In Twilight Regalia

I get a lot of legal junk mail at work for my attorneys, much of which they pitch immediately.  This, however, was worth the tree it was printed on.  Emphasis and bracked explanations are mine, and the segments are presented out of their original sequence, for brevity’s sake.
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Article Excerpts by Jeff Immerman, Esq., Cotkin & Collins, Los Angeles

 
“…From the time of the California Supreme Court’s May 2008 decision in The Marriage Cases [the California Supreme Court Ruling enabling same-sex couples to marry] to just prior to the voters’ approval of Proposition 8 in November 2008, approximately 18,000 same-sex couples were legally married in California…. Once married, some of these couples for example may have entered into contracts and transactions between themselves and third parties affecting or changing the characterization of property from separate to community and have incurred substantial community debts.

While retroactive application of Proposition 8 does not affect the marital status of heterosexual couples, it will substantially impair the marital status and related property, financial, and parental vested rights and responsibilities of same-sex couples who became legally married in reliance on the rights recognized by the California Supreme Court in the The Marriage Cases.”

…”If Proposition 8 is immune from judicial review, persons who disagree for whatever reason with the judicial branch’s future determination(s) that a legislative enactment unlawfully infringes upon an inalienable constitutional right of a discrete class of persons, will in the future seek to circumvent constitutional limits through the initialive process.  Unless prevented from doing so, such persons will resort to the non-deliberative initiative measure process in an attempt to resurrect a statute already found to be unconstitutional.  Such a scheme will undermine the constitutional rights of California citizens and will also under the system of checks and balances upon which our governmental system is based. …

…Proposition 8 . . .will, if upheld, cut deeply and permanently the inalienable rights of same-sex couples and the power of the judicial branch to protect, preserve, and safeguard the inalienable rights of California citizens.”

I’m SO TIRED.

It’s been a hard 24 hours.  Yesterday at this time I was pretty much ok, pretty awake, but the City of Los Angeles has conspired against me since.  First, though, the database system I’ve been shoveling stuff into for the last three days decided to overload and close up inexplicably. Our IT and outside corporation that composed the program have been scratching their heads over glitches for weeks but yesterday was an official meltdown.  That left me with mind numbing little to do, which  is an uncomfortable feeling. I always have SOMETHING I need to finish.  Even did the filing.  But there I was with the only one large repetitive job left involving the meltdown morass, and so the rest of the afternoon was spent trying to look busy, which I do by websurfing and chewing cinnamon gum so I won’t stuff everything else in my mouth, and generally wishing I were somewhere else.  Can’t leave the desk. Chained to the phone.

Should I go across the street to just see a chick flick, alone?.  Decided, no, not today, I should get home, I should take that StrengthFinder test to find out where my strengths are and reassess my inclinations/skills/future.  I should TAKE CHARGE OF MY LIFE.

So FINALLY FINALLY TICK TICK TICK it was TIME to leave and leave I did, out into a row of cars that suddenly inexplicably stuck still in a place it never sticks.  It rained yesterday, a fact which hadn’t dawned on me till I was at that point in the line, and OH YEAH Californians can’t drive in the rain (I recalled out from under my fog), a fact which you would think I would connect by now with habitual chaos.  If you smell moisture, be prepared to stay in one place for a very long time, because some idiot has invariably slammed into the guy in front of him.  As was the case, it turned out.  But I didn’t find that out until an hour later.

I (having been sorely afflicted by the frustration of things not functioning all day long) had decided Oh so misguidedly that I should take matters into my own hands, make a right turn off the one street to which I attach all my mental compass functions (Wilshire Boulevard) and venture out towards that street only a half mile down the road, which I was certain existed, named Olympic, and which I have often driven on in fact so I know it exists, but for some reason had removed itself from Los Angeles’ infrastructure, or perhaps even the planet, since my GPS didn’t see it either.  Off I drove on what appeared to be a simple right turn, and in three slight jogs I realized I was nowhere near anywhere I recognized.  This happens to me fairly often, since the 20% portion of the right hand side of my brain which should have been allotted to “Internal Compass” was reassigned just before birth to “Melodic Recognition and Tonal Memory.”   Which means if you want me to join your band, I can play just about anything you can hum for me in a couple of tries, but don’t ever let me drive the bus.

So this bozo was driving the bus back around and got stuck again going apparently EAST, (how did I do that?  It must have been that evil Santa Monica Boulevard, Sheryl Crow be damned), got stuck again in a queue, and soon enough discovered I was en route to the 405 freeway, the STUCKEST FREEWAY IN AMERICA.  I looked in vain for anything that would suggest which way I was facing and found a TESLA dealership sign (ah how science finds new ways to mock me) which suggested to me that I was facing exactly the opposite direction I should be heading.  AHA! said I, of course, sheng jing bing!, crossed wires again.  I made yet another right, and ended up under an overpass which was teeming with homeless men packing it in for the evening.  Is there anything else depressing you can add to this day?, I said to myself, after locking myself in and proceeding a few blocks further.  Dumb dumb dumb.  Should NOT have asked that.

Eventually seeing I was running out of gas, I turned into the one on the corner and filled up, after waiting for four cars (who all happened to have their tanks on the same side as mine) needed filling.  Off I went, certain I was heading in the right direction, which I was pretty sure was West.  But Los Angeles is not New York, and no fair grid exists.  Two blocks later it was apparent I’d been actually going North.  When I when I intersected with another No Choice But This Road situation, I was….. back at work.  Pretty much.  It was about a 45 minute circuit for nothing.

Hungry and angry and ready to go straight to wherever my dead mother was hiding and blame her for all my genetic shortcomings, I did what E.T. would do and phoned home. “I really REALLY have to get a physical compass, a BIG one that GLOWS IN THE DARK, for my car. Or a chauffeur,” I said, safely back on Wilshire Boulevard, which had emptied during my little impromptu tour.

Husband said he would work on it, encouraged me to stop and eat something since he knows how angry I get when my blood sugar plummets.  I opted for the quickest cheapest (only 10 dollars in my wallet) place near home.  About 40 minutes later, I was nearly there.  FIRETRUCK.  GIANT FIRETRUCK BLOCKING MY TACO BELL.  15 minutes after I nearly had a three alarm chili heart attack, I had rounded two corners more and finally ended up in their ordering line.  Mercifully, I was heard and ordered the food without a hitch.

Back on the way home now, only six more streets to go.  Light.  Another light.  Idiots clogging our neighborhood gas station and lined up out into the street because we have the lowest gas for miles around.  They HAD to broadcast that on the nightly news during the skyrocketing gas price crunch recently, and we’ve been invaded by cars from the entirety of the state since.  Around them.  Swing around the vegetable truck that always parks across the street, and click the garage gate opener.

NOTHING.  I’m at my OWN FRONT DOOR.  NOTHING.

I click in different directions, nothing.
I call the manager.  “Mail box full.”
I call Husband.  He comes down and uses the other clicker.  Nothing.
I’m going to call the police, a locksmith, the Governor, Sigourney Weaver with a flame thrower and a loader, SOMETHING.  FINALLY it opens inexplicably.

Then I spend the evening hour or two in a carbed out fog, wake up with indigestion at 1:00AM to an escaped pet rat, scramble around looking for her in a bunch of towels in the bathroom, find her and return her to prison, and wake up at 6:20 and come to work and I STILL HAVE NO DATABASE.

If there is a circle of Dante’s hell that didn’t get named, this is it, and it probably didn’t get named because unlike my fantastic luck, Dante never found his way out of the traffic jam.

I have a computer database that won’t accept any more entries and a lawyer who can’t spell the word “threat”, let alone “threatened”, and I am deeply, deeply, sad inside today.  But that has more to do with marriage and my inopportune proximity to Valentine’s day (tomorrow).  Last night we made a joke of struggling for a spot on the couch, and the topic of being the alpha dog came up.  He claims to be the alpha dog of the family.  Unfortunately so do I.  He said, basically, in so many passive-aggressive non-ways, But I am the alpha dog and you can’t be happy being the alpha dog.  Because I am the alpha dog.

I was just about to counter with, “But, I don’t want a submissive dog to my alpha-ness, I want an equal.”

But then I realized that the equal to equal is always a war with alpha dogs, isn’t it. And I realized how unhappy I am with it.  I am uncomfortable being controlled, I am uncomfortable and angry if I’m told I have to accept and not comment, and I’m furious if I’m told it will never change.
He pretty much said all those things within a couple of sentences, without even intending to piss me off.  In his offhand, alphadog automatic mode.

He said, “But I don’t argue with you because you always disagree with me anyway, so why should I continue?”
“But I’d rather we could communicate more anyway,”  I tried to say.  Don’t know if I said it that clearly as I have here.
“But I am me,” he said, “and I’m never going to be like that.  I’m not like _________.”

Never going to be like that, is what hit me.  I have set myself in a framework that is now an announced prison, with that statement.
I used to think he would flex with time.  But on this one point I’m not so sure.  He has moods where he becomes talkative, but he does not discuss much.  I don’t think he has a clue what romantic discussion is about or anything that would lead to it.  I don’t think actual emotional communication is even in his vocabulary.  He has only cried in front of me once, and that was when he was directly exasperated with me over some lack of communication we were having when he felt like I was still longing for someone I used to know, and I told him that was NOT the case and he dried right up.  I keep demanding communication, connection, closeness, and none of those things show any signs of coming any closer to my shores with time.  I let out my rope and let out my rope, and draw it in, and there’s nothing in the net.  Strangely, he doesn’t feel any lack.  He is content to live this way, laying our differences aside and ignoring so very much.

In the past, I would just close up shop, pack my stuff; chalk it up to being the wrong person, just move on.  But I’m 50 plus now.  I just recovered from ten years of artistic poverty by diving into a career disaster that should have panned out; and after a bunch of failed relationships, I just have SO little motivation to trust anyone or begin again.

But can I live with this alpha oppression and lonely obedience?  Can I just accept that things will never happen?  I wish I could push myself to feel intensely one way or the other; to motivate me to a liberation or a resignation.  But it’s really right up the middle.  It’s either “He drives me crazy, he does not love me, he knows not how to love anyone; I hate this”; or, “He’s a good man, he’s calm, he doesn’t demand much of me, he’s stable, he’s able, has no vices, he’s generally kind, I should be grateful.”

In Feng Shui, pink is the color best suited for things related to marriage, relationships, romance, because of its symbolism from the metal white and the red of fire.  Passionate flames forge a rigid metal into stronger, more resilient things.  I could choose a metal sword of white or the fire of red affections in the feng shui of it all.  But I cannot choose anything, I am pink.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask you after I found the kit in your bag that day.  You were already in the process of moving out after a three year relationship.

Why now?  was my first thought.  Why would you go to drugs, to cocaine or whatever it was that you were doing, maybe speed?, why now?  What did I do that drove you to it?  Or what was the deviation in you that wouldn’t allow you to take an honest route to a simpler life?  That was the first thought I had as I looked at the little zippered kit with its round circle of glass for a cutting surface and empty vials and the knife and other small curious items.  I was falling through the floor with a stomach full of lead and I wondered how you could have thought so little of me as to call me your mother in your head instead of your lover, and hide away this thing you were becoming, or had become.  What was it I did that made you keep me separate.  That made you decide I could not be trusted to love or help or do what you needed.  I wafted further and further away on a boat of confusion over the leaden sea, down and away and far.

Then later, they all came to me, in bits, over time.  The secrets.  It was almost as if I heard you confessing them to me in my subconscious, long after you were gone.

That day that we went to Canada and stopped into that dilapidated hotel you said a friend had recommended, but it didn’t look livable.  You went upstairs and I didn’t.  We left, you said it was ridiculous, we could get another hotel.  I paid for the hotel we finally chose, in part, and your mother ultimately paid the other half.  That little secret upstairs dawned on me later.  How you must have gone up to buy drugs.

Then there was Jeanine.  Such a fun friend the first time we went up there.  The clubs were so full then, all of us in our black and silver finery, it was such a time.  She was so perked and goofy and took us around and we met all these people, all of whom we didn’t meet again.  The next time we went up, Jeanine was no longer taking your calls, not interested, having gone so straight, so out of the club scene.  I didn’t know that included the reason she was connected with you, which was drugs.

There was the strange way you could sleep and sleep and sleep, and stay up and stay up and stay up.  I really should have known that was drugs.  My fault; I should have connected it, but I didn’t, I trusted you.  You kept it so well hidden.  You pretended to sleep when I was going to bed.  I knew you were struggling to wake up on the days when you couldn’t seem to lift yourself out of bed.  I got you up.  I actually liked it.  I kissed you, I cajoled you, I pulled on you.  I made you coffee.  I made a way for you to be normal.  When you were working or schooling, I made sure you got up.  But the work and the schooling on the side eventually fizzled, with your discontent, with your lack of focus, and ultimately with your own complete exhausted lack of interest.  I always wondered how much more you would have become if only you had let me know what you were dealing with.  If you had let us know why struggling through this wasn’t working.  All the opportunities you might have claimed, that I would have been happy to provide and support, but you wouldn’t let me, because you clung to your secret instead.

There was the nervous way you would get into repeating yourself when you were in a rant mood.  Everyone knew it.  Here he goes again.  No way of arguing with him in that mood.  It wasn’t a mood actually, and I talked you down and tried to have patience each time it happened.  Because I cared for you.  I cared what others thought of you.  But even I couldn’t keep caring when you assailed even me and my beliefs.  It seemed only to give you pleasure to win on your chosen point, in a crazed, unfazed way.  Now when I think of this, I’m only saddened, and I wonder whether you even heard what I’d had to say in any of it.  It was nothing but a big argumentative fog that we couldn’t get out from under.

There was the “friend” we went up to see in Canada who claimed he would put us up and then backed out.  Why exactly did he back out I wondered?  You made a large furious episode of it.  But I could only wonder, did he refuse you because of the drugs?  Or had he only been willing to give you some, and this had all just been a huge pretext for getting some, and then we were again on our way, with me footing the bill for where we stayed?

There was the lice episode that turned the house upside down with cleaning for two days.  In all my life I had heard of it, but never seen any, never known anyone who could be anywhere where they could be caught.  Only much later that little tinkling connection was made in my head.  You. You had been somewhere you shouldn’t. You brought them home.

But what makes me furious is that it makes me doubt everything now.  All the beautiful things I experienced with you are suspect now.  The things you bought me.  The morning when you were asleep, when your hair lay on the pillow in the windowlight like a drawing by Alphonse Mucha.  The sleeping image of you that I cherished.  Were you just…. under?  It all became a sad doubt.

The nosebleeds that I nursed you with.  You claimed it was your mother’s Chinese medicine.  Of course.  Why didn’t I realize it.  Now all the care and worry, I realize was misspent.

We went to the dermatologist together.  Both of us had problems, but yours…. how much of it was just self-inflicted?  Psoraisis is worsened or bettered by internal effects.  Now I can’t know if all the effort I put in to helping you with it was worth anything, or just running around in circles.

The time I begged you to quit smoking.  You tried, and the one day you came in to me, looking wild-eyed and desperate, like you were going through drug withdrawal.  I had thought it was the cigarettes, gave you a massage, put you to sleep.  Guess what?  It Was drug withdrawal.

The only thing I can gather that helps at all comes from this moment.  Maybe you did try, for me, a little.  But you couldn’t keep it up.

But the worst is that, after you had gone and there was nothing left, I came to realize I would never know whether or when you had actually loved me.  If you had.   I would never know if you were You when you made me the silver valentine box, when you hugged me in the kitchen, when you called me little names, when we danced, I can never be sure anymore who was talking.  I can never know if you were really with me at all.  I suspect that you loathed something in yourself so much that you never really knew how I thought of you, that I actually adored the way you looked, and moved, and felt in my hands, and that I tried to see your way for you out of that tiny place you were living in in your past.  How I wanted you to be present with me. But you pulled away.

I have heard you’re much worse now.  Worse drugs came to you later.  Your family finding out, rehab, identity crises, arrests, your child birthed by someone you never really could maintain, and given to adoption, further problems, and how all of it came slamming back to you.

So I can only hope that no matter what you have become by now, at least you know that I was really there, that I would have helped, that I would have loved.  Because I did love you.  Perhaps you’ll connect that sometime.  Maybe you wanted me to see you and discover it, and hated me for not seeing it.  Maybe you hated me for being so facile.  But let me say that my lack of touching the bottom and seeing the darkness was because I saw only the hopes for you.  Maybe you can fault me, since they were My hopes for you and not yours.  That’s true.  But you didn’t give me the truth.  And I loved the truths I did know about you.  I loved your fragility (even though I didn’t know how devastating it would become).  I loved the way you styled yourself and lived your own fantastic idea of life, no matter how outlandish anyone thought it was.  I loved that you treated me preciously when we were together the first two years.  I loved that person I knew as you.  And of course there was the best sex either of us had ever had.  I was entranced with you, the way you had loved me, the way you looked when you danced, the funny small things we shared only between us.  I was just in love with you.  That was all.

Just after I found that kit, I called your brother.  Not to rat on you, but to tell him to help you, because you were already lost to me.  He told me that I shouldn’t worry, you would never be that stupid, I had nothing to worry about.  I hear he’s not speaking to you anymore.

He also told me that day that I should remember that love was just “chemicals in the brain.”  That’s how he put it.  It broke my heart to hear it, because that meant no one would know the truth of what I’d felt.  But all these years later, I can tell  you, it’s not.  No matter what became of you, I can still give you one sure gift.  The love I gave you then was real.  Very real.  You can know that now, now matter what’s become of you.  I have no sympathy for your bad choices, and a great deal of bitterness over the sadness you caused others, but the love I felt for the person I knew to be true underneath everything, I still love if only in a memory.  I’m sorry to see you go away bit by bit.  Though the rest might grow unrecognizable, I will always remember that person, and love that one, that him, the you I knew.  I did love him.

I’m really sad lately.  Desolately sad.  It’s not like it was before where there was so much stress and I knew a lot of it was my lack of success and my necessarily empty job.  this is different.  Now I just feel so pointless.  Bereft.  I don’t really actually try to think about it, but a hundred times a day I wonder,

Why is this me? Why am I me?  Why did I end up like this? 

Why do I have no one who actually really wants me, loves me, wishes for only me?  Why is there no one who sees this?  Sees, really sees me? 

How did I never have a child?  I only wanted the best for my child’s situation, but the situations got worse and worse and then there was nothing, and now all I have is a strange old form where I used to be, and too old a body to have anyone come from me.  And even if there were someone else’s child, it would not be for me, it would not be from me nor for me, because I would always know it was going to wonder who made it.  I would love it, but it wouldn’t necessarily love me back, even if it were from me, anyway.  But I miss it.  I miss the little things I would have had.  Small shoes, little wrists on a swing, a happy inexplicable feeling.  A feeling that no matter what, I would have a need, a point, a conscience, a consciousness, that there would be no choosing whether to go on or not.  Not like now. 

I can’t tell anyone this; they don’t have anything they could say that would help and it would just upset them.   Especially the ones with children.  But the more I test the people I love in small ways, the more I realize I am peripheral to them now.  I really don’t need them because they really don’t much need me. And yet I need someone, something, all the time, deeply, and it’s never going to be met.  I can’t fill up the hole, it’s just too big, and nothing they will say will make it disappear.  It just keeps bothering and paining me all the time, and I just want out of this whole framework that makes me so constantly troubled with it, so aching all the time, so longing for that kind of thing I could just stop and be calm in.  That calm is just gone.  I knew it for a little while, but it wasn’t true.  It just left. When I try to mention anything of it, it’s just too big for them to discuss with me, I’m just too much weight, too difficult.  I just want a quiet safe place where they will all let me be the real person I was meant to be, and I am wonderful inside and not hurting constantly, and that place is not here, not here anywhere. The place where I am seen. I feel certain I am someone else, not this.  Not here. Not like this.

I know, I know, other people around me have life threatening illnesses, or have custody battles, or have new life changing chaos invading at every turn (infants being only some of that).  Jobs lost, great fortunes emaciated into hollow assurances, yada yada. Roofs falling through, yes I know.  But today I want to whine about something no one else thinks important enough to whine about.  I’m fully cognizant that this is going to be a self-indulgent passage.  I think in this case I deserve to be indulged.

That topic is: that nobody is ever really making an effort to physically see me anymore.

I have become an underage shut-in practically, and that is in part due to two problems as I see it.  Ok three.  Well maybe four.  Ok there are just a bunch.

1) No one I met while living here (that I want to come visit me) lives here anymore.  Anyone I met in the last four years who I actually liked has vanished without a trace or made themselves so successful as to be completely unavailable.  While San Francisco is a town of transients who never leave, this town is a city of movers and shakers who vanish every three months, it seems.  And oh yeah, the successful types are now all scrambling to hold on to what’s LEFT of that, so they’re even more busy this year, for sure.

2) None of the people who come to L.A. ever seem to arrive with the sole agenda of visiting me.  It’s always Disneyland, Universal Studios, a job offer, a gig, a gem show, the morgue, who knows, all I know is it’s me that ends up second.   Can I give them another call on Sunday and they’ll see if we can at least hit a Starbucks?  Ya. Whatever.

3) All of my true friends who are sincerely happy to see me are completely broke, and have always been broke because they are generally artists, screenwriters, musicians, intellectual perpetual students, entrepreneurs, or want to change the world and donate almost all of their time pro bono.  They are the diamonds in life, the substance of my life itself, but somehow none of them ever manage to have that guy with the giant cardboard check arriving at their door every week so they can get on a plane and see me.  I, with my hands soiled from being a minion of the Evil Kingdom, must appear on their doorsteps to become purified.

4) The rest of the worthy and devoted friends have all decided to simultaneously shower the surface of the earth with a rain of newly popped-out progeny.  They are much too incoherent from 3:00 feedings to give me a conversation that makes much sense.  They generally start any phone call with OMG!! HOW ARE YOU, (bouncing), and then discuss the joys of their new infant for 10 minutes (which is fine by me, I’m all for being an informed Auntie), and then OPpps!!, gotta go, they’re:
( [checkbox] screaming)
( [checkbox] pooping)
( [checkbox] needing a burp)
( [checkbox] going to fall off the couch and split their head open)
( [checkbox] getting into the drawers), etc.

When you hang up mid-breath, you realize nothing ever got said.  At all. And you go back to wondering who else you can wake up from a comatose post-feeding nap.

5) Then there are the Facebook Myspace Friendster Yahoo connections who insist on Twittering you every two minutes with the details of their projects or meals, but have no inclination to every actually hold a conversation with you in the first place.  They probably have befriended you for the sake of
a) shamelessly promoting their business endeavors
b) showing you their rugrat pictures
c) showing you how many exotic places they visited instead of your dump of a town
d) giving you glib comments about their great life so as to appear more glamourous
e) figuring if they knew your high school friend, you must be someone they’ve momentarily forgotten; what the hell;
f) sending you lots of cartoon icons instead of actually verbalizing; or
g) actually remembering your name from high school, and after two sentences, putting you on their forward lists for e-mails that promote a, b, or c and somehow will inexplicably invite you to increase your penis size later.

I guess I have a couple of things I could do to regain my connections.  I could:

1) Win the lottery;
2) Make a scene on Oprah or Dr. Phil (oh but then I’d have lots of Unwanted friends);
3) Start hiring myself to clean my friends’ houses instead of my current job;
4) Become a acclaimed supernanny; or
5) Write something very long, informative, warm and heartfelt, and hire a helicopter to drop it over the Marianas trench, and see if something intelligent responds.

I think number 5 is my best shot.

I’m in a strange musical frame of mind lately, growing more and more interested in things I find north of the Tropic of Cancer….don’t know if this is in subliminal response to my growing distaste for heat of any kind, but anyway:  These two bands (can you call them bands?) are something I’ve found interesting.

How typical of me. Royksopp (without its appropriate umlaut over the first o there) has been around for almost 10 years now and somehow I never bumped into these two guys until a stupid Geico ad played them in the background.  Electronic music from Norway I’d been around was usually deep dark death metal, nothing light and poppy — and while Royksopp’s tunes are somewhat light and poppy, they hold on to the poetic mood-ly-ness of the northern things I’ve heard.  Yes, I can say moodlyness if they can say Royskopp, which is a jargonistic pronunciation of their word for a puffball mushroom.  Am I getting obscure?  Yes, they are.  Can you tell I’m bored with conventional music?  Of course.  But HEY.  Besides their flowing electronic pulse, their videos have been winning huge awards for years.  Just go to YouTube and pull up “Remind Me”  or “Eple” to check out their little visual journeys.  Well worth looking.

Then across a mere ridge or two is the Swedish band (you can call percussionists that, yes) who is relatively new, Detektivbyran

Detektivbyran

(without its necessary circular dot over the a) who are three guys in great debt of Yann Tiersen, the French (Oh ya, that name sounds very Breton, don’tcha think, oh ya), guy who did the music for the movie Amelie.  If you loved the music from Amelie, and/or have a pentient for dark waltzes like I do, these guys are for you. I like both their albums - there are only two plus a couple EPs that I know about so far.  Besides, how can you resist guys who bounce around tapping neatly on vibraphones and glockenspiels while wearing hightops, or have a lead accordionist with a name like Anders Flanders.  BIG wins all around.  Go buy some.

Day 1 Thinking About Thanksgiving

A disturbing thing has happened.  I don’t know if it’s a life borne of good fortune that has caused it, or a hedonism pushed past the breaking point, or age doing a number on my phermones or hormones or endorphins or whatever, but Something is making me unduly disinterested in the daily joys I used to experience while eating, preparing, cooking, experimenting with, or even looking at, food.  

How can this happen to me???

I can’t eat or cook with any real interest any more. I never would have believed it would happen to me — ME!  Me that developed from a kid who couldn’t even open a soup can at age 12 to a complimented provider of ethnic or homespun feasts at 30?  Me that loved food so much that even saltines and lemonade were something to be savored while watching cartoons.  Me, that people used to say “Where does she put it?” about after a good meal when seconds disappeared from my plate.  

I heard of this happening to women who cook for years and years. It happened to my mom, but I’d always assumed that was because she had the culinary chops of an accountant on meth with only a flamethrower where the stove should have been.  My grandmother actually supplemented the family incoming baking for local restaurants and was county-famous, but later in her years she just “forgot how.”  Alzheimer’s?  Nope, before that.  Long before that.  They just got…. bored.  Just … before Valley Speak happened, “so Done with this.”

I should feel like fall, like Thanksgiving, like YAY I’m going to go to another city and cook for my friends.  

I’m so not feeling… anything.  PANIC.

Day 2 Thinking About Thanksgiving

How can it happen to Me?

This is a situation that creates trivial problems and real problems both. 

Trivially speaking, it makes me nervous since I’ve been asked to cook my usual Thanksgiving dinner for a couple of friends at holiday time, in an unfamiliar kitchen.  It’s been how many years since I did Thanksgiving for a group??? At least five.  

I am dreading it now.  I can see the near future: me trying to sweep the mental cobwebs away from the order in which I used to make all the side dishes, trying to remember all the stuffing ingredients while actually AT the grocery instead of going back three times for forgotten crucial items.  

THEN, braving a kitchen where I’m basically going to be playing a game of What’s behind door number 3? with each cabinet.  Oh what have we here?. Another almost-empty bachelor cupboard with some tea, or some condiments, or some mismatched bowls in it.  It will be a vast wasteland of jelly jars and three year old half-eaten boxes of granola and maybe an errant can of clams, where I’ll desperately be trying to prepare my miracle.  Roasting pan?  HAH!  Breadcrumbs?  ummmmm, well there’s some frozen rolls in the freezer maybe (nervous grin from my clueless host).  Spatula?  Um, he used to have one of those… Oi I need a strategy.  I can’t think about this now. 

Day 3 Thinking About Thanksgiving

But wait. 

I pause.  

Actually, I can do this.  Even without my memory.  I just remembered.  No one cares.

I’m going to have to do the short form.  Something I dread, but I suddenly realize now will be just fine in their eyes, because, the truth is, they don’t know Thanksgiving like I knew it.  No one’s the same anymore anyway.  They’d all be fine with sushi and some sort of protein replacement tofu burger in the stuffing, they could care less.  It’s like the beginning of Home for the Holidays where you’re panning through an airport terminal just before a busy Thanksgiving weekend and some beleaguered enormously tall black guy is whining into the payphone, “Mom!  Mom!!!  You don’t…. Mom, I can’t eat that stuff anymore!” 

It will be the edited Jenny Craig version:  Which kind of grilling technique in the barbecue would it be instead of how many butter-basted hours.  Too much fat!  Which kind of fresh steamed green instead of the au gratin green beans or baked spinach! Too rich!; No one will want the homemade cranberry orange-zested cinnamon sauce I used to make.  Too much sugar. Which kind of braised squash instead of the garlic and double-cheese-baked potatoes! Good God no!~; what kind of quick frozen bought yogurt pie they would consider eating, not my fantabulous overly spiced gingery pie with vanilla honey ice cream. Too much sugar.   No one will care that I didn’t make piecrust.  No one will care there are no cream brioche rolls.  No one will KNOW it isn’t Thanksgiving. 

Now if I can just hide behind this handkerchief and convince myself we should all just skip it and go to Pinkberry.

Day 4 Thinking About Thanksgiving

But WAIT!!!  NOOOOOOOO!!!! I can’t!!!  I CAN’t.  

I owe it to Madine and her legacy of culinary nirvana. 

Oh god, Madine.  Can’t forget her.  My tastebuds can’t.

I studied your work with such admiration.  It was you who did it, the first black woman who ever invited me into her home and let me know with no ifs ands or buts that they Cared About Their Cooking.  She cooked for my friends’ rooming house at college, and she was an EXpert.  EXtra everything.  Her house at Thanksgiving was a shrine to food.  I had never laid eyes on such a spread, ever, anywhere, not in any church-given Christmas feast, not at any wealthy relative’s house, not at any party I had ever been to.  

Not only was it all amazing to look at, it was all the most superbly flavored and interesting spin on regular dinner fare I’d ever had.  And not one item of it was store-bought; she had baked and cooked everything.  The sauces, the breads dusted with crunchy seeds, the gravies (two kinds!), the piecrust hand-fluted, the au jus steaming, the toppings, the flaky fluffy rolls, Macaroni and cheese? Wow!  not like any I’d had!  The herbed butter, the awesome chew of the cookies, the cake with its buttercream sweetness, the pies - a cloud of meringue and a savory mousse-like sweet potato, and some apple with gorgeous latticework top, it was unbelievable. The honey-glazed salty-ham shank, the amazing roasted chestnut turkey, the quintessentially perfect mashed garlic potatoes.    Lasagna??? When did she find time??  I have never been astounded by anyone’s cooking but twice in my life, and this was the first time. The second was famous and French.  And Madine’s Thanksgiving dinner beat it out, on only a couple minutes’ deliberation.  

She will not go unforgotten, and I’m sure her grandbabies are all grown up now and I really sincerely hope they are not eating sushi on Thanksgiving.  Because at least one day of the year, your Grandmomma would like to know that you knew what GOOD was. 

Madine, I promise, they are at very least, not getting away without your double-baked potatoes.  Honestly.  Salut!

Things I would have rather been: 

1) A vampire superhero.  That way I would have retained my gorgeous form, youth and vigor whilst fighting crime by slurping up dangerous criminals for sustenance.  Would have gotten more history under my belt.  Definitely would have known where the Karpathians were.  And would have been sincerely glad to part with the the common cold.  Can you imagine how long that would last?  a minute.  Less!  That would be totally WORTH it. To be a vampire means you never need to carry Kleenex.

2) After driving by the new condo site we see going up incrementally every day, I’ve decided being a flagperson is my new goal in life.  When you are confronted by your firms’ clever sidestepping about facts concerning Sur-response to a Motion for Dismissal you should be scanning and e-mailing back to a CEO who even the most wiley lawyer in your firm would probably not spit on, the purity of wiping your grimey neck while standing in a street holding a stop sign just appears to be a cleaner way of life.

3) Glenda the Good Witch of the North.  Just being able to laugh like a bird and taunt “Rubbish!” was good; but the DRESS.  Oh yes. Not to mention that I was sincerely drawn to celluloid in all its forms, cellophane, and lucite after that crown appeared.  What a great seduction, glittering transparency.

4) I’d have made a fabulous Red Queen.  It’s pretty much what I do now, say “Off with their heads” a lot.  Have to find a flamingo or two.

5) A set builder for a Harry Potter film.  But of course I’d rather live in the set, and then they would probably have sent me to the Happy Home after inhaling all that Super88.  Not so good.  But I would have been happy!

6) A sleep experiment participant.  They could monitor me for weeks, I’d just keep on catching up.

7) My dog.  I know I would have been well-loved.

8 ) Clara Bow.  She was not only the idol of every girl of her day, she was the start of true seduction on film.  And who could resist the cute little black bob haircut with the big wicked eyes.  Awesome. Icons today just…. run around having illegitimate kids with weird names.  It’s just not the same. 

9) Anyone who lives in those little houses on the coast in Positano.

10) Steve Jobs.  Only with hair.

This is how I felt only two days ago:

“I will tell you now, I do not want to blog anymore. 

I felt very self-assured about the purpose of this when I began and its therapeutic bullshit premise, but that was before there were strangers.  

I never intended this blog for strangers.  I write with an eye to all the world, to everyone else, but I don’t want one of those everyone elses in my face making me feel uncomfortable that I disclosed a biological fact to them.  I don’t want to be responsible for for my reaction.  I don’t want to suffer the crawling under the ground feeling.  I don’t want any more pain  or awkwardness or disappointment, because that: is what this blog was supposed to VENT, as in LET OUT.  

I do not want it coming back in my face doublefold.  I am not interested in being someone’s peculiar specimen.   Fuck you all. ”

Of course, this was followed by:

1) A check in the mail from a contractor boss who practically kissed my feet for writing, researching and finishing a huge ‘Welcome to Snohomish County, WA’ brochure; 

2) an attorney who actually laughed at my joke sometime mid-morning, and

3) two days later, by someone writing to me whom I had not seen since 8th grade and who, completely unsolicited, told me they were very interested in my blog and would go back to read more later.  

Such a smiling useless kvetcher I am.