''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

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

I'm already gone

I’ve gone on about this before, but it’s a feeling that’s so strong, it’s hard to ignore as I do with all the other fleeting realizations, memories, potential posts that I push out of my lazy mind until they whither into forgotten possibilities, too busy with books and work and life. But this? This feeling, this moment is when I realize I need this space to eject something, and my guilt about not being good to you all is overridden by my need to slough something off, whether or not it’s even read, a need to dissect meaning and pore over fibers of sound and play with syllables and scrutinize the allegory of words until I am satisfied in my mind that what I’ve written is really how it is inside here, this place I want to understand, so my brain can call it a day and can stop being harassed by something I can't pinpoint.

I booked a flight to Phoenix (you know, to that one place where I grew up, that place I’m refusing to call home anymore), and as is always the case, from the moment I decided to go, my head has become filled with its every smell and tone and hue and nuance and I ache for it in ways that I didn’t allow myself to when I knew it was out of reach. I don’t call it home anymore because it feels ungrateful to allow myself the luxury of continuously claiming that the true fit, the realer real is taking place somewhere I am not, especially when this city is throbbing with spring like it is, true to how I remember it throughout these many years.

Besides, isn’t home supposed to be a place where there is warmth under my feet, where my sheets are blazed in sunshine in the morning, where a rogue strand of hair gets pushed behind my ear sending delightful shivers curling around my neck, where my toes get the lint cleaned out of them one by one, where daily negotiations on who will make morning tea get played out with kisses and promises of ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’? Yes.

Isn’t home where people, acquaintances I have not chosen to befriend but who have appeared in my life, have persistently gouged away at my heart by approximation until they have succeeded in finding a pulsating soft spot in it beneath all the barricades of bored sighs and disinterest due to hyperbolized cultural difference? Yes.

I felt it, home, I was sure of it, just the other day when for once it had stopped raining and the sun made a shy gesture from behind the clouds and so we (me and these people I'm discovering I might love) went outside to live in these streets again and drank and drank and we continued as the day turned into the dusk that only required a light sweater. And in changing from one bar to another, we had to stop and order beers in small glasses and bring them outside to the middle of the street. There we stood, leaning against a badly parked car, slippery thumbs fighting for their grip on cold beers, thanking Christ or somebody for having given us a sunny day, in the middle of Calle Mateos Gago, the street that leads to the heart of the Giralda. There we humbled ourselves before that radiant stone giant towering over all of Seville in all her raw beauty, the nimbus of dusk surrounding her. And as we inhaled the orange blossoms that bejeweled the trees lining the street down to her gothic door, we jumped slightly on tip toes and bumped into each other warmly, silly and cozy inside from the day of drinking, cheeks aching from smiling, and feeling, above all, lucky, and I thought, “Fuck yes this is home.” Where else on earth could it possibly be?

Tourists frantically snapped pictures of the Giralda with their cell phones trying to capture her perfection in the early evening light and they stared up at her as I would the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building, admiringly but as a jewel in someone else’s jewelry box. But this, I own her. I see her as I turn in to bed and she lights up my skyline. Those morning teas that get negotiated? I drink them with her, quiet but there. But it’s not just now that I see her more often, from a fortunate vantage point now that we moved into the house of windows. I also have endless memories across time at her feet in the twisted labyrinth of streets surrounding her, and this time is what confirms what I already know: that this is as home as home gets, complete with a long trail of memories, good and bad, following from behind.

But why then, if this is the case, just when I hesitatingly click 'OK' to confirm the charge to my credit card for my flight purchase, does my mind open up and a flood of mountains and heat and freeway traffic juggernaut into it and a landscape, a cityscape, a housescape snaps hard into focus and reminds me that, while maybe not home home anymore, surely Phoenix is something, and that something feels like it’s bruising me as it ironically gets further and further out of reach the closer I get to my travel date, because the closer I get to my travel date, the closer I actually am to my return travel date, and thus the further away any of it is altogether (Noble Savage wrote beautifully once on this very strange phenomenon).

As Phoenix pulls and tugs and begs and pleads and scratches and reminds and blames and guilt-trips with endless memories of its orderly grid of me flying through it with my window rolled down, I realize there are more memories there than can fill these labyrinthian streets. It lectures me, telling me that it’s definitely something if not my home and it’s more than just a place in my past or a holiday. And no matter how much I tell myself that I prefer the Giralda to Camelback Mountain, the lively plazas with cervesitas to the half-vacant strip malls of neglected Subways and derelict Jiffy Lubes and the cobblestone streets over sardine-packed freeways, a visit there is still akin to breathing and eating and human contact.

And I begin to find it odd and in some ways shameful that the sense of missing and nostalgia as an expat at least in my experience and the definition of home is sometimes not at all focused on people and relationships as one would expect, as it should be, as maybe some fault in my character or some coldness in my heart doesn’t allow it to be, as I often claim it is. Rather the missing is all intertwined with a way of living, a way of experiencing urbanization, a way of merely travelling through one's day, and sadly a way of consuming. And a feeling of panicked urgency to be coddled in that urban space once more invades my mind and takes hostage of my ability to look out the window and realize what a beautiful month I have ahead of me in Seville.

I stare out at those lone palm trees that are so very familiar to me, virginal from the sad winter but now spreading up and open in celebration to be penetrated by that hot Spanish sun, that are scattered across this city stuffed between baroque churches; they are normally reminders to me of the Arabia that once dwelt here that I get to contemplate because this is part of me and this is my home but now they only yank me back to that sun-scorched desert valley where I dread going because I dread having to leave.

StumbleIt

Can't I just post an audio clip of myself groaning and you'll know what I mean?

I miss being able to write. I'm blocked and I know that it's mostly just the not doing it that's making me not do it. I see some of you are blocked like me. But say you're not quitting for good. That would be awful and it would force me to think about that one time when it was really cool, back in the day of good blogging. Nostalgia is my worst enemy right now, so please don't do that.

My reading is suffering. Pretty lame of me to beg you to not quit when I haven't even remotely done my part to encourage you.

Other times, when I can, I carry on across your blogs like we're still in touch, like you're in my head and you too have read that pretentious post that went through me just the other day that lingered there in the center of my nervous system, playing Double Dutch with my neurons. I played with it and tapped at it and scratched and tortured it, the poor stupid thing. None of this happened with my pen, which would have required entirely too much effort. I pulled its little legs off of its twitching corpse and carried the carcass around the house in my mouth until its gut juice seeped through the incisions my teeth had made and its bitter taste made its way to my tongue. And then I didn't like it anymore and how could I give you such a foul cliche in hopes that you would praise me for killing it?

I know I should have some things to say about home, other than the cheap overview I gave you a couple of weeks ago.

I suppose I should tell you how it takes going home to realize that home's definition has apparently been revised in the 2009 edition of My Mind and that I actually feel the calmest and best in the anti-home, the scapegoat and seed of all of my turmoil. My inner dictionary has been rewritten, without consultation of its primary user. That thing had always been so reliable up until now.

Home is apparently not where one is safe and secure and comfortable and at peace. It's a place of confusion where I'm no longer cut to that mold and when I leave I'm relieved to say goodbye to release the pressure and intensity surrounding the visit, to let home fall into the background of memory and fuzziness and distance where it now resides permanently, quieter and quieter, its unbearable decibels turning to a light hum.

I fall into non-home and the excited pace of 'see this, go there, enjoy! Enjoy! It will all be over soon!' ceases and the heart goes back to a healthy steady pace feeding oxygen to the cerebral cortex again, a bit less frantically now, but certainly providing all that is needed to keep those synapses from going on strike.

And now I think I can make it through the winter without you, you infidel of synonyms. I won't be flying over your mountains and swimming pools and palm trees any time soon because I'm to the gills with you. I'm ignoring your threats that the longer I am away, the less you'll resemble what I thought you were. We were separated for so long and you became so perfect and tender in my mind and then you go and throw a fucking antonym at me right when I'm trying to cuddle up in your arms? That's lame.

There -- I went and brought you a carcass and placed it in your shoe, a hunted token so you know I love you, and I looked up at you blankly. I know. It's not as good as new and its legs are missing and it has teeth marks in it and one of its filmy wings is down the hall near the bathroom. But it's the only kill I could find in this lifeless, quiet place.

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

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.

StumbleIt

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.

StumbleIt

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.

StumbleIt

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.

StumbleIt