative play where anything goes and everything is a potential house-play prop and everything is shared and roles are flexible and can be reversed at whim. I was now an irritable pre-teen and she was a spiteful elementary over-achiever who glared at me through squinted hateful blue eyes that looked just like mine.

Huta copied me but hated me all at once. We were forced to share a room and in order to handle her bothersome and forced company, I cleared out my side of the closet and created a sort of mini room for myself in there – a place to escape from her annoying and ironically hate-filled emulations of me. The privacy of my closet room was good for a few hours where I relished in my own tiny little defined space. But when my sister discovered this valuable piece of real estate she had not been previously not privy to, she promptly emptied out her side of the closet and created her own little special room, where she glared at me from the gap in the closet and whistled and hummed and scratched around and fidgeted and annoyed the living fucking hell out of me and my property value plummeted like a mobile home in a hurricane.

The following years can only be described as Huta and me having bouts of ignoring each other intermingled with waged armed conflict where projectile missiles of coat hangers, flip-flops, or any large blunt objects found on the battleground were launched at each other with the full force of our capacities.

We were eventually granted our own rooms by the wise intervening powers that be, trenches of sorts where our ammunition both real and sentimental could be collected, our cannons could be loaded with insults, where shields could be strapped on, especially over our hearts.

Ceasefires were short-lived and peace was a delicate state always teetering on violent upsurge by either side, especially if a word was uttered in the wrong tone, if a blush-brush or a certain feather pillow went missing, if domestic duties were seen to be unfairly assigned, or if the company of the family cat was perceived to be monopolized. There were various territorial zones one normally respected, but even with these honored fortresses, doors were frequently slammed, bedrooms frequently looted, important artifacts often went mysteriously missing and were later found in foreign garrisons. When diplomacy was engaged, such as with a loud bang with a clenched fist on a bedroom door, it was commonly met with a not-so-statesmanlike, "GO AWAY."

When I turned 18, I moved out of the house and moved in with my older sister who had total and complete control over my military capacities and I therefore did not instigate wars because I knew my military would never stand up against hers. And my younger sister Huta disappeared from my life, for the most part in any practical sense, yet again.

Oh, we would see each other when I went home, gave each other a "hey" or an awkward hug if it had been a really really long time. If I stayed longer than a couple of hours, her icy eyes would form into their usual squinty glare and it was always clear that our peace-treaty could be reneged if either of us so much as breathed wrong. Ignoring each other was easiest.

But then at one point we coincided amazingly by choice, in Dublin, spring of 1999 and I hadn't seen family or home in months, and was homesick as ever. We had a beautiful time together, even though she was kind of an idiot and just when we got bikes to go for a bike ride she had to slam on her brakes and fly over the handle bars like that. But I forgave her clumsiness because I had missed her, surprisingly, and we went for beers together for the first time in our lives. We talked about our dreams and our future and our parents and love.

And then in a small hotel room in Dublin we decided that we needed to have one final battle. And we brought out our best soldiers and put them on the front line, we flexed our muscles and showed our greatest technological advances in sisterly-love-destruction. We raised those old medieval fortifications again and pointed our artillery through the holes and I think I got some really good hits in there and threw the best of the best of my mortal grenades. But it was the final blow instigated by the Huta, the one that has always stayed with me that took down the stronghold inside me:

"You've never given a shit about your family."

And in the midst of my homesickness and longing for precisely family, that arrow got me in the gut and sent me down to die in the mud.

And I never fought the Huta again.

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Balloon watching

At the young age of six, I was whisked away, along with my eight-year-old sister to start a new life in Albuquerque with my dad. Dad didn't want the divorce and he was gonna be damned if my mom was going to take away his daughters.

He was taking the kids.

He was gonna be in control so that he could see that they were not badly affected by the stigma of divorce.

He would figure out a way.

He was flying off with them; it would be just the three of them for now, somewhere better, if he could get lucky, if the wind would only blow the right way this time.

I'm not really sure why the hell he picked Albuquerque. Maybe Phoenix held too many reminders for my dad about his failed marriage. Maybe it had never brought him anything good and he wanted to try his hand somewhere else, somewhere far, but not too far from his other young daughter, just three years of age who my mother had managed to get custody of. Maybe he wanted to be far enough away from the frowns of his disapproving family and the muffled snickers of my parents' "friends". Maybe the I-told-ya-so looks were too unbearable.

My dad was around 29 years old at the time; tall, a full head of beautiful light brown curly hair, clear blue eyes, straight teeth that had escaped the eager, greedy hands of his family's orthodontist when he was a teen. My dad grew up in all-American, upper middle class family of nine children in Arizona during the 60's. He escaped Vietnam by just a couple of years, unlike his brother who my father, at age sixteen, saw buried. His father was a federal judge, his mother had a master's degree in Psychology but was a housewife and a devout Mormon. He came from a family with a history of power and success; his maternal grandmother had served in the Arizona State legislature in the 1940s (no small feat for a woman at the time), his paternal grandfather was a Professor of tax law. All of his siblings had gone on to law school, or had become accountants or had started to work their way up the military ranks.

Compared to them, my father had a head full of hot air.

My father had not a dime to his name, just some nice oak bedroom furniture and a clothes dryer, but nowhere to put it in our tiny apartment so it stood in the living room absent a washing machine (my mom had gotten the washer).

He had never gone to college like the rest of his family or travelled much out of the state. He had not done much of anything except disappoint his parents and my mother, who he had married at the ripe age of 19. He grew up in the Mormon tradition, but it was likely a life-style choice of his parents rather than being deeply ontological. They were at the same time cultured and well-educated, steeped in community and family, and very well-respected.

They were grounded, not like my father who was floating off into space, with all the others who would never make anything of themselves.



They probably didn't like that my dad smoked pot.

They probably didn't like that he had asked them for money to start a sales call center out of his apartment; to start-up a vending and snacks company (based on the "honor system"); to get his real estate license; to pay the IRS all the money he owed them; to buy himself a Ford escort to replace the giant brown Chrysler he had also been gifted from his grandmother.

They probably didn't like that he had opened his uncluttered mind to becoming an evangelical to soothe a failed marriage, a career that had gone nowhere and to find meaning in life. It must have been so easy to turn to that and it must have itched at and irritated their Mormon roots so.

Scoffed at by his family and ex-wife, he turned to his two young daughters to fulfil him. He learned to braid their hair for school. He did their laundry, properly sorted and all. He made sure there was a nutritious breakfast each day, specializing in chocolate chip pancakes on the weekends. He learned to make quiche and chicken enchiladas. He made sure they took their Flintstones vitamins. He had them see a counselor with experience on dealing with children of divorced parents. He bought an ATARI, somehow, who knows how he got the money, but they played Pac-Man for hours together.

He sometimes accidentally burdened them with things he probably shouldn't have shared with them, such as how lonely he was or how worried he was about whether the food would last all week until his next paycheck. He didn't have anyone else to talk to. It couldn't have been easy to find a female ear or heart with all the baggage and debt he carried.

And then I'm sure he would plant his feet firmly again and vow to never burden them like that again, to keep his head out of the clouds, to make them think everything was okay. Everything would be okay.



He had tears in his eyes a lot.

Defeated.

Regretful.

Utterly disappointed with life.

And those two girls picked up on every bit of his discontent and yearning.

Each day at the breakfast table with bowls full of oatmeal and Flintstones vitamins ready to chew and orange juice poured, four big eyes would stare up at him and give him some kind of motivation to put one foot in front of the other. Sometimes those little people asked him if he was sad. And he would blink his tears away and smile and say, "No."

One time he took them to see the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon festival.

Maybe he stared up at that colorful New Mexican sky while the girls took turns sitting on his shoulders and maybe he wished he could glide away with them in one of those air-filled, stripe-spangled jewels, effortlessly through the crisp sky to somewhere else, somewhere easier.

I know one little girl wished it.




Three is a Crowd by JadeXJustice from Flickr
Untitled by TailspinT from Flickr
Mass Ascension by a4gpa from Flickr
Checkered Sky by JadeXJustice from Flickr
Above the Crowd by a4gpa from Flickr

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I want to tell you about my family but unfortunately this is where the story begins

I don't have many childhood memories from before the divorce of my parents. My very first real, complex memories consisting of more than just momentary flashes of color, feeling, fleeting sensation or glimpses of fading images are those of the time right when my parents were splitting up.

Those first few memories that I retain reflect a child trying to piece together the scenario of separation with lapses of naive hopeless hope for a reconciliation. I'm thankful for the fact that my mind didn't let me keep everything that happened, only a few memories as parts of the complete narrative of my childhood.

I am six years old. I am in front of the last house that my parents lived in together. The house at the edge of the cul-de-sac, the house in front of the scary man's house with the ribs that jutted out, who always smoked cigarettes and who didn't like us playing in his yard. This was the house where my mother told my father she would never move to another house with him again. She was sick of his social ineptitude, his failed business ideas, his uprooting his family every time the wind changed, trying to make a buck off the equity. These are the things I know about, the reasons I was given later in life, the filtered data.

In my memory it's raining and I'm playing in the hot Arizona rain. I'm barefoot on the sidewalk and the sun has gone down and I look down and see giant raindrops. They are oddly huge, and they ingrain themselves into my mind and the fragrant rain melds with the smell of oil on hot asphalt.

Just over at the porch of my house my parents sit watching the rain, and I'm happy that they are sitting together on those fold-up chairs we take to the lake sometimes on Sundays. Likely they were discussing divorce minutiae such as who would call the phone company to get the line turned off and when would be a good time to go to the bank to close their joint account, when would be a good time to tell the kids.

In another memory, I come out of my bedroom in the middle of the night to find my parents calmly packing their things into separate boxes. They are talking like nothing is wrong, having accepted the way things are now and just having the task of transmitting that acceptance to their children.

My mom holds up some sort of Native American dreamcatcher and asks my dad if she can have it. He says "yeah", shrugging.

No tears right now, just the packing of separate boxes for two separate houses to distribute divided, mismatched things within; things that used to fill just one house. Most of the things belonged to my father, whose well-to-do grandmother had died allowing him to inherit some of her nice things, like a set of China and a classical oak bedroom set. Eventually he decided he didn't care about China and let my mother keep it, but he needed the bedroom furniture for his new apartment in Albuquerque. No matter that the bedroom set would never fit in his tiny bedroom. It wouldn't have fit in my mother's new tiny apartment either.

In another memory, the family is in the car on our way to a restaurant. I see my parents in the front seat. I can't see them clearly, just the shapes of their heads over the seats, but there is palpable sorrow between them and maybe they are even holding hands. My mom doesn't think we kids are paying attention and says quietly to my father that this is probably our last meal together as a family.

In the restaurant we sit at a round table. My parents pay attention to stupid things like if we are sitting in our chairs properly and if we are eating our vegetables. But tonight, for some reason, we're allowed to have another Shirley Temple and order dessert instead of waiting until we get home for Otter Pops.

In the parking lot after the kids are buckled in the back I look out the window and see my parents embracing; just the behavior that fill a six-year-old heart with that desperate, naive, and hopeless hope.

These are not memories of explosive arguments, abusive shouting, spiteful jabs of hate thrown at each other with ugly words hissed through closed teeth with clenched fists. Those things undoubtedly happened, but I don't recall them. These are just memories of two people that cared about each other but had failed at love, time and time again, and eventually gave in.

There is nothing so sad as watching your parents fail at love.

Well, except maybe watching yourself fail at it.

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Jim the perve*

When I was sixteen years old I got a job as a waitress in a retirement community (not to be confused with a nursing home, I always insisted).

This place was posh alright; rich retirees looking for a social life, aerobics classes, bingo night, golf outings, etc. It was called "The Springs" and was sold as the shiz in terms of old fogie living. The pictures on all the pamphlets showed young-at-heart-but-wrinkly models with perfect dentures laughing their way through their golden years. Included in the ridiculously priced rent was a "dining experience" where you had to sit in assigned seating with other old people you probably couldn't stand and where you could enjoy the luxury of a menu that rotated Salisbury steak, liver and onions, and chicken fried chicken again and again and again until you were begging to be euthanized by your family already.

My job was to serve these people liver and onions and Chablis wine and make sure their dining experience was everything the pamphlets had promised them it would be. Normally the old folk ate in silence. When they did speak, they shouted at each other because nobody could hear a fucking thing.

There were two dinner sessions, one at 4:30 and one at 6:00 and each retiree was assigned to one depending on their preferences, but Jim came and sat down at 4:30, and sat straight through until the 6:00 hour when he would eat.

Nobody wanted to sit with Jim.

Jim was in his late eighties, had sunken in blue eyes, no hair, dentures that on a good day he remembered to wear down to the dining room. He walked very very slowly with a cane but could be quick as lightening when his meatloaf didn't sit right in his stomach.

Every single time I passed by Jim's table he made a comment along the lines of:

"Shake that ass."
"Gimme someathat."
"Be a doll and sit on my lap."

It never ceased. But occasionally the comments were more aggressive, along the lines of:

"Get your ass over here, I'd fuck the shit out of you"

to which I would reply,

"Oh whatever Jim, as if you could even get it up anymore, and even if you could, I wouldn't go near your wrinkly ass."

(Keep in mind these were the days when Viagra was probably just the wet dream of some old pharmaceutical chemist at Pfizer).

On and on we would tease each other throughout my shift, three days per week.

Mind you, I am sixteen years old, but never did it once cross my mind that this was beyond inappropriate or that it might even teeter on sexual harassment. Jim was too old to give a shit about the fact that he might have been breaking some kind of rule, if indeed he ever had. The other waitresses stayed away from Jim, but I always sort of egged him on.

Once a month I would pick Jim up in my little Toyota Corolla and I would drive him literally next door to the Native New Yorker for buffalo wings and I let him introduce me as his girlfriend, but the waitress who knew him by name always gave me a knowing wink. I would order alcoholic drinks and they wouldn't card me.

Sometimes I would let Jim put his hand on my knee for a few seconds before accusing him of being a perve and shoving it away. Then he would accuse me of not knowing how to have fun with my own body.

When Jim wasn't being a sick fuck he was kind and concerned about my schooling and my future and he gave me advice and told me stories about his children who he hadn't seen or spoken to in years.

He would bring me pictures -- proof -- from when he young and beautiful and in the Navy. He showed me these pictures as evidence that at one point in his life it was he who was the object of the gazes of the sexually deprived. He brought pictures of himself holding babies, proof that at one point he was loved by his children.

He must have looked at me in my teenage glory and thought about the cruelty of life being without second chances. Maybe he thought about all of the social conventions he had followed that got him nothing but a wrinkly face and a useless body and a Salisbury steak on Tuesday nights. Maybe he thought about the many women he had fucked when he was in the Navy or maybe he thought about all the women he would like to have fucked and didn't. Maybe he remembered his daughter and how he had made a butchery out of fatherhood.

When I graduated from high school I tried not to forget about Jim, despite having the life of a typical 18 year old that had since moved on to better things than waiting tables at an old folks home. I'd stop by every now and then but soon he had changed. He had stopped teasing me and some days he thought I was someone else, maybe his daughter.

Then one day I came to visit and Jim didn't live there anymore.

Or anywhere.

Poor Jim.

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By the way, has everyone had problems subscribing to my feed? From what I can see everything is okay in my feedburner and it says 8 people are subscribed, but commentluv can't find my feed and a few other say they are having problems. Can anyone help my ignorant ass?

*Key's post reminded me of this.

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Luisito, bloggies; Bloggies, Luisito

Oh, I'm sorry. How rude of me.

You haven't been properly introduced, have you?

Bloggies, this is Luisito.

Luisito, meet the bloggies.

Luisito and I met at a bar called La Carboneria where I used to hang out as a study abroad student in the Spring of 1998. People laugh when I tell them that here, because it's just so typical. La Carboneria can be a magnet for tourists, but locals like it too. Of course we met there. Of course we did, where else?

The first time I met him we were standing in front of this piano:

(I have no idea who the dude in the picture is)

It was a cozy little place, that bar.

There was never a cover charge and there was always live flamenco; real, hard, it's-an-acquired-taste flamenco, not the watered-down touristy version. You could smoke hash and nobody cared, and that we did. There was cheap wine to be drunk and people watching to be done, and oh, much Spanish to be learned.

I met Luisito through his younger brother, who, truth be told, I had a mad crush on but who kept telling me, "my brother plays guitar, you know. He's a wonderful guitar player...my brother this and my brother that..." And then one day he dragged this famous brother to the bar to meet me. Luisito walked in with his messy hair and his wrinkly Pearl Jam t-shirt.

That night he jokingly asked me to marry him. I jokingly said yes. I internally tried to reconcile the fact that I liked Pearl Jam with the fact that I thought I was too cool to like Pearl Jam.

Fast forward five years to 2003 and we were not-so-jokingly married, and the fact that I used to have a crush on my brother-in-law had become just bizarre.

Luisito is messy; he has messy hair. A lot of times he has a stained shirt, and his pants are all scuffed up on the bottom and fuck, why is he wearing those shoes? Where did he find them? I thought I threw them out. He has a slight unibrow that, on grounds of not giving a shit, he refuses to groom. He has relatively small hands that are perfect for a small-breasted woman. He has strong arms and not a lot of hair - but the hair on his chest forms a perfect Iberian Peninsula. He's not tall and thin like his brothers nor does he wear perfectly laundered clothes made in Italy like they do, but he is the most handsome of anyone in his family. He inherited the best of his mother and father's features, melded into a beautiful face; his mothers large brown Moorish eyes and perfect nose, his fathers large lips, while his brothers did not inherit such harmonious combinations, rather getting their father's enormous nose and small eyes and their mother's crooked teeth.

But, see, all I've done is describe a container.

Today we drove home from his hometown where we were visiting over the weekend and during the ride home Luisito spoke to me about containers and contents of containers and the sharing of the contents of containers.

He said that there are artists that are containers; for example musical groups that have the look, the demo where every track is perfectly executed. The marketability is there, the technical know-how has been made available, the money has been spent to churn out something likeable.

But you're not allowed to open the container.

You're not allowed to take away the sound technicians, the photographers, the just-so-care-free looking attire to see what is left. You are not allowed to remove what is money-driven, fame-driven or just plain driven by desperation for acceptance. The containers are tip-fucking-top, but there is no going deep and pulling out what's inside them.

The reason why you are not allowed to open the container is not usually because there is nothing in there, or because what is in there is rotting cabbage that has been left in the fridge for two weeks that could have been good but nothing was done with it.

Usually you are not allowed to open the container because of a lack of generosity. Maybe the containers don't know how to share their contents.

There are some artists, musicians, writers, whatever, that never hold back on any piece. They never say, "I don't want to run out of material, so I'm going to save this idea for my next piece, my next painting, my next post, my next album." There are those that put everything they fucking have within their soul because they know that creativity is not finite, but rather it expands when it's used with the whole heart. I don't know if this is the same as genius or if it takes this generosity for a genius to make themselves known.

So, my friends, meet Luisito. He's a slightly roughed up tupperware container, with a fucking five star gourmet dinner inside. And I'll lick the tupperware clean, because he's willing to give away all the contents anytime anyone opens his container. He doesn't save a morsel for himself, within himself. In every single thing he does, in every song he writes, in every project he works on, in every meal he makes, in every other human or animal he relates to, he pulls his whole heart out and just hands it to anyone and doesn't want any of it for himself.

He's never once held back.

Someday I want to say that I got to the point where I did the same.

I'm still learning, honey.

Eventoblog054 by JuanJaen from Flickr.
Eventoblog 081 by Juan Jaen from Flickr.
Luisito by Blues 2008.
Luisito and Blues circa 1998.

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