''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

Don't stop kicking, okay?

I've been meaning to write about you.

Really I have.

Because when you're older you'll probably think I didn't care at all about what was happening to you, that you had now grown to the whopping size of a red bell pepper, that you were now doing somersaults inside me. I had written so passionately about other things, other people I loved, people I barely knew even, but not you. I was even able to write about the lack of you. But not you.

But see, I write when I'm conflicted, troubled, mixed and jumbled up inside and in need of pulling everything into focus somehow, to probe and dissect innards by way of word hunting. With you, I hadn't felt any of these things. Everything had felt just the way it ought to. There had been scaly monsters inside me locking horns like there usually are for other things. I hadn't felt fear or uncertainty or guilt or absolute weakness.

But this week that changed.

This week I remembered how my cousin lost his baby boy five years ago and my stomach sank like a stone inside, you must have felt it too. Tiny Jordan wasn't as tiny as you, but as humans go, he was pretty small at only 18 months. This perfectly healthy boy suddenly lost control over his left eyelid, causing it to droop down and not blink properly. Then it was discovered that he was developing cataracts. To add more worry to his devastated parents, whose baby was going blind, he refused to eat and anything that made its way inside was promptly spat up. The doctors decided to perform an endoscopy. It was an outpatient procedure, but one that required general anesthesia. Little Jordan went to sleep so the doctors could find out what was wrong and help him get better, but he never woke up again. He was killed by diagnostic medicine.

Those two people managed to pick up the shattered pieces of their family life. I don't know how they did it. Your kicks and somersaults and racing heartbeat confirm to me that I Would. Not. Make. It. I can only assume this process took them years to recover from, if indeed they ever really did. I know that Jordan's older brother Stevie must have suffered too. Stevie was developmentally disabled but he understood things. Stevie is sweet and smart and even then at only 5 years old knew that his parents were hurting. At some point he knew not to ask about Baby Jordan anymore.

Today 10-year-old Stevie is hanging on to his little frail life by a string. His parents, terrified I'm sure by all things medical, took him in to the hospital when he began to lose his balance and his head began to bop from side to side. The doctors wanted to sedate him and perform an MRI. During the MRI, they discovered he had a spot on his brain, which would require further testing, a spinal tap, another MRI, all of which have had unexpected complications and problems breathing, which then required an induced coma and a ventilator. Little Stevie went to sleep so the doctors could find out what was wrong and help him get better. They are now trying to release him from the coma, by injecting him with medications that are causing him to go into seizures. The doctors do not believe he is not going to make it. They want a complete blood transfusion now and a heart biopsy.

His parents are, were, will twice-forever be, eternally, redundantly broken. They were finally limping around trying to hold each other up, sometimes being too much weight for the other to bear with his or her own limp to manage. They were finally making a life again. I don't think they really ever imagined such a shattering blow would fly out of the god-clouds so unfairly soon, while they were still so fucking injured. I don't think they ever imagined that another one of their boys might lose his life in another rare medical diagnostic tragedy.

In the meantime, you kick. Through my tears over breakfast, you kick. Through the floods of memories that hurricane over me of the childhood I shared with my cousin, the one where he got the shit life of shoes that were too small and a drunk stepfather passed out on the couch and 7-11 hamburgers for dinner, and I got the good life, you kick, kick, kick.

And your kicks remind me that you are living and healthy and safe inside me. And you also remind me of how weak and fragile you are: now, when you are born, when you are 18 months, when you are 10 years old, and probably for the rest of the time we share the world together. Your weakness and fragility translates into my own weakness and fragility. And your little kicks remind me that if all the humans on earth stood in a line and shit-lives and medical fuck ups on tiny loved ones were rationed out based on who deserved them, there's a small chance that I might end up with one, and my cousin definitely, definitely wouldn't.

I love you my little red bell pepper. Please don't stop kicking.

StumbleIt

Titles are crap. Do you require a title if we're just sitting there? No.

So can we just act like we're hanging out having a coffee? And can I just say straight away that I'm not fucking using my thesaurus today because when people have coffee together they don't whip out their thesaurus to try to express themselves just so. And don't expect even so much as a spellcheck out of me today. If we're having coffee together, I assume you are interested in me and even if you can't identify with my predicament, you don't require that I spin you round a wordy flying saucer adventure, do you? I just have to talk and I don't even care at this point how it comes out.

Because through all of this shit I'm going through, I forgot that I need my friends, and more than any of my real friends, I need my internet friends: you. And them.

So, remember that one thing where I do that really animal thing but then for some reason no little homo sapiens appear? Well my doctor just told me that Luisito and I are the equivalent of a dog humping a stuffed animal on the living room floor, the uncooperative stuffed animal with the missing ear being me. Well, that’s not exactly the case. I’m actually more like a stuffed animal with a tiny pathetic pulse that makes the dog so crazy he chases his own tail in between humpings: I have ‘diminished fertility’. I gather that means I get to listen to approximately 108 more enlightened individuals tell me that I just need to ‘relax’. Believe me f-tards, I couldn’t be more relaxed if I were stuffed with latex.

Stupid font bullshit I don't care.

The scare tactics, which I'm fully aware were scare tactics, of the fertility clinic have worked on me and we've signed our infertile asses up for full in vitro and yes I feel conflicted about the whole damn thing to the point where I'm unable to even write about the conflicting feelings, but there they are and this is where I stop the post because this is just so fucking inadequate as far as posts go.

Can we do this another day?

--------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe I explain myself better here.

StumbleIt

I’m fine, really, I just needed to go for a jog and to say the fuck-word ten hundred times

I step into the elevator and stare in the mirror at what can only be described as a thirty-something, American dork giving me the stink eye. She’s wearing these dumb blue running shorts she’s had for like 15 years which act as some ridiculous cake topper for the hairy and mole-ridden legs that haven’t seen the sun in 9 months and that are probably about to get rocked into a melanoma frenzy by the hot Seville sun.

There are tits somewhere under this sports bra that is so tight that I become forcefully acquainted with the previously unknown phenomenon called ‘back fat’, which I just quickly add to the list of body parts I would like exchanged for something else. The hidden, smashed up tits are stupid, inadequate blobs of uselessness though because they’ve never once served either one of their real purposes. I’d be better off with mosquito bites, or cancerous moles or watermelon jelly beans for tits.

My workout clothes are out of style and too small for me because I refuse to spend more money on shit that's gonna rot in my closet from lack of use. And by 'refuse to spend money on' I mean 'can't buy because pretty soon I’m gonna be unemployed'. But whatever, I'm not talking about money and my stupidly precarious job situation, okay, I'm talking about the fact that my boobs are idle, ineffectual flesh quagmires and that I never fucking exercise because I have problems with self-discipline.

Today's different though. Today I'm going running. Yeah, like, with my ipod and all my stupid gear and shit. And I look like a total dork but I don't care. Because my body parts are stupid anyway and they go with my dumb outfit.

Today I want to smash pavement with my heels, until my head turns a scary shade of red with a rush of the opiate of endorphins, no matter how much the impact pulverizes my whiny little bitch of a sacrum that, while I'm at it, should be added to the list of body parts that need to be exchanged.

I raise my lip slightly exposing my teeth in disapproval at my reflection. Stupid elevator mirrors. I should have taken the stairs. I decide that I don’t care if my sacrum shatters into a million pieces. It’s not like I’m pregnant and I need to be careful. It’s not like I’m “healthy” anyway. Nature already decided that my kind are to die out, so what’s the diff? Ha! The pavement is going to feel what I want to do to people’s faces. People like my doctor with his stupid 25 thousand million dollar scheme he has cooked up to make me a sci-fi baby in a petri dish because I apparently require weird lab equipment and a million dollars to have a family. He'll only do this after stabbing me for scary blood tests and looking in at all my rotted organs and after cutting out a chunk of my husband’s balls and after making him jack off on demand. Bam! How does that feel, stupid pavement face? What up with your science now, bitch? The pavement also gets to be all the stupid people that have pestered us to have kids because my god, it’s so goddamn simple, you just lay down and deposit your cum and voila!- you have a vomiting woman and a positive pregnancy test and truckloads of like hope and excitement and shit and, you know, a future that doesn't resemble the fucked up one that's in my mind right now.

I blast the music on my ipod and hope people hear it and know I’m not interested in humanly high fives, chit chat, eye contact, sharing the universe with them, offering them a drop of water if they were dying of thirst, or being a member of their stupid society with their stupid ideas and their seeds they spread like a germ diaspora while my shit never gets fertilized because it sucks. Them, with their perfectly functioning ovaries and sperm, with their abilities to bust out their junk at any given moment and create the seedlings of a human, statistically speaking, with nearly anyone that just happens to walk by. Them, with, you know things like property in their name and, oh I don’t know, a steady income so that they could adopt a little baby if they wanted to, a little baby that needed a mommy and daddy and that's out there and that needs me. I know I only live in a rental apartment and I might not have a job soon, but I'm gonna make it and so fuck you for not letting me have a family until I'm fucking old and gray and too decrepit to have one.

I don’t belong in that society. I guess I’ll just hang back here with the a-holes that think breast milk in a sealed container in a fridge at work is offensive and that say they don’t want kids simply because they don’t like what it would do to their beautiful bodies as if gravity ain’t gonna fuck that shit up anyway. We'll just hang out here with our dogs and talk about furminators and about how great life is without kids and how people with kids fucking suck.

By the time I get back home, my head is clear and I don’t hate everyone anymore, and science and society are cool as shit again, and I'm gonna survive, I guess. But my face is red for the next three hours and my back really fucking hurts.

Stupid sacrum.

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

Do you know where I can get some boxes?

When we found the new apartment, that little corner came into focus again.

Just a tiny jagged corner to get around. The one where you have to tiptoe around broken glass and rusty lockjaw-promising nails, while people are sling-shooting massive turds at you from every direction.

This little corner involved seeing the apartment and feeling my weak hope swell up from a buried place in my stomach and come up into my face and take over my mouth and my eyes, turning me into an infidel to my own good reason and experience. It involved sleepless nights of pretending it was from all the coffee I had drunk and not from the worrying that we wouldn't get it, that it wasn't all going to turn around for us, that the person that had it on hold would end up taking it.

Once it became ours for the taking, it involved hours of worrying that we would get our drawers yanked down -- once again -- by greedy mother fuckers, like the time we made a full price offer we couldn't afford on that flat in the old Jewish quarters and they said they now wanted more. (Side note of vengeance: three years later that flat sits unsold. And I try very very hard to push away fantasies of that fucker's skin rotting off and being unable to afford a dermatologist cause he can't sell his stupid flat). Or when we found the perfect penthouse on the Alameda to rent and they called us and said the flat was ours for just 300 more bucks a month. (And I try very hard to dismiss the images in my mind of the person's face getting the shit rocked out of it by my imaginary fist).

On tippy-toes we cut through the mine field armed with not caring too much if we lost another limb. Yup, just me and Stumpy. We can get by feeding each other with the toes we still have left between the two of us, we don't need anything more than this. Besides, I'm actually starting to think that the cockroaches the size of dump trucks that hang out everyday in our bathroom are kinda cute.

And so, pretending we were indifferent, shoving the feeling that bad luck was somehow following us into the back of our mind, pretending we weren't expecting lightning to strike our goddamn pen, we signed the lease.

I've been unable to sweep my thoughts up into the dustpan and find, amongst all the dirt and cat hair, the tiny missing screw holding my fucking life together.

But I think I can get to sweeping now. As soon as I get all this shit packed.

StumbleIt

Hoping for Giggles

My husband Luisito and I are planning to hike the Grand Canyon while in Arizona for holidays this year.

You know, just "for shits and giggles", as the expression goes.

I am hoping, however, that it will be minimal shits and abundant giggles, considering the primitive plumbing situation (actually, the shits should be minimal as my asshole is very finicky about functioning in an unfamiliar working environment and does not hesitate to go on strike when his working hours are altered or when his rights to vacation days are not respected, taking my entire digestive track to the picket line with him. This is normal, as my asshole is, after all, pretty much European now).

Regardless of how shits will be dealt with in the canyon, I have my doubts about the availability of giggles unless laughing in a fit of hysteria at my own misery counts.

My mother will be joining us, who I haven't said much about before, mainly because her personage and my feelings toward her are so skull-fuckingly complex and are characterized by contradictory bouts of shits and giggles, that I don't even know how to begin to weave her into a coherent narrative that would make her a believable character, or my reaction to her a logical one.

Despite my undying love for my mother and the giggles she induces on occasion, I am not blind to the fact that as my mother has aged, she has increasingly leaned toward the part of her personality which requires her to emit this heavily polluted nonsense when she speaks whereupon confusing shit-fumes of insanity invade my oxygen supply and annihilate my giggles torturingly one by one. What I mean is that she is loud about her 'politics' (really too polite a word), which happen to be the opposite of my politics, which would be fine if she didn't shout them from a hill top or from the bottom of a canyon or from wherever the hell she is in a continual stream of verbal diarrhea taking any and all innocent giggles as collateral damage.

One way to prevent the destructive effect of said shit/airborne toxic poisoning via motherly political speeches and to increase the ratio of giggles to shit storms is to ingest liquid forms of milder poisons in heavy doses. But considering that we're going to be hiking in the scorching Arizona desert, I doubt that it would be wise to occupy any water room with alcohol. Besides, I think my asshole might inform the labor union about what's going on if I even attempt to favor giggle recruitment and subsequent dehydration over shit-eating sobriety in a desert work environment. A high-profile labor claim of that sort may even cause the entire company to liquidate its assets, which...well, ewww.

Friendly debate with my mother without alcohol has never worked before. Attempts at open, respectful dialogue often end in seizures of "Why are you mad at me!?" hollered from a tear-streaked face and insane amounts of guilt taking hold of me for partaking in giant political feuds during my short and infrequent visits.

For this reason, I first considered wearing some type of repellent head and body gear for my canyon descent. I felt that such equipment would have a two-pronged protective effect: it would shield me from the poisonous giggle-corroding aerodynamic political fecal material that might make its way toward my ear canal while simultaneously cushioning my head from hitting the canyon walls or my body from ricocheting off of needled cacti should I decide that a head-first dive into the canyon is preferable to an 8 hour stroll at a conversational pace with my mother.

However I fear that the effectiveness of my repellent jumpsuit may be compromised because my dear husband would likely latch onto me as I jump. Besides, launching myself and my spouse head first into the Grand Canyon, quite frankly, does not provide the prospect of many giggles and it may actually instigate pant-shitting which has actually been proven to be incompatible with giggles. Such forced and unexpected labor for my asshole would in turn create problems later when I ask him to cooperate with downsizing after I realize that my enterprise has gotten too large to attempt to hike a canyon of any size ever again.

You know what? I'm just going to chuck everything from my backpack and carry a tank of laughing gas, which is really the only thing that I will need to survive in the desert on this adventure. Plus my asshole can take a couple days off which will boost his morale for when we get back to normal operating conditions at the factory.

Bring on the giggles. Stay away shits.

StumbleIt

Historical agnostic icons can suck it

The funny thing about Jesus and his super potent sin-cleansing blood is that he can forgive anything, except not believing in him. His blood can wash away any sin except ditching him at the bar and leaving him alone with those douchebags the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, while you flirt with Charles Darwin right in his face and then go off to play darts and order two rounds of Mind Erasers without even asking anyone else if they want one.

But Darwin is totally hawt and stuff. And he totally gets you. Like, his shit just makes sense. You can just tell he's well read and has thought his shit through before he goes babbling on about some theory. Jesus, on the other hand, just kinda throws stuff out there and everyone gets all quiet and awkward and it used to sound all poetic and stuff, like when you first started going out, but now it's sometimes like, "Srsly, dude, what the hell are you talking about?"

So you decide to ditch the chastity belt and ask ole' Chuck to come back to your place to kill a bottle of Captain Morgan and listen to that really sweet Phish album, 'cause OMG-- he's totally into Phish too. I mean fish.

You don't really remember how it all went down but you can pretty much assume the sex was totally NOT awesome.

And now you're all kindsa hung over and throwing up that slice of pizza with a side of ranch that you don't even remember eating, like all over that blanket you got from Urban Outfitters and your hair looks like a rat's nest and your breath smells like sour rum mixed with diet coke and extra cheese and nicotine. You can tell Darwin is starting to feel all uncomfortable, his eyes darting around and he's fishing for his keys and you can feel him wondering what his responsibility is here. And he starts putting his pants on kinda sneakily and and he's all, "Well, I'm gonna take off, I gotta go help my buddy move. So…I guess I'll see ya around. I'll give you a call n stuff."

And you think: Fine. Just leave me here in this pile of vomit. Asshole.

I swear. It's just like that time when you totally got it on with Karl Marx at that bar in Nogales, after he came up to you and totally rocked your world with that pick up line about the 'opiate of the masses'. But when the going got tough and, due to unreasonable amounts of tequila, you required a short nap in a Mexican toilet stall at 2:00 in the morning, Marx was nowhere to be found to help scrape your ass off a disgusting tile floor.

Historical agnostic icons can suck it, 'cause they don't do jack for the soul or forgive sins or any of that crap. What a bunch of dicks.

So you're left all alone with your own vomit-stained soul with nothing but piss-warm beer and a shot of tears for breakfast and you can't even find the keys to your truck which you don't even remember where you parked anyway. And who the fuck knows where your wallet is, not that there's any money left in it.

And now you're all: Duuuude. Jesus totally would've spotted me like 20 bucks and would've gone to get me a sesame seed bagel and would've acted like I didn't call bullshit on every story he told last night, embarrassing him like that in front of Satan and Yahweh and all those guys. Jesus would've loaded a bowl for me and been all, "Wake and bake! This will totally cure your hangover, babe!" with a big forgiving grin right before going to get me some breakfast and then making me a hemp necklace.

Face it. You completely dogged Jesus, dude. And so now it's time to play god to yourself and forgive yourself for all the stupid philosophical bullshit you said before you fell off your bar stool last night after those Mind Erasers. And you're trying to wash out the puke stains on your soul with a glass full of blood, which apparently worked for Jesus, but you don't know what his secret is because that shit just creates further staining. So, you try to nail yourself to a cross to let bygones be motherfuckin' bygones but it turns out it's actually a two-man job and you've exhausted the phone number list that is thumb-tacked to the communal bulletin board in the kitchen and nobody is even willing to bring you an Egg McMuffin right now, let alone come over and help you crucify yourself.

So it's just you and your sins. Buck up, shithead. You'd better put on your big girl panties cause you can't find your chastity belt fucking anywhere, yo-- maybe you left it in the car. You best roll up your sleeves and dry your tears of self pity and learn to forgive yourself for ditching Christ and your religious family and all the other sins that have come post-bubble that no omnipotent beings are gonna be around to cleanse and wash away.

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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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That Thumb Looks Familiar

I wake up startled, as usual. The surprise reality of 8:00 a.m. scares the shit out of me every time. When will I learn to expect it and not get startled? Haven't I noticed a pattern here yet? Sun goes down, eyes shut, sun comes up, eyes open. Nothing new here, no need to have an anxiety attack every time it happens.

But this is my welcome into each day; the dream world-- my world -- ceases abruptly and somebody else's life begins for the day, a responsible person's life.

This time my surprise wake up is different though, not the usual alarm-from-hell wake up. This time, someone's gigantic swollen hand with brachydactyly type D thumbs I'd recognize anywhere is about to strangle me into my typical day of obligation, characterizing how I'll feel until I fall asleep again that night. I try to push the lifeless foreign arm thing away but what the fuck is happening with my real arms? Why the fuck are they on vacation when you need them? One of them appears to be replaced by this slug of a giant, swollen, clubbed-thumb hand/arm bullshit that isn't reacting at all to my commands.

Where is the obedient arm I remember that could help my docile hand check my nose for crusty boogars right now, that could rub the sleep out of my eyes, that could push myself out of bed, functional with all its submissive digits awaiting instructions from the brain?

For some time now I've had the feeling that I am no longer actively living my life as I once did, rather it is being lived and I'm allowed to watch as if I were watching my own open-heart surgery. I'm a recursive puppet, apparently with an abnormally large maverick arm with a clubbed-thumb hand, controlling its own show, but a puppet nonetheless; no soul, no spark, no ganas, infinitely feeding myself back into my own circularity, leaving myself bewildered by my own uncontrollable control over my own life.

My own abnormally thumbed sadistic hand is holding me down, holding me in place, smacking me in the face to wake up, hurry up, go here, read this document, go there, stop for milk, call the guy to get the dishwasher fixed. The rest of me – the me that hangs from strings controlled by the swollen infidel appendage-- just wants to be left the hell alone with the full use of my capacities, with digits and limbs that mind their master again.

Someone's hand that looks like mine slaps me into the reminder that the laundry situation is no longer bearable. If I controlled my own arm, I might go out and just buy new underwear to avoid responsibility for that giant mountain of dirty clothes that has long since overpopulated the hamper, sprawling out onto the floor, creating a suburb of clothes alongside it now, competing with the hamper itself in size. If I controlled my own arm, it would rest behind my head as I'd watch the pile of clothes grow and mutate, pants giving birth to dirty underwear caught inside their legs. My well-behaved arm would help my hand light a cigarette for me – a much better alternative as an activity for arms compared to sorting laundry.

Then I'm slapped in the face with the tumescent tissue again, as a reminder that dinner must be made -- an event, something acceptable, something balanced, something fit for a proper family with real plates and shit. Popping a frozen bagel into the toaster to calm a single rumbling tummy simply. won't. do. This act would be too utilitarian, giving nutrients to the bloodstream, nothing more, sans the symbolic ritual of it all. If I controlled that traitor of an arm, it might prepare just that and then check off the hunger box on my list of shit I can be bothered to deal with. I'd eat my acceptable nutrient-product while staring at a blank wall without blinking. For dessert, the dutifully complying arm/hand would fetch me a spoonful of peanut butter which I would enjoy perhaps sitting on the kitchen counter, with that same blank stare, my other hand following orders to support my chin and to not dare attempt to mince garlic, wash dishes, or throw away the spoiled chicken in the fridge.

Maybe one of these days, I'll wake up and my arms will become incumbent upon me again, cooperating once again and surrendering to my will and will stop trying to run my life with all their busy activity. The first thing I'll do with my obedient arms is grab the scissors and cut the puppet strings.

Vacation countdown: 26 days.

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London Bridge is Burning Down

Don't I wish a London post could just be about London; the River Thames, the Tower Bridge, the view of Big Ben and all that lovely stuff.

Right now, me talking about London would be the equivalent of when my grandparents put on kimonos and gave a three hour lecture/slide projection about their trip to Asia when I was 10.

"...And this is me on the bridge. It was neat-o. Here we are crossing another cool bridge. London has really cool bridges."

You see, I'm just dripping with eloquence about London. Maybe the words will come later, the desire to describe it. Actually, you know what? There is someone who can describe and photograph it much better than I can.

I've got nothing on London because the trip wasn't really about the city itself, it was about reuniting with old friends and contemplating scorching the fuck out of bridges.

Sometimes reuniting with friends brings about the discovery that you don't have as much in common as you had remembered; you are older now and less tolerant of truckloads of bullshit and less willing to spend precious moments in life that are way-too-damn-quickly passing you by alongside people with whom you find no shred of commonality with any longer.

Or maybe the bad news is that you do find commonality but you just really, really don’t want to...you've been trying to flee from those parts of your personality. Your currently fighting yourself to not be that.

Maybe the bridge-burning fantasies are just something that happens in your thirties when you stop caring how you are perceived and start realizing that if you want to live your life the way you truly believe you should, it sometimes means throwing a match to the bridges you can no longer be bothered to cross, mainly because, well, you've been up and down this riverside a shitload of times now and you know damn well there are a million other more beautiful bridges just begging you to cross them.

There are bridges that are more historical in your life, ones that you believe are sturdier, with much more interesting architectural designs that please your eyes and your feet and your spirit as you cross them, solid ones that can take on various onslaughts of meteorological and erosive phenomena, ones that make you feel more secure in that they can seemingly take on much more weight; the weight that true friendship sometimes demands.

I love those bridges; the really good ones.

And it is bridges like these that make the flimsy, shaky ones that are made of old rotted wood, barely held together by a few rusty nails just not seem worth the trouble anymore.

I didn't exactly burn any bridges in London, because maybe I avoid conflict when I should stand up for my values, but on numerous occasions I greedily caressed my matchbook with my index finger, running it up and down the side taking a single powerful match out and teasing it against the sandpaper threateningly, all the while eyeballing some kerosene and begging my husband to shackle me down so I would hinder my pyromaniacal tendencies of ending friendships. Those walking, talking, flammable bridges I sometimes refer to as "my friends", beckoned to be served a molotov cocktail of shut-the-fuck-up with my burning flame of bridge-detonating disapproval.

But in the end, the flimsy-ass bridges remain intact.

I just don't know that I'm gonna cross them anymore.

And that, my friends, was my weekend in London.

And I guess this post officially makes me an asshole.

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This is me. There's a freak show going on in my brain.

I spend a lot of time walking the streets, people watching.

I watch people, okay?

I'm a Peeping Tom that's just right there in the open, walking to work. I'm Blues, butt watcher, boob leerer, clothing critic.

I'll dissect your fashion statement in a millisecond in my mind.

My gaze used to favor the young and beautiful, the slender, the sleek, the strong, the dolled-up. My eyes preferred the ones subconsciously offering breeding services to members of the opposite sex through impressive and accentuated hip to waist ratios, through strong family-protecting arms, through voluptuous baby-feedable breasts highlighted by the appropriate push-up equipment, through clothing displaying a certain level of social status and ability to financially support offspring. My glance lingered upon those that fit the very precise and limited beauty mould that our culture has decided deserves a double take.

Pretty people, yup.

But lately, I find that my eyes linger over the motherly.

I see women, their pouchy abdomens attesting to the children they have carried. I see their less than perky boobs that finally became entirely utilitarian, after years of oblique glances stolen, peripheral staring, and a lot of fuss. They have finally passed the phase of alimentary purposefulness. I see some of them in their mom jeans that highlight what happens to the female bodies...afterwards. And I know they would never trade their children for their old bodies.

I see a young mother extend an arm backwards, pinky jutted out while she looks sternly at a small child walking behind her, encouraging the child to take her hand. I hear the child say, "Mamá" and the woman answers, "Que?", exasperated, as if tired of all the questions. And I wonder, does she take it for granted in that moment? Being a mom?

I canvas their faces for proof of age. Are they older than me? Are they younger than me? Maybe they are older but have just had some work done. Shit, she must be old. I wonder what kind of wrinkle cream she uses. She can't be younger, is she??? Fuck, she's younger. Did they have to get fertility treatment? Did they adopt? Or did they try to get pregnant on their honeymoon and wham bam, it worked?

I look at Luisito and I think...what if? What if we can't, babe? Okay, so we adopt, we know this, but I wanted you and me, you know, we wanted...we wanted to do this. I wanted the baby to have your eyelashes and your nose and your thighs. Can we swing this if we can't? Can we deal with this level of disappointment? If we add this to everything we've been through will there be a giant surplus of bullshite? Will we implode?

And I feel a fear in my belly, a fear that my assumption of being able to snap my fingers and have children whenever I wanted might be being challenged. With every period now, I think, Hmmm. Okay, I guess not this month. No biggie.

"How long did it take you to get pregnant?" I quiz my sister, my sister in law, my friends.

"Oh a few months."

"We just stopped taking birth control to see what would happen."

But I feel menstrual pain like I never have before. The last time it kept me up the whole night. My periods are irregular now and fucked up and long. Things....they don't feel right.

"Acude inmediatamente al ginecologo". Go immediately to the gynecologist, my general practitioner told me, not knowing he was gonna scare the bloody life out of me by saying it with such urgency.

So I went to the gynecologist the next day and with clammy ass hands and trembling legs, and trying to act all, "No this ain't weird that my junk is all up in the air, yo. No, not at ALL. I'm cool", I mounted the handy stir-ups and offered my crotch up to the lovely phallic probe of truth, all the while chanting to myself:

Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance.

Ooof. This isn't supposed to hurt. I'm not supposed to be freakin' THE. FUCK. OUT. right now.

The doctor stared at the ultrasound and informed me that all my junk looked perfectamente normal.

Oh yeah, doc? Well, then why did you schedule me for a pelvic MRI? Then why did you make me do all those blood tests that made my arms go numb and my blood pressure drop and my lips turn blue?

Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance.

I can't find the words to express the anxiety I'm feeling. Truth be told, I have serious issues with hypochondria, and anything medical-related makes me want to either faint or barf, but I can't shake this. Because I don't know that I can deal with more disappointment (centered around myself) right now. And I'm just fucking scared that something is wrong with me.

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