In Twilight Regalia

As I am sprawled out on my couching coughing away on some Albanian virus flown in by one of my lawyers, one wouldn’t expect to find me smiling like an idiot, but I am.

I am so happy with a new band I found — They dredged up all these colors I had been starving for in sound for a good long while.

And I have the wonderful luxury of my iBook and my iPod, my eyes full of pictures and words, my ears full of excellent headphone sound (thanks Mikeybear!), my stomach unhungry, and my windows not blown out by a hurricane. I am friggin, HAPPY, man! That is a statement I rarely say, and few things but music can make me like this.

It made me so peaked listening to this tune that I wished my mom were here to listen to it. She would have loved it.
This was a woman who was born well before plastic!
Before television!
Before REFRIGERATORS! …Yes!!

But she loved rock. She loved the latest, most crashing loud sumptuous sounds she could find. She cranked up our old Motorola TV speakers when great tunes came on, and they rattled permanently after one of those times. She danced in a way that looked like it couldn’t quite let go of something unrelated to my era — what was it? Swing? It just didn’t look RIGHT, but she was having a great time with it.

When the Beatles came out and there was such a scandal over “long” hair (what was that, two inches over the collar of their suits?), my mom planted her stance firmly against my Dad’s grumping. I was in grade school, and she was dressing me like a proper little Caroline Kennedy. We went to see A Hard Day’s Night in the movie theater whether Dad liked it or not (we took a taxi!), and my first Beatle memories are with her, sitting in a dark theater packed with weeping bouncing girls screaming at the tops of their lungs straight through it. I look at that as my first official concert experience, even if it was a movie. The fab four hadn’t set foot on our shores yet, I don’t think.
It was electric pandemonium!
I was an instant convert.

Once in a while on a Saturday afternoon, we’d go to the one little diner in town for our favorite cinnamon apple pie after doing errands around the tiny town square. Only a handful of old hicks in flannels were in the joint and a waitress with an old pink polyester uniform and no-longer-white apron. But the diner must have picked up at night, because the owner had put Beatle tunes on the juke box for the highschoolers. There in the midst of pork chops and John Deere hats, she clicked open her coinpurse, gave me dimes to feed, and she pushed the buttons for TWIST AND SHOUT!

NOW SHAKE IT UP BABAAAAAAAAy!!! blew out of the corner. TWIST AND SHOUUUUUT!!!

And they all looked around…….

….. and Ma and I giggled, conspirators in a great plot to change the world’s ears.

Much later, after the shock of my dad leaving wore off, she suddenly realized she could do things she wanted. She began to try it.
Suddenly we were a cat household. “!!?!”
We no longer had to have dinner every night at the same time.
She actually wore jeans to the grocery store one day. (Heavens!)
We ate pans of fudge together. (I still think my twisted food-reward syndrome was born in this period.)
And music bloomed for her, too. She began to reach for the soul she’d stuffed away.

She loved everything on the Derek and the Dominos LP, and when I figured out the piano section to Layla she was delighted.

She turned up Rod Stewart to an embarrassing level. I found a poster of him, SHIRTLESS!, in some head shop, and bought for her for her birthday. She actually hung the sweaty Rod over her bed (my friends found this very amusing).

She pounded on my door the day I first played YES, and demanded to know what that stuff WAS, and could I play that one again.

When her peers were complaining that no one could sing any more and Joe Cocker was just a screamer, my mom was right there comparing him to black scat singers from the 30s that she had liked. She loved his raggedness.

She thought Todd Rundgren was as adorable as he was catchy. I was for a while very much into a British band Wishbone Ash, and she played that till there was vinyl resist in the grooves of my record. Emerson, Lake and Palmer was another band whose records we thrashed. And Oh yes, she liked Pink Floyd.

Now don’t get me wrong: I kept my bedroom door closed a lot as a teenager, stereo cranking or not. I hid from her all my dirty little secrets that I knew she’d freak over. I knew she wouldn’t understand that new corruptness that went along with teen life of the late 60s and early 70s. I had huge fights with her over both stupid and dire issues.

She hated when I called her Ma!, like my friends (trash! she said) called their moms.
We argued over my hair, my clothes, my dates, my friends, war, politics, religion, and just about every opposite mental pole you could gravitate toward.
I bitterly hated her over many decisions she made about her own life and mine at times. And her nagging drove me to the point of having visions of chairs crashing down on her teeth. I really did imagine that one day. What kind of sound would that make?, I thought. The violence of my own thought that she conjured in me made me a bit sick to my stomach.

And I think her fear, her lack of going out and grabbing more of what she wanted in life, actually angered me most. She was from an era where the men acted, and the women were wallflowers waiting to be picked. When cast away, they wilted. The vestiges of that meant she didn’t end up with much but a tiny ramshackle house in the middle of a WalMart hick town, and her cats.

She was, after all, not a “liberated” woman, but a cast-off woman, in her own thought. She became a closet desirer. An armchair experiencer. A vicarious liver. How I wished she had come out, Come Dancing, like the Kinks sung.

In the early 90s, when those two packs a day finally got to her, and she could do very little but watch TV, her last request of me was to find a video of Seal. He was her new hero.

“We’re never going to survive unless we are a little crazy”, he sang.

And so she did.

Wish you were here.
Ma.

I have come once again to the painful realization that any person I work for will inevitably make me feel like I am obviously a bastardization of nature that should have been exterminated when first I raised my knotty head. I have grown accustomed to being despised. This comes again and again into my life because I often try to do the right thing instead of the proper thing,
or maybe just my thing instead of their thing,
or maybe my take on their thing wasn’t what their thing actually was,
and because my idea of the highest ideal (with which I do all things) involves a thought process foreign to most of those granted power over others, called “creativity.”

You’d think I would have gathered our social structure’s subtle whispers and headshakes, stared hard at the result and made some adjustments, tried a different tack.

But in fact, since I have a lot of trouble liking any of the components of the giant machinery of society (particularly the machinations of the workplace), my first impulse is to puzzle and balk. With robot cornea of The Terminator, I inspect, dissect, and find I myself to be a different sort of species compared with what I’m viewing.
I generally have a lot of righteous indignation at this stage (which turns rapidly into an Agent Smith-like detest)
which frequently leads me to the unfounded conclusion that I have sovereign power over my own experience.

This mirage doesn’t last long, not to worry; I have my come-uppances on an hourly basis, and sometimes much more often.

The second impulse I get is to dismiss and disregard, since I am a benevolent human being at heart, and much squishier than a Supervillain. I have always been further aided by early indoctrination in The Thumper Creed: “If you can’t say thumpthin nice, don’t say nothin at all.” I believe that I might have misinterpreted my mother’s intentions on the actual scope of application of that statement. Here you’re supposed to have a giant stag of a father who would compliment that with some sort of Take ACTION! statement that would have counterbalanced the constant admonishing.
Maybe nothing aggressive, but something … Proactive, let’s say.
“Follow ME.” he might have said.
“Go back and shake their hand and introDUCE yourself.”
A father might have said that;

but because my father was one of THEM –
(he wore a HAT for heaven’s sakes) –
I had already disregarded anything proactive he might have said. I was as puzzled by him as I was with the rest of them. And most of the time, he just went back to watching his program. He needed a lot of space back then.

The third impulse is to flow
glow
grow
go rocket off into my happier previous paths of thought prior to being so imposed upon by the fetters of regard and acknowledgment. Here I swoon into the visions of the film I was just cinematically choreographing in my mind, which settings I was considering, what kinds of faces and words I was using, and what kind of buckram would hold a shape so dramatic as that, it would have to be grommeted and suspended, perhaps even thermoplastic boning, and ….WAH WAH?

WHAT? What did you say? and I’ve suddenly lost the entire groundwork of my present surroundings and my innermost dark secrets as well and I see it all crumble into a confusing spew of verbage from this OTHER person (WHO’S THAT?) standing there all Charlie Brown’s teacher of a wah wah

WAH Wah Wah-Wah WAH???

expecting me to have offered something cognitive in their general direction and I have no answer because they weren’t IN my movie,
or my science project,
or my vivid memory of a Hershey’s Kiss decorated chocolate birthday cake,
or my rehashing of yesterday’s argument,
or my poem,
or my philosophical psychodiscourse on my education of self and its flaws.

WAH wah-wah wah wah.

(They’re still here. What the fuck?)

WAH WAH?

Sorry?

This leaves me suddenly mired in a chocolatey pit of impossible shame, having somehow lost complete participatory validity,
(raise your sheepish hand)
and of course now risking the inevitable evaluation of that separate thing-like being, who by this time has sniffed around the tree of my mental inaction and pronounced it void of purpose,
HOLLOWWWWWWW!!!!! (knock knock!),
apparently lacking in IQ points (ah how they love their own scales!).
BAD ARTIST! No Mensa for YOU!

One gets accustomed to being regarded as mentally retarded or just disobedient,
(SPACE CADET!!!)
unwilling, unwelcome and unwanted. They really think you’re doing it to spite them, too. Particularly when you’re young.

All in a sentence or two, this can happen: You can be a nice person, a worthy charge of an instructor, or a valuable employee, or a perfect significant other, and just one of these AHA!!! moments can turn your status to permanent shit.

So you get used to living with being despised. You know it’s going to happen. It might happen several times today. Get ready to be beat up again. >WINCE<.

This is how you ruin your credentials as a friend, a colleague, a member of a planet you had no intention of staying on in the first place. You were born HERE, they insist, and because you keep trying to float away,
you red balloon you,
you will be punished.

I used to know a lawyer who had a calligraphed statement on his wall behind him:

“If you can’t dazzle them with Brilliance…
….Baffle them with BULLSHIT!”

And that, my creative ones, is all the salvation you’ve got left. Spew out something unrecognizable that they can wrongly attribute to something
faaaaaaaaar
outreaching their capabilities. Dropping names helps too. I think the entire 1950s asbtractionist color field painting movement did well with that. (And I like them well enough, too.) Performance artists of the 90s, for SURE. They built Babylonious towers of it.

You will become a great liar. Your childhood will be sullied with the sins of deception. Skills of the socially challenged. Sharpen your lies well or they’ll come and take your stapler.

I’ll be thinking up some great one when the next wage-earning interruption comes.

I decided I had far too many ideas about music and people wouldn’t necessarily find them all on Amazon.com or etc., so I have to say get out your Blue’s Clue’s magnifiers and go sleuthing…. I know they’re out there in the airwaves still.

10 GREAT OBSCURE SONGS PEOPLE SHOULD HEAR and WHY in no particular order.

Tchinchirote
by Cesarea Evora –
Because: She is the non-gothic mourning dove of song. Because she is from Cape Verde, and who else can be her? Because she is a large brown warmth of woman who cannot be anyone else.

The Host of Seraphim
by Dead Can Dance –
Because: It makes you believe there might be some kind of atomic afterlife of logic or magic or even scientific reason afterall. Should be listened to with eyes closed and no humans within 100 yards in any direction. A testament to the evocation of the pure sound of the human voice.

Nice Nice Very Nice
by Ambrosia –
Because: It has an old seventies Rock-Opera midsection that’s a bit overwrought, but the setting of Kurt Vonegut’s poem is a great fun fit to the flow and punch of this classic-rock-style tune.

Free World
by Kirsty MacColl –
Because: Kirsty has already left the planet, and that is sad. She had guts, amazing guts, and was every bit as wry and droll as her notorious acquaintance, Morissey. Her writing was a delight, I miss her.

Name Der Rose
by Qntal –
Because: They are like no other electronic medieval band on the planet. Because Sigrid (Syrah) Hausen has the best, darkest, most properly classically trained soprano I have ever heard. And by that I mean efficient, accurate to daring extremes, and perfect! perfect! perfect!. SHE RULES!

Dreamland
by Lisa Germano –
Because: She makes you aware of the vague lull colors under your eyelids, and sings them. Also because she has the gift of ingenuousness.

God is God
by Juno Reactor –
Because: This is the most savage/polished dance tune of the 90s in my opinion, and sumptuously layered with recording nuances over a thrashing, swaying industrial beat that will not let you stop moving. Love it loveit loveit.

The Plastic Bag Theme
from the American Beauty Soundtrack –
Because: It audibly explains the vision of that moment in film SO WELL. It holds in so few notes the simple futility, frailty, and hope of a human life.

Jockey Full of Bourbon
by Tom Waits –
If you haven’t investigated Waits thoroughly you won’t know what a distillation of himself this one is. It’s so sinister and trashy and machocentric, while maintaining a Hemmingway-like sensibility of art. All that aside, it is the catchiest damn thing. I just want to sing it all the time. I’m going to re-record it some day as a cross between Carmen Miranda and a knife fight.

Regret
by Malice Mizer (w/ Gackt) –
Japanese bands can really, really, REALLY surprise you. This is movie-music, I think; the title says all. A lovely transportation. Compare this with Gackt’s other works and you’ll be VERY surprised at this amazing man.

A couple of other lists offered for your contemplation or submitted for your approval:

TWENTY BEST CHART-POPULAR SONGS THAT SHOULDN’T BE FORGOTTEN

Tico Tico by Carmen Miranda
C’est La Vie by Chuck Berry
Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil
Tequila by The Champs
Birthday by the Sugarcubes (Bjork)
6 Underground by the Sneaker Pimps
Serpentine Fire by Earth Wind & Fire
Room to Move by John Mayall
Uncle John’s Band by Grateful Dead
Yes it Is (Please don’t wear red tonight) by the Beatles
Walking in the Rain by Flash and the Pan
Lola by the Kinks
Talking in Your Sleep by the Romantics
Pride (In the Name of Love) by U2
Stop Me by the Smiths
Black Friday by Steely Dan
Long Way Home by Supertramp
Life’s What you Make it by Talk Talk
Into Something Good by Herman’s Hermits
The Experiment by Kate Bush

And now to show you that I am TRULY arcane, the following dusty awards:

AMAZING MUSICIANS WHO ARE FREQUENTLY OVERLOOKED
(and I mean this on the basis of their MUSICIANSHIP):

June Tabor
Bela Fleck
Tom Waits
Kate Bush
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Milton Nascimiento
Joni Mitchell
Todd Rundgren
John Kaye
Iris DeMent
Stan Ridgeway
Martin Simpson
The Legendary Pink Dots
Jane Siberry
Sheila E.
Astor Piazolla
They Might Be Giants
Leo Kottke

Note that I am not really addressing the category of JAZZ in this whole thing, because that is a world unto itself, for which I have many many other criteria. Will do that one soon.

Comments appreciated and welcomed, no matter how scathing.

My friends are always telling me to meet people through Craigslist. In San Francisco, that really was a great way to bump into interesting people, and it was in Seattle too. But what’s on Craigslist in L.A.?
Here I take it line by scary line for you. These were the “activities” posts for the weekend of 9/17.

franz ferdinand (l.a. greek theatre)
Who’s THAT? ?.

Running Buddy/Trainer needed (West Valley/West LA)
OK, You run, I’ll get in the car and hold up fingers for how fast you’re going.

Need tennis partner (Echo Park/Silverlake.)
Also not me, though I suppose it should be.

*** J-FIT OUTDOOR FITNESS-3 SESSIONS FOR$98*** (SANTA MONICA and adjacent areas)
yes yes yes ok ok You know they said Rome and Sparta at their peaks were obsessed with physical fitness and beauty….

Looking for DISCO music 70s Party (Los Angeles)
I checked on this one. It was an Italian longing for an oldschool Eurotrash party. Surely there must be one?, he asked. Not that I know of. I’d probably go if there were.

SO>…..you’re looking for something to do on a wed. night? (EVERYWHERE)
Wednesday, Ya, right. After a 9 hour day of being badgered by attorneys I wanna go somewhere. I want to stare at a WALL.

R U ISO 420? (So Cal)
See my post, The Animatriarch, at Line 1.

Free fun event for car enthusiast (Hollywood)
Shrug.

Anyone interested in going to the Lake Shrine tomorrow?
This was a person who wanted to go meditating with someone. Ok that makes LOADS of sense. Let’s bring our baggage into the picture while we try to let go of it.

PRIVATE BOXING LESSONS (HOLLYWOOD)
Well I might actually like this, but I’m not exactly Hillary Swank. I’d last maybe, five minutes.

East Coast / NYC GALS (50’s-60’s)friendship/culture group starting (westside area only)
Wellllllllllll. I may be older, but I’m not THAT old.

HOLLYWOOD WHIFFLE BALL Co-Ed Needs Players!!!!! (Hollywood/ L.A.)
This would be fine except it finishes with a beer party. I can see those freckled faces and cutoffs now. Not me.

Le Joshua, DJ’s and cheap drinks… (South Bay)
D.J.’s are just people who wear stupid looking hats, cheap jewelry and play bad music in my experience. Mostly anyway. Cheap drinks….. well do they do Shirley Temples?

Try a Cuddle Party this Friday (Los Angeles)
This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard of. It’s a let’s get physical free-for-all not-really-an-orgy-orgy. Probably spawned by Reality TV, I think this is the sign that Rome is now officially burning. They don’t even want enough commitment to actually screw. You just …. ewwwww, I don’t want to go into it. Smelly.

Tennis weekdays in Santa Monica/Venice
Um ….schedule.

Tery Lockett- If you know him I’m looking for him. (Hollywood Studio City Burbank)
Sorry I don’t.

Tennis in Palm Springs 4.5 and Above (Palm Springs Area)
. . . ….@@…….. . . .

Tennis anyone? (Highland Park)
AGGGGGGHHHHHHHFUCKING TENNIS ALRIGHT ALRIGHT NOOOOOOoooo.

Tori Amos- Last Chance Tonight (LA)
ehhhhhhhh not for 60 bucks.

Weight Loss Support
Ok I’ll get back to this, but it’s not exactly an activity for FUNNNNNN

Looking for Beginner Tennis Partner (Burbank)
ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING TENNIS

European Female Need a Non-Flakey Female Friend for Weekend Clubbing (Hollywood)
She’s Russian and much too young.

Seeking nudist sun bathing female singles (West SF Valley -818)
This a preposterous thing to ask I must say. But at least they’re honest. Now where’s my fiddle?

Don’t KNIT in front of the telly! - help Katrina survivors! (Silverlake)
I did, I did. Really. Done deal. Where’s my crocheting?.

Kung Fu / Qigong partner (LAX)
I don’t think they’d take me but I’ll think about it. I could at least make cool sounds afterward and look threatening.

ISO of Trainer (West LA)
Let’s see, I could train you to Sit. SIIiiiiiiit. SIT!!!. BAD JOCK. Sit!!

Singles Event This Thursday…. (Los Angeles)
GAK GAK GAK,,. I can’t even discribe how gakky this one was. No.

Do you speak Italian? (Studio City)
Can’t say as I do.

LA SINGLES SCENE (LOS ANGELES AREA)
GAK. Is that asbestos fumes I smell? Or is it someone making soap with excess liposuctives…..?

Looking for some fun activity partners!
Gay guy HEY, he’s SAFE FOR ME!, Likes to go to movies, YES, theater, YES, museums, YES YES, even Disneyland EH, wants to not lead a dreary corporate life, OH HELL YA, and basically wants some friends WOWEEEEEEEEE ……..Oh SHIT, he’s in Orange County ………..

Girls needed for co-ed league–tomorrow!!! (Glendale)
This means there is a band of sweaty guys waiting like drooling dogs at the other end of the keyboard.

Workout partner - training for rugby (Los Feliz)
Ya, Like I’d survive THAT.

Looking for poker buddies (South bayish-90505)
One word: LOSER. Me, I mean. Can’t possibly. It’s genetic in my family to lose money at poker. Truly. I’d just rather walk in, put money on the table and walk out, it’s less agonizing.

marathon training partner (west la)
Okay, you wear this harness while I get my rollerskates and say MUSH!!! alot.

KROQ inland invasion today ride offered (hyundai pavillion)
Rap event. Not likely.

SINGLES EVENT AT SPIDER CLUB TONIGHT! (Hollywood)
Not single.

Donate your United Miles for Hurricane relief > (Everywhere)
Like I have any.

AS SEEN ON OPRAH - PROSPERITY CAN EASILY BE YOURS
HEY get outta this category! Flag.

FREE Chair Massage…Before or After that activity!! Today! (Culver City)
1) This is in Culver City. Sketch Sketch. 2) They say FREE chair massage by licensed masseuses. 3) Then they say it benefits Katrina victims? …. I don’t have time to figure out why this post doesn’t make sense.

Personal Trainer, Weightlifting/Cardio, Free analysis (WLA/Bev Hills.)
HYyyyaaaah!! Because I vont to looook like AHHHHnold. HYAAh!!

Free Online Dating at It’s Just Coffee
Not dating anymore, thank god.

Cute Guy Seeking Younger Girl for a Week of Camping and Music in Baja
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!

♥Join Party Post LA ♥all the parties in Los Angeles!! (Los Angeles)
This is translated as “Paris Hilton Clones Apply Here”

Habla Espanol? Need help with English? Are you from Ecuador? (Venice Beach)
I’m beginning to think I might as well be.

Looking for people to meet a few times a week for Volleyball in Venice (Venice Beach)
I’m too shy for that…. My victorian swimsuit just wouldn’t go over very well.

☻Coed DODGEBALL ☻ TODAY! Fun pick up games ☻ 1:45 to 4:00 (N. Hollywood photo inside)
Hmmmmmm. maybe I’ll make a costume….. ya……
Forget the Dodgeball…. I’ll just make me a costume….. YEAH!!!

We took a picture of Ron in a pith helmet once. He really was suited for it. He wore these Captain Spaulding the Great Adventurer khaki docker type shorts too. He was like the last of the great white hunters. His world gets smaller every day.

Ron was a guy I judged color for, did data entry for, and basically acted as Women’s Opinion Consultant. In dark-rimmed squared glasses, he ran a T-shirt printing business and was perhaps the plainest, most Average White Dadlike, skinniest, most bland conformist I’ve ever been around in my life. His taste drove me to despair. But there was a core of good in there.

He had prejudices that leaked out of every corner of his conversations, about all kinds of people, and yet, that seemed to be just baggage from a super-white upbringing amid “NICE” people. He could be the most paranoid near-racist in one statement, and straight afterward, sponsor a Cambodian woman for a green card to work in his shop, and buy her Christmas presents. And actually mean it. He was the Walnut Creek American Guy. He was oblivious to his flaws, and as innocent as he was impossible.

Walnut Creek is a place where you smile while tippy-toeing. A place where you have NICE neighbors, who tell you exactly how high your hedge should be, or your roof, and ask you politely to remove the tree limbs from the tree of yours that’s growing on their side of the fence and then everything’s hunky-dory again. Until someone calls their lawyer. Ron was the kind who’d never let it get that far, heavens no, he believed in all things in moderation.

I redid his arcane database, which frightened me. It was still on a green screen CRT with white courier type. He feared losing valuable data so much that he refused to buy commercial databasese that might not cover the same fields he wanted covered on his ancient computer. He got confused by cutting and pasting being much the same as copying and pasting when I tried to describe what a buffer field was. He was not a luddite, he would swear, he just believed in moderation. But besides typing I had other duties.

Too cheap to buy a lawyer (which was probably why he lasted so long in Walnut Creek), I was to research contracts and create some for him. Here he preferred risking his whole legal commitment with vendors like The Discovery Channel on the expertise of a legal secretary/artist. That was a wierd, fun goose chase of a project for a while.

But mostly I gave opinions.

“What do you think of this teal rather than this midnight blue?,” was his kind of question for me. It was obvious to me each time that the result was a hair’s breadth of difference from a sales point of view. When there was an actual sale-ability issue, I’d tell it like it was, and it would make no difference to him.

He would solicit opinions from us all, screen printers and trained artists alike, agonize over it for two days, and come back to make the same damn artless decision of his own anyway every time. In the Amadeus of the world of color, pieces frequently had “too many notes!” for him.

He would agonize over artistic content level, shapes and print-detail and quality, and then he’d choose to print some lame artist who cribbed everything she knew from Matisse and tweaked it to look Jamaican. Why? Because he knew there was buzz around her in the cheap office-art world and it would SELL.

He wasn’t all nerdiness: His most redeeming statement was about the Talking Heads: “Who told them they could break up!!!???!!!” he demanded.

To his highest credit, along with Penny the Cambodian refugee, who packed shirts, he hired and maintained Steve the screen printer and some nights, gave him rides home. Steve needed everything he ever received from anyone.

Long after we left off working for him, my friends and I didn’t hear from Ron after a while. We heard his daughter was in the hospital a long time, so long that it took all the money and he sold his Walnut Creek house for a lesser one. I think his T-shirt business became unfeasible and he closed it.
I wonder about him still. I think of him when I hear “Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer…” since he was both Captain and Margaret DuMont to me.

Maybe some day when David Byrne is totally unrecognizable, we’ll find Ron again in the crowd. In his NewAge T-shirts and damned awful shorts, singing Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?.

I woke up for no reason wide awake. My phone said 4:20.
I’m not that kind of girl! I said to my phone.

Am I the only person that does this?

When the piece of carrot I cut falls on the floor I find it and scold it and wash it. When it falls a second time, I decide it has made its decision for treason and I toss it.

I give brief relationships and projected histories to my pens and pencils. They have reunions in my purse after long absences.

Noisiest of my personal belongings are my earrings, who have Disney-like pow-wows over who will be worn next. After all I have about fifty pairs of them, in different strains of about five colors. The black ones get boastful, since they are worn a lot. They aren’t developing turf wars yet though.

The gothic crosses are getting more and more morose. It’s been a long while since the right time came. Not to worry, I tell them. Soon. They languish.

There’s a pink dangle-y pair that’s sort of the Brittany Spears of the bunch. They don’t get much respect from the others. They’re clueless about this, however.

My jades got tucked in my purse for a week. They came back all sea-sick and dusty. One of them got into a liaison with my hairpins. What a scandal.

When one of a pair gets lost, it goes on an adventure. What does it see while it’s been left high atop the financial pile on my coffee table? When I find it and it returns, it tells the others stories, Reports of the Distant Couch. It becomes a big man on campus. Yes certain earrings are not feminine. That was the studded hoop.

The blue glittering swirled clip-ons beg silence of the others.

They belonged to my mother — I gave them to her as a child and took them back when she passed away. They have barely been worn. I pick them up now and then, contemplate wearing them, fear their pinch, long for their gaudiness, put them down. I visit with them, think of my mother (who never really liked them). I wept over them once. The others are very impressed with the behaviour the blue glitttering ones can pull from me. They command great respect.

Once I mentioned all this to a bunch of people who were talking about their own peculiar mental habits. I thought this fit right in. But when I mentioned it, they all just …. stopped.

I have this way of stopping people like that.

Perhaps that ’s why then, I thought. I have trouble liking people without this talent of anthropomorphic empathy. Only my artist friends seem to be unfazed by this.

It’s like an old TV show about James Thurber, My World and Welcome to It. He was one of the most spare cartoonists and funny people. His house would talk to him, as did his dog; mother-in-laws would appear out of walls, etc. It was quite logical to me and made me laugh. The show didn’t last long.

Most shows that make me laugh don’t last long. But they always get awards.

Where are the people that are giving awards when I am here handing out the Oscars of time to my baubles? What would make them arrive?

What do you think Floor, should I get a red carpet?

What makes a person not sleep? I haven’t been such an insomniac lately, but on the whole, I’m the kind of person who wakes at any slightest click, pop, laughter, or music. Those are the things that aren’t supposed to be there, and something must be wrong! says my brain. That’s when I get up and write.

Now I have another person in my life and sleep is tricky; some nights I pass out and some nights it’s impossible while he zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzs away without a dream in his head. Ever. I mean, he never dreams, Ever. I puzzle that such a creature exists. I dream constantly, tiringly, of all the possible realities I missed.

I have dreams about chasing after something I can’t remember where I left it, maybe it’s my purse, maybe it’s my clothes, while encountering all my friends who’ve long deserted me in real life and being so happy to see them, and yet I really do have to go, do you have some SALT? See because I have a bunch of leeches all over me, and I really need some salt RIGHT AWAY…. and they have no salt.

And I wake up and think, well, take a pick, you could be younger and thinner and have all the people around you you used to want and like, with a few leeches…. or you could wake up and be older and fatter and friendless in this neighborhood where the trash blows around with a strange new experience on every front….

…..and here I am hard pressed to choose.

Which I guess is why i have problems sleeping in the first place…

But I have had some amazing dreams.
I have had dreams that I return to on a regular basis, like actual geographic locations, where I see the same people and pets, who don’t exist. I have dreams where I’m creating the BEST music, making the COOLest costumes, having the deepest conversations. I’ve had dreams where you discover the planet you are walking on is actually made of some seething, breathing, monstrous disgusting slimy creature that’s going to absorb you at any moment….

But waking up can be just as harrowing. The strangest waking up I ever had was after a night of carousing and inhaling and trying to avoid some guy at a party in an old Victorian at some friend of a friend’s party. I remember now that it was dark and I remember my frame of mind when I withdrew. I remember being ready to leave that world around me, the drugs, the guy who was after me, all of it. I don’t remember much after lying down upstairs.

But my eyes did open, and it was screaming stark white.

A white empty room with a wood floor and two windows. Two white sconces on either side of windows. It felt like I was placed into the last scenes of 2001 Space Oddyssey. A contrived space created by a misunderstanding, but benevolent master race?

It wasn’t really clear where the door was at first. There was no furniture, there was nothing but a white sunlit room and out the window were……

BALLOONS…. !

HUGE BALLOONS in the bluest clearest sky I have ever seen, it was a Peter Max poster of a sky with little figures in the gondolas of HUNDREDS of balloons of every color, pattern, all floating up perfectly diagonally from one lower corner of the windows to the upper right corner and awaaaaaaay into the blue…..and I,

I was ….. DEAD! Was I dead???

For a moment I truly wondered if I’d done it this time, and what the benefit of balloons would be in the afterlife. OKAY IF I’M DEAD, WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS? was my first thought.

My second thought was

OH SHIT I’m DEAD!!!
NOOOo how did I do that???

I hadn’t meant to do THAT.

The thing that was me felt all flung apart.

Was I me? Were I?

What was feeling? Was I feeling that?

Had I and then what? Ah… I? It’s me isn’t it?

It is.

Isn’t it?

Then I noticed branches at the bottom of the window. TREES!

I ran to the windowsill and looked out and there were in fact actual trees and houses, and just to comfort further, telephone lines.

I slumped backward with sheer collapse of relief. There was a mattress there. I had been sleeping on it.

Later they told me that I had seen the launching of the annual balloon race that that flat town held every year. Perfect place for it with all the fields around it. Balloonists from EVERYwhere come for it….

Sometimes I remember that moment and I think I would probably STILL choose here. I would still choose the blowing-around garbage and the flooding in the distance of thought and the snoring and radios and past dated food in the fridge. It would still beat leeches in the long run.

RESISTANCE IS INCOMPETENCE IS FUTILE

The Kaiser Medical people never called me back. They said they would have someone call me back last Friday. No one called. More work for me to call about tomorrow, where I have to press one for English, three for appointments, and hold, and then tell someone named Lateesha my number from my card, my whole address, my whole two different phone numbers, and my mother’s maiden name before they will talk to me….

I have to get a new credit card with 0% because my deal with my current 0% credit card company is expiring and I know that it will take up to 1 1/2 months to get the transfer from one company to the next done. Why? Because they
A) don’t give a shit about you saving any money
B) consider you a deserter
and
C) can’t spell your name anyway and probably have two records on their database for you already.

I also have another credit card, one I’ve been with for years, and I am transferring that one to someone else because they are EVIL and they jack up the percentage rate for ANY REASON THEY FIND HUMOUROUS AT THE TIME. They are simultaneously screwing me on my current card rate while offering me a 0% balance with a sneaky default clause with a huge interest penalty in my other name…..

Part of this is because they can’t remember that I faxed, phoned, and separately wrote them and sent them my marriage certificate to tell them to get my TWO RECORDS fixed into ONE RECORD which was my CORRECT NAME, the MARRIED ONE. They can’t seem to do that. Too confusing for those 19 year olds from South Dakota that they have stuffed into little cubicles and don’t allow outside for air. Their brains get like those little plastic games where you have to get the silver balls rolling into all the right holes and then they are missing one hole and it just keeps rolling around, you know? Beeeeeeezzzzzzzz buzzzzzing up there. Also, you have to realize they never learned to spell in the first place since they were all going to play guitar for a living. Well, one of them was going to raise alpacas. But she didn’t really have to work for a living…

Meanwhile AAA is writing to inform me ever so sweetly that I may have forgotten to pay my premium, when in fact I spoke to Eileen at x4429 only a week ago to pay for the coming month. It WAS paid. She SAID it went through. Huh?…. More work cut out for me, the consumer….

Then there’s my bank. You know the one with the horses that purports to be old and well-established? Bank looked at my payment to my credit card company for 800 smackers. I guess I was in a hurry and the handwritten part wasn’t clear. So they put the payment through for 8 bucks, even though the digits clearly read $800. WHO MAKES PAYMENTS TO CREDIT CARD COMPANIES FOR 8 BUCKS????? Well there’s another batch of phonecalling to do… that shoots my “freetime” for lunch for two days this week…

The T-Mobile people have my name correct, but they maintain that I still live in Seattle and my old phone number is my account number. I think I faxed them about that a long time ago but it doesn’t affect my service at least…

My dentist, who spells my name correctly only because we both have the SAME last name, is recommending I come in for more voluntary torture…

The DMV still thinks we have our smashed car….. they want us to sign something….again…..

But HEEEEEEyyyyyyyyy, My building management company is telling me I am getting a refund of $17 bucks. I guess the City of LA decided they couldn’t pass charges on for routine painting of the halls to the tenants.

But see I know someone already paid for this in their sweat and effort. A lady came to the door one day asking if I spoke Spanish. I don’t, I said, and off she went to the next door. She was getting signatures. I bet SHE worked hard that day so I could get my $17 bucks back.

Muchas Gracias Senora, you’re the last bastion of competence.

Now I wonder if she knows where to put “it’s” versus “its”. Probably not. But then neither do any of the people who made the errors above, no doubt. I even found that one messed up on corporate signage in a city zoo. A prominent city zoo.

Am I all righteous for knowing all this? Yesssssss. Am I “more-better” than them???? Yesssssssss. Am I an asshole for rubbing this in your faces? Probably yes, and no. Because you’re making me DO TOO MUCH.

You’re all making me do too much and I’m TIRED. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO DO YOUR WORK OVER, YOU BOOBS!!!

DO YOUR OWN FRIGGIN CLONE WORK YOU CLONES.

BAH!!!

I’m going to bed.

OR, HOW I LOST MY LOFT

Today I made a serious American breakfast. A not-so-frequent event. And we happened to have fresh strawberries for the pancakes. And I remembered my live-work loft apartment I once had loved so much, and the banana pancakes we ate there each weekend and …. Lisa, who made them for us. Perfect, circular, golden-on-each-side discs with perfect fresh banana pieces mashed well into them (anything close to the end of the banana was chopped out) in perfect ordered stacks on plates with a new stick of unopened, and therefore unmolested, butter. She was very particular about the wrapped butter.

Lisa, a slim dark haired woman who resembled “Emily the Strange” before Emily existed, came into my life answering a classified add for roommate, along with an ass of a husband, Paul. Paul could not sing, but made many excruciating recordings in our shared workspace, had an obsession with expensive desk items and refused to use anything but “The Clapper” to turn out the lights. He’s another story.

They had seemed so stylish and young and nice and hip at first. She had a measured calm way of speaking, sophisticated. She looked very …. I would say “Mod”, even before the acid green trend and the rehashing of 60s graphics and miniskirts and smooth sleek Audrey Hepburn hair returned in the 2000’s. She was all simple sheath dresses with her short blunt bangs and her simple bags and shoes. If she’d been a car, she would have been an Alfa Romeo Spider, or maybe one of those classic white Cadillac convertibles, or some other Barbie car. Somehow I could envision her with a picture hat and a round hat-box shaped bag in vinyl, Foster Grants, and a cigarette holder. Maybe even elbow length gloves. She just had that kind of classic-Barbie-accessories thing happening. But behind those Foster Grants were many a dark secret.

Cinnamon was her enemy.

She first broached this subject with me when I was making french toast one morning, and she panicked upon seeing a small square spice can on the table and told me she could not have cinnamon in the house, at all, at any time. She was deathly allergic to it, she claimed, and had had her throat swell up on a cinnamon roll that nearly killed her. Really!. I said. I had never heard of this. I took her seriously and reluctantly gave away my box of cinnamon. When she asked me to clean the cupboard under where it had been, I complied with a goodnatured Californian “whatever.”

Then as months passed I noticed she and Paul only invited me out with them to one restaurant, the same one each time. Paul then divulged that Lisa had a “problem.” She was terrified of RESTAURANTS that could harbor cinnamon. This one had none, never used it, and it would never be lurking in the air, on the utensils, in the soup, etc. She would not eat in any other restaurants. She may not even be allergic to it any longer, he said. But she refuses to go get tested again for tolerance levels. He, the great enabler, would take care of anything that affronted her. He didn’t want to push her. Which really meant, “I don’t want to fuck with her over this.”

There was the day we were shopping in Embarcadero Center and she walked in a far reaching arc away from the side of the hallway that had a bakery in it.

And then it wasn’t just cinnamon.

Sunday mornings with her perfect, glorious pancakes, I noticed that butter thing. She threw out half sticks of butter. Sometimes near-whole sticks. I noticed she rarely kept leftovers. One day when I reheated some spaghetti she looked at me oddly and walked away. I realized she had never used the microwave. When I mentioned she could use it, she said she preferred pans. She didn’t like the hot spots?, I asked?. No, I just don’t use them, she said. Case closed. O-Kaaaaaay.

There was the day she said she would rather I didn’t dye my hair when she was in the apartment, the chemicals in the air were strong. But it’s just bleach, I thought; a clean thing. Hmmmmmmm.

We talked around it and I found out more. Planes terrified her, she’d never even been in an airport. Certain clothing items she had just disappeared–she’d thrown them out because they came into contact with something she couldn’t bring herself to believe was launderable. Lipstick older than a month gave her pause. Anything was possibly suspect.

My food got thrown out of the fridge, without asking me. She had wanted to wait to ask me in the evening, she said, but it was THERE
and it was just THERE
and she couldn’t wait and have it THERE ANYMORE.

And the day she threw out my bar of soap, my empathy wore out.

First thought: WHY AM I LIVING WITH THIS FRUITCAKE!???!!

Second Thought: Every time I pick a roommate it’s something. Why should this be any different from the lesbian 19-year-old girl with the Shawn Colvin fixation or the Moroccan guy who wouldn’t pee with the bathroom door shut?

Third thought: I could kill her?.

Fourth thought: I could help her.
::sigh:::
Alright alright I’ll fucking help her.
Fruitcake.

Yes that is the pathetic real me, it takes about four levels to get to something worthwhile, and even then grudgingly.

So we began with eating. I talked to her about eating. She talked with me for hours about wrestling with her compulsions. She really did want to change. But she kept dancing away from actually DOING anything about it. And in a few months she did acknowledge she wanted to eat somewhere different. I asked her each time I wanted to go out, did she want to come too?
Just to sit with us?
Not this time?
C’monnnnnnnn.
Eventually she sat with us. She ate nothing but drank bottled water at first. Finally one day I got her to eat half a sandwich. She was feeling very brave that day.

Enter the darkest secret of all: She divulged they had children. They were living with grandparents, two boys, one 11 and one 6. I couldn’t believe it. Apparently she had been so unable to deal with raising them (nor was Paul great at parenting), the grandparents had taken them off their hands for a while.

When I saw her finally interact with her children it was the most peculiar thing I’d ever seen. She looked as if she intellectually wanted to love them and be good to them, spoke to them lovingly and encouragingly, yet could barely bring herself to touch them. Children were, after all, the prime germ-carriers of the planet. The children themselves were halting little birds, well aware that they were barely able to express themselves in her presence, and had to be careful not to break her mood. They were the most squashed little souls I have ever seen.

I do not like little boys much, but I felt for these two. I wanted them to have arms around them, to give them tousled hair, reading lessons in laps, and french toast with cinnamon. They deserved better.

So to make a long story short that’s how I lost my loft. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about the boys or the food or the prison of her food-fear anymore. We had arguments and words, and our friendship dissolved as they decided to force me out. Amid bitterness and progress and further digressions, I let her take the loft with Paul and the children and they shut me out. I moved on to a place with no more banana pancakes.

But I thought much later, those boys had to have something like contact, and eventually they got it. Paul, ever the ass, ditched them all and last I heard she had begun to take care of them herself. She renamed herself Felice. Remarkably, she began to pull herself together. Last I heard she had done many new things, eaten in different places, and flown in a plane.

Still wonder if she ever tackled the cinnamon.
Trade you a can of cinnamon for the banana pancake recipe, ‘Lise.

THAT YOU CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S TRUE, IT’S MADISON AVENUE.

You ask for it, you got it!
When you got it, flaunt it.
Because I’m worth it.
Have it your way.
Be all that you can be.
Reward Yourself.
Get More.
Impossible is nothing.
Live Richly.
Dream Up.
GO FOR THE GOLD!
Just DO IT!!!!!

That’s what they’ve raised us all on. And they wonder why anarchy is breaking out in the midst of a floodland of disaster.
Why rapes have occurred.
Why helicopters are being shot at.
Why stores are looted and why those who can do, do it all– to them all.

It’s a quiet erosion that occurs first. It’s about Morals, Ethics, Human Rights. It’s a country where the morale is made of ME FIRST.

The very fabric of the country was so fragile in Iraq. When we arrived and threw the balance, it rent. I have to admit that, even if I don’t like their ideologies. We threw in an element of leveling equality they couldn’t handle. We bungled a lot of things as well. They didn’t much like each other even. Let alone us. Now they live at gunpoint, and from many angles.

And now our authorities are surprised that our own ideologies have created monsters in the washed out streets here at home in screaming heat and sewage of what is possibly the greatest national disaster since the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906? And George Bush has the nerve to ask for “Patience?”

Whose fabric is weak?!
I told you so.
Gil-Scott Heron told you so….. and that was a LONG time ago.
Brothers just didn’t listen. They all went out and bought new shoes.