In Twilight Regalia

I am burning up.  I’m not talking this time about the fact that we’re million years old carbon or anything, not like the meteorites. But maybe it’s part of the reason the global warming issue is having special meaning for me.

(This is such an asinine topic, I think to myself.  What have I been driven to.)

But no one who is not inside my skin seems to understand what the hell is going on.  Not really.  Most all my friends are younger by a mile.

I’m so hot that I’m not thinking straight, but I have to say it.

People will make fun of me if I say it. They do, you know.

But the truth is, menopause makes you loopier than a Great Pyrenees with fleas.  You are going into a furry blurry death spiral and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I’m sweating so much I can’t put makeup on in the morning.  Liquid makeup turns into watercolor puddles that don’t smooth out.  The undermost layer of my hair has been stuck to my neck for weeks.  I’ve thrown all the polyester out of my wardrobe.  It doesn’t make any difference.  I’m radiating so much that a bra is overload.

For a while, I thought that the heat I felt was just within my own sentient self; that no one else would feel it.  It was just my reaction to life in the southern sun of California.  Ya, even in the dark.

NO.

My husband put his hand on the couchback against which my kidneys had recently been pressed (I was pulling myself off it, panting to the floor to collapse and flail out all limbs to allow for air flow, like a starfish flopping on the carpet).

It was BURNING UP.  He asked if I had a fever.

No dear, just me.  Just me flaming forward into the universe.

There’s a feeling that accompanies it — it’s the thing that wakes you up at night, not just the mere, sheer force of wanting to escape the heat.

It’s a sort of whirling YIKES sensation, rather like the feeling you get when something pulls you STRAIGHT UP suddenly into the blue on an Oct-o-pus ride at an amusement park, or a very fast elevator in Sears Tower.  It makes you inhale because you literally brace yourself.  You know it’s starting again.

Here we go!  HANG ON!!

You feel like a 10-ton pressure of prickly hot embarrassment flush compounded with a washover of UGGGGGGHHHHHH I’m being turned into a PPPPPPAAAAAANNNNCAKKKEEEE.  And when you’re at the bottom and you feel certain you might be able to fit through a mail slot, you realize you need to TAKE OFF ALL YOUR CLOTHES.  NOW.

But you can’t. So you turn on a fan, if you’re lucky to be sitting near one, or lying next to one in bed (which will be on continuously for the next 5 years). (Buy a good one.)

If you can’t turn on the AC in the car or immediately throw yourself in the nearest Italian fountain, since you’re already a coin’s width, you might as well be prepared for the comments you will receive:

“Are you ok?  You look sick.” (Actually, I always look like this anymore.  The teenager in my head is protesting it too, trust me.)

“It’s chilly in here, aren’t you?”  (Ah, so that’s why I’ve been functioning so well.)

“Please, there’s no need to be anxious.”  (No, really, it’s just me grimacing over the fact that I’m quietly combusting.)

“Are you expecting?”  (Thanks, no; it’s just the belly fat that’s compounding my inability to ventilate.  But thanks for thinking I’m that young.)

“Wow, have you been running?”  (No, actually at that point I would be turning a bright red color and wouldn’t still be in 4-inch heels, fool.)

“You should really check out my Weight Watchers book, it’ll help a lot.”  (Can I just hit you a small bit, right there?)

“Hormones suck, but I just got on the program with the progesterone, now I’m good.”  (I’ll see that you get flowers in the cancer ward in 2020, dear.)

“Have you tried Black Cohosh?  Works for me.”  (Yes, but it’s not all that effective; and I keep forgetting that I have to take it.  And then I forget to stop taking it, since you’re only supposed to take it for a short period of time.)

“I know this great herbalist…” (Oh GAWWWWD… here we go….)

But the most fun occurs when you get asked questions involving your short-term memory, which no longer exists, since you spend your nights waking up drenched, rolling over throwing off a blanket or sheet, falling slightly asleep, discovering you’re now freezing, throwing on the blanket, falling slightly asleep, waking up steaming and wretching, and lather-rinse-repeat.  Not to mention having to take a leak a couple times.

Your short-term memory on the average day after such a bout (particularly after two or three nights of this) is really a crap shoot.

Your synapses have entirely gone Helen Keller on you.

Your boss might say: “Remember the Vantage contract paragraph that went through three sets of revisons and we had changes to that third revision?  Where is that?”

And your first instinctive mental reply, having been pulled from some rusting, exhumed mental file cabinet by your myopic midget memory who, after a long waddle down a dimly lit passageway, standing for a bit with thumbs hooked in his belt, scratching his balding head, and fumbling with a boney finger through some dustbunnies and a flinging mouse, and finally holding up a yellowed crumbling card, would read: “Darling argyle funnel fruitbat??”

At which point your external reply to cleverly buy time would be:

“I’m sure I have it here, I’ll bring it in to you.”  

(Thankfully you still possess a rational superego that can still process on some basic survivalist level.  Lying to one’s mother in childhood actually proves a useful ingrained resource once again.)

But your dripping swamp of a face would show you’re lying. 

It is too busy responding to your internal metabolism that is dancing clockwise chanting WOOOGUM-OOOGUM BRROO-HOO HA-HA, WOOOGUM-OOOGUM BROU-HOO HA-HA, you’re going to come out just the right degree of tenderness if we poke you with a stick into this pot just a little bit further.

In short, you are doomed. 

You realize this is your body’s way of getting you ready for the torments of old age. 

Not the physical ones - but the external ones: The blows that come from people who will no longer have any respect for you as a human being and will treat you like the blithering fool you have inexplicably, helplessly become.  People who will make remarks about just leaving you out on the ice.

People who will laugh when you put a 911 autodial button on your cell phone screen.

Hahahhahahahaaa!  They will point and jeer.  “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”  Hahahhahahahaaa!  What idiot can’t dial 911!

Hahahahahahahaaaaa.  Why would you need that?!!!

Hahaha.

Ha.

And then they will see your furious red dripping face with the flaring nostrils and slightly skewed look in the eyes from 3 hours’ sleep and they will leave you alone.

Forever, quite possibly. 

It will get you acclimated to your new life of peace and solitude, and basket weaving.

That’s what it’s for. 

I’m beginning to think that all people past a certain number of years spent twirling around this planet start to act doubtful of good. I know that that feeling is hitting me hard. Maybe I can just blame it on age? Or maybe not. Maybe this time, it’s well-founded fears.

It’s a measure of our strength (or some say, delusion) at the end. Do we believe in life, in goodness, in God, in harmony, in LOVE? Are we able to pull through every insane thing in our lifetimes and say, yes, I know LOVE is really all there is and it is permanent and enduring and supremely healing? It beats everything that’s going on before my human eyes here.
Or do we aquiesce to fear, dread, doom?

I’m besieged with things that make me feel absolute doom lately: colossal things that shouldn’t upset me in the middle of the night. I think perhaps others are worried by these same things, but I wonder if they worry as much as I do. The question keeps coming back to me, Is it Just Me??? Or is life really, really, REALLY going under this time? Because I am beginning to think so, against all my life’s hopes and previously accepted sureties and it makes me question all faith. I am talking not about my own life anymore, I am talking about the world. I am talking about the physical phenomenon recently called global warming; I am talking about the redundancy of human endeavors to make change, good, fail, and go to war yet again. I am talking about life as we know it. I am talking about the fact that everything that once seemed as if it would always be there — like polar bears — a piece of a child’s reality — might one day be gone. With heat, or under water, or with a total global equatorial imbalance.

When was the last time I saw a fire fly? Perhaps 40 years ago. I am not even sure they still exist.

When was the last time I saw a milkweed pod in prairie grass? Again, over 40 years ago.

Stuff is disappearing. The opportunity to go out and find those things used to be disappearing, but now, even the stuff is disappearing. Even if you look.

The rate at which stuff is disappearing is really alarming me.
The heat waves are alarming me.
The constant building and paving over our planet, daily chewing up land that held forest, is alarming me. The lack of attention paid to an alternative to gasoline engines is bothering me. And I’m no rabid-for-change 20 year old. I’m not a joiner. I’m no card-carrier. And I’m telling you now, this is affecting us. This is alarming.

There was a day in particular when this worry first came to me, I can remember clearly. I mean, all my life my mother had been saying, repeatedly, “We just don’t seem to have winters like we used to when I was a girl…” and everyone had ignored it as foggy nostalgia. But I realized on one day in 1999 or so that she was right; and not only that, but that something even more out of control might be happening. This is my secret fear that might be ridiculous, but might be possible eventually. That we might attempt to control our weather.

On that day in 1998 or 9 or whenever it was (I really wish I could recall the exact date because it was strikingly strange), in a place in California where it NEVER OCCURS, a huge temperature swing in one day occurred. The temperature went from a typically cool standard evening up through an unseasonably hot morning of perhaps 80 degrees, and it just kept climbing. It rose to over 110 that day in places near us, and it rose so fast that everything seemed to stop still in the acridity. It got quiet. Things hid. We all hid.

This might not sound like an unusual temperature to someone from the valley in southern California or Death Valley in Arizona, but that was just it: This area, with its green vegetation and seacoast and such, NEVER had seen this kind of heat, and not in a rise of 30 degrees in a single day. There were no hot Santa Ana winds in that region. It was freakish. It was killing. It continued through the night, with no seawind coming to the rescue as usually happened at night. It stood there, baking us all. I remember standing in the yard that day and looking up at the setting sun and actually worrying that perhaps something was truly, truly wrong. It was suspicious, just by its sheer suddenness. It made me wonder, was the military experimenting with something that could alter the atmosphere from space or something? This is like, some kind of scary test, right? Where they demonstrate to some super-power head of state that, hey, look what we can do now! This is the latest in weaponry. Heat this place up beyond tolerable with our giant microwave laserforce! Huh? Oh, ok, we’ll turn it off now.

And just like that, the next day, the temperature dropped back to its normal range.
Nothing was said about it in the papers. A few people died. They mention that every time there is a heat wave, but it seemed very odd to me that no one mentioned that extremity combined with that severe brevity. I checked the papers. They were all silent on it. I fully expected someone to mention it publicly, but no one did. I have never forgotten how off it seemed. I still wonder about it.
Perhaps it was not the military, but just the first evidence of the warming that actually made at least me, personally, aware.

This is the first time in my life that I can stare into, really see the potential drastic death of my planet. And still I can’t accept it.

Other generations have seen global war that seemed as if God himself had died and left us all.
Is this something that we will pull through, like that? Can it ever be like the 1940s that evaporated into the 1950s and suddenly peace returned and prosperity once again blossomed and life went on? Or like the 1960s when everyone thought culture and civilization was turning tribal, but then it just mellowed back into normalcy? Is it going to be one of those things? Or …. not?

Will we never recover if all the cities that are built on our beautiful coasts are submerged? Think of it: Venice, New York, the entire south of France, Miami, Shanghai, New Orleans? Those places will all be gone? They will if things continue. And far far faster than we realize. Like, drastic changes taking place in the next 10 years. DRASTIC changes in the next 50. Like we could all be dinosaurs. Gone, into strata.

If we don’t find a way to change our entire management of our atmosphere. Together, not just as a nation, but as a planet. This entire system of the oil based empires of the planet must change.

It’s time to put the bombs and guns DOWN, people. We have no time for that.
There’s really No Time. I mean it.

And I realize with some relief, I cannot acquiesce to doom.

Not an option.

What is it with Asians and Bob Dylan. I do not get it.
Is it that microtonality is not lost on them?
Is it that he’s an icon from the past and they’re just lagging by 5 decades?
Do they know that ain’t isn’t a actually a word?
Do they know that “ain’t” doesn’t “come natural” to a Jewish boy named Zimmerman?
Is it that his lyrics are simple to decode and tell poetic stories?
Is the poetry even evident to them once it’s transliterated?
Is it that you never have to tune your guitar to anything different?
Or maybe go without tuning it entirely?
Is it that he sings about American places and things?
Do they sound like real places? Because they aren’t here anymore.
Is it that so many college age Asian kids own acoustic guitars and his work is facile to play?
Is it that they Actually think they can attempt singing his stuff?
With no Rs?
Do they just think harmonicas sound interesting??? American?
Or maybe,

Just maybe,

It’s that he was an arrogant new rebellion art-fop sonovabitch who didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone else thought.
And they,
in their little tightclamped officedrone England’s-quiet-desperation-ain’t-got-nothing-on-us bow and don’t speak and squirrel it away until your manga lets it out or you commit some horrific murder kind of lives,
would DIE to be someone like that.

But really, folks,
I am so DONE with this. It’s been happening since I was gaining on my blistered fingerpads.
Little Japanese school girls idolizing my Martin and asking me if I can sing his tunes for them.
Dorky Chinese exchange students listing him as their all-time FAY-BO-rite.
Enduring kumbaya renditions of him by teenagers who can’t sing by the ocean around campfires,
or was it the mountains, I can’t remember,
or was it the drunk guy on that other trip?
Was it me? Did they get me drunk?
or with that stupid math guy that always shows up with the seriously messed up guitar.
He messed it up on purpose like that.
Moms who tell me he well HE’s the EXCEPTION, I mean, of course we like Bobby…..
Bob Dylan playing underneath extraneous Korean soap dramas in the middle of fights between mother-in-laws.
Bob Dylan being whispered by French recordings in shops in Kyoto.
Bob Dylan as Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan as Kimiko as Bob Dylan
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

My husband downloads music from various msnbc surreptiously-Disney-owned WB fluff hardrock chart related multiconglomerate trashbin sites and never remembers what it is that he’s downloaded for free, it’s just new fodder for him to bounce around in his absent-minded musical rummage sale space. The last one is a compilation of every second-rate singer on the planet doing covers of Bob Dylan tunes (no it’s not from the movie I’m Not There) and as I’m listening to Sunny Goodge Street for the hundredth bazillionth time it just gives me a sharp jab in the cerebrum to recall the opportunities I had to say,
NO, I don’t care if you call me back
when I won’t give up my friends for you,
and I can’t understand what you just said,
can you please put a verb in it,
and there is no container on the planet that will contain the smell of kimchee
and I know it, but I’m going to kill you if you don’t find a new place for that shit while I’m eating chocolate cake,

and IF YOU MAKE THAT SNORKING NOISE IN THE BATHROOM AGAIN I’M BUYING A GUN.
SERIOUSLY.
AND TURN THAT SHIT OFF.

1)
Place: Bus Stop in Front of a museum.
Time: Saturday night around 1:00 a.m.
Siting: Obviously homeless person, drunk Mexican guy, Blonde Hilton Clone, Masai Chieftan in full tribal plaid wrap with circular bone in nose, and two Korean students. Just… waiting for the bus.

2)
Place: Starbucks Brentwood
Time: Saturday around 10:00a.m.
Siting: Val Kilmer and 13 year old son Jack. Just ordering.

3)
Place: Office Lobby near DSW Shoes
Time: 2:30 pm
Siting: The best 20 foot square painting by Laddie John Dill ever, that no one ever really sees much, since it’s just on their way to work.

4)
Place: Beverly Hills at Wilshire
Time: 7:30p.m. on a Friday
Siting: Opening on the sidewalk amid flashes and paparazzi of The Posh Puppy pet store, sporting an enormous photo in the window of a maltese wearing a rhinestone crown.

5)
Place: Ethiopian Restaurant
Time: 12:30pm on a Wednesday
Siting: Irishman and Obviously Iranian Guy sharing a business lunch. Irish guy was SO NOT EATING THE FOOD. Were they just mapping out gun running?

6)
Place: Sunset & Ivar
Time: 9pm on a Sunday
Siting: Burly guy in a yellow tutu and sneakers. No purse.

7)
Place: Beverly Hills at Wilshire
Time: 10:00 am or so on a Saturday two weeks after number 4.
Siting: Real Estate Sign in window of empty Posh Puppy store. Busted for using puppy mill dogs.
Place: Nordstrom’s
Time: Saturday afternoon
Siting: Three beautiful women’s faces engulfed by muslim burquas peering in the Nike display window.

9)
Place: Physical Therapy office
Time: Wednesday, 4:00p.m.
Siting: I meet a physical therapist who not only is the son of a Soviet rocket fuel scientist, but also just happens to be the brother in law of Alien Sex Fiend’s Nick Fiend. How far removed is That?.

10)
Place: Office
Time: Wednesday morning
Siting: General Counsel of Giant International Company I Can’t Disclose on his knees under a desk. Earthquake!

A wonderful moment came in the midst of a uselessly harried day.

We have a yearly “Bring Your Child to Work” day which has been dubbed unofficially “Rugrat Day”, since it seemed at one time, all the progeny from our floormates used to be 9-month blobs. This made the day more of a presentation ooh-and-awww day rather than anything beneficial for the children. They were all roaming on a blanket in the library one year, and the next, the older kids either stood behind their mothers’ skirts or took over the candybowls on the sly. It’s been a loose-cannonball kind of day, traditionally.

I was gearing up for a mad day just concerning my own work early this morning, too bothered and worried and hurried to even dress well today (unwashed restyled hair, no earrings, all black, lucky that I threw on a necklace). In among the stressed out crisis phone call conversations of my two bosses, people talking amongst themselves going up and down the aisle discussing deals and financials, and intermittant airplane-simulator white noise from our printer, I noticed Attorney E’s daughter was emerging from her cocoon of unaware kid mania into real childhood. Standing like a new little person.

There she was, the little nymphet in place of what used to be a rampant smudgy four year old. I was shocked to see how her height even at not-quite-6 is now towering over other children (her dad and mom are both over 6 feet). Her hair had grown princess-long, and her attitude was now shy and eye-wide under her sandy bangs.

I watched as Mom and Dad packed her into a jeans jacket to take her outside to be with the other kids of that age for a courtyard lunch, and everything fell away beside them. It became a silent, perfect place, unnoticed by the flotsam and storm of business activity. The three hardly spoke, having already talked over Dad’s shoulder while watching him working in his office. Mom was quietly smiling, buttoning her up, Dad in back of her was lifting and smoothing out her hair, just tenderly… they moved together in familiar rhythm, in such a small circle of repeated everyday assurance that harmony and warmth just seemed to pulse off the three of them in waves. It was a pausing, taking time to perfectly love, a pearl moment.

Dad in his blue shirt, one in a sea of blue shirts here, so standard, snappy, efficient, seemed softened in an instant; daughter and Mom were dressed in warm and patterned reds, pinks, blues; a colliding carnival of color against the beige box of our daily containment. They were rosy cheer personified.

How I envied them that moment. This is a little family who knows how to grab happiness, even if it’s in snippets. They do it amid two dogs and a number of other exuberant chaotic factors at home like a side-business for Mom, nieghbors, mothers-in-law, serendipity barely clinging to sanity. But they still make time for their daughter to have a kiss from her daddy after school, a kiss which they do by “drive-by.” The drill is: Mom calls from her cell in the car while driving daughter home in the afternoon; finds out if Dad’s available, and if so, stops by in the parking lot to have him come down from his tower of steel and glass just to have a few minutes of What Did You Do Today? and a hug. This is a very valuable thing, since Dad travels more than anyone in our department.

And of course I know that this kind of moment doesn’t last, that it bursts into tears later over something stupid like a toy or candy or a skinned knee, or icky food, or a mean playmate, or a brother, and I know that those clothes don’t come cheap and Mom woke up early and Dad doesn’t get enough time with them in order to keep them in their nice house, but they HAVE these moments. They’re there.

Here before me I see that those two parents know that. They absolutely know. They grab this little moment and it glows in their hands like a firefly.

I want mine too.
How on earth do I get it from where I am, I don’t know.
I had always expected to be a mother, a grandmother, something.
Though I don’t have it; I am almost sure I deserve it. Somehow. In some miniature, bright way.
I’ll just keep looking for it, walking around and around through all these rooms of existence, back to the center.

I managed to take a vacation day on Friday and flee to a short adventure. My best friend in life, Mike, lover of doggies with spots over one eye and other goofy people like myself, has a family of sisters that I spent a lot of time with and love, and visit whenever they come. I’m Auntie to their kids.

My little surrogate niece Chloe is a competing junior golfer (youngest level) and San Diego was the scene for the Juniors tournament. I couldn’t pass up seeing her and sister Naomi, my favorite small pal right now, as well as their mom, my big pal, Mari, and their dad Alex, since they’ve been across the globe in Guam for a while. I was too late for the competition, but since her first tournament was turning Chloe into a bundle of nerves, I would only have been added pressure. Two days and a basket of flowers later, she regained her confidence and played well at the end; that was all we were looking for.

So I high-tailed it into the sunset Thursday night after she finished with my trusty GPS Jane directing the way at every lane-change. God I love technology! There is just no substitute for someone talking you through the baffling signage of the L.A. freeway system when it’s that grey time of twilight. Before I’d left, my husband was all “Be careful!” and seemed to pay more attention to kissing me goodbye. He was genuinely concerned. That only worried me more, since it means he knows I’m a completely helpless, compass-less mess should our Jane go down, even apart from the usual freeway calamities.

But I arrived with all pieces of the car in place and stayed with them all in a hotel as big as a sprawling Las Vegas casino that had rooms like posh closets. But hey, the bed was great, and there was a 9-hole practice course out there to go watch Chloe tink around on in the morning. (Watching Chloe golf is kind of like watching a Chaplin movie. This is a girl who loves her stuffed bunny, but on the course, she’s all business: silently positioning, siting, calculating, WHACK, and then picks up her set of clubs that’s longer than she is tall and goes pad pad pad pad pad off in her teensy Nikes, her long black ponytail swishing under a little white Hello Kitty ribboned bow. I was speeding it up in my mind and it cracked me up completely.)

After golf, it was a long day of Legoland with my two little pals — roller coasters, even, which for me is like sending myself to the moon. Motion rides I can usually do only if it’s centrifugal, and to actually progress on to anything outside of a tight circle, I must calculate the last time I ate, how many house-heights that thing is, and after much mental preparation, dread and boredom and more launch dread and finally buckling in, while everyone else is just having a whooshing good time, I’m all claws going through hypertransport WHOOOOOAAAAAA and I don’t come out the same at the other end, some of me having been left where Scotty beamed me. I did this TWICE I tell you. Maternal love will conquer anything, really.

The trip was a great party until the next morning, when they were to leave for San Francisco and then Singapore, and I was to get back to my Jane GPS and head north. That’s when I made that kind of judgment call that only a person with my middle class overbudgeted background would make and picked up THE WRONG BOTTLE, Mari’s bottle, of what I THOUGHT was saline/cleaner solution. I had thought it would be better to use her big bottle than waste my little bottle, which was just the right size for airplane travel, and which I might NEVER FIND AGAIN since it was a sample size given me by my optician, and I looked at Mari’s label to be sure it was solution and saw no caution signs, and so I rinsed my contac lense and put in my eye and

OH GOD. It was that ACID that made for protein removal. Acid that should have a neutralizer tablet added to it before you even opened the case in the morning to put your contac in your hand. It might have been straight hydrochloric acid for all I knew. I panicked, the pain was so intense I winced so hard that I couldn’t open my eye to get the contac OUT and then when I finally pried it out and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed my eye with water, the pain was just not going away.

I would lie to say that I had not done this once before. Yes, I know I know. But here’s the problem. This happened twice for the same reason. The Ciba company packages regular cleaner and this specialized acid protein-removal cleaner in virtually the same packaging. There is no different colored label, there is no giant CAUTION DO NOT PUT IN EYES warning, there is NOTHING. The first time it happened was not so bad because I somehow managed to rinse more quickly; afterward I took the bottle and tablets and all of it and threw it away. I just didn’t want that mistake happening again, confusing it with my saline. But now here it was AGAIN.

Mari and Alex were hastily packing, gathering up their girls’ things; I, all slow motion at the sink while Grand Central was waltzing around me, rinsed yet again and again after a while, looking blearily for a “what to do if it gets in eyes” how-to set of instructions in fine print. Nothing. Mari had had this happen too before, and we agreed after rinsing, it should just go away eventually.

I said my goodbyes to them in my glasses, and began the drive two hours back north with a watering right eye, wondering if that would help, all this flowing of tears should help, right? There was no point in waiting to drive later. If I did, the traffic would be monumentally worse; L.A. to San Diego is a giant mall-race madness on Saturdays.

So I drove with trusty Jane all the way back, only to pull off at my freeway exit to a traffic cop instead of a stoplight. And then there was another cop at the next intersection, and the next. I drove through this gauntlet of dead lights and began to realize we were having A HUGE BLACKOUT. People were on their doorsteps, talking, asking each other the same question, Is yours out too?, and at last after a few near misses from people running lights, I was Safe, Home, and carrying my bags up three flights of stairs where there was no elevator service, and no air conditioning, and I CAN’T SEE from my right eye, and the halls are BLACK. Great, I’m in agony and L.A. is in complete chaos.

A half hour later it was worse. Do we go to the emergency room in a blackout or NOT?
The eye was killing me, so a call was made to poison control, and the acid-bottle story was told.
GO! they said. Go to Hollywood Presbyterian, you need to be seen.

So that’s how I came to have a 100 dollar Saturday even after my weekend trip was over, and my husband’s BE CAREFUL premonition had a whole new meaning.

The pain-numbing drops had worn off when they told me the reason it was taking so long (an hour had passed and I still hadn’t seen any sign of the doctor).

I was just thinking I want to sue Ciba corp, but right now I shouldn’t complain, things could be worse Ow OW OW OW, when they wheeled by an old woman on a gurney with a gaping mouth. Um, I think that person’s dead. Ow OW. Ow.

Finally the nurse came in on our request for more pain drops at least. “Sorry, someone’s died, and there’s one doctor on shift,” said the nurse.

Shit! She WAS dead. Ow. Ok God, I get it, that was a little heavy-handed, don’t you think?. Ok. Ok. OK OWWWWW.

A red-haired blobby looking doctor with an accent that seemed to roam between Israel and Norway came in and cheerily told us that I essentially had a scraped cornea. He enlisted my husband’s help with catching the drips in a basin from his merry irrigating — the acid had begun to eat a hole in my eye covering, he said. GREEEAT. I get antibiotic goo in my eye and Vicodin painkiller (inserting “woohooo!” for someone else here who might like that stuff on that point, I myself have enough of a struggle with gravity, without using that stuff…) and they tape gauze over me while I’m having Butterfly and Diving Bell tremors. I’m being half-mummified.

We drive toward home through lights out and lights out in the heat and decide we might as well get food, I’m starving. Have you ever noticed how trauma makes you suddenly STARVING? At our favorite Mexican restaurant, in a section of town that still has air conditioning thank god, and being led on Alex’s arm, I am suddenly the invisible girl. I am freaking out everyone who sees me. No one wants to be reminded of an eye illness.

Now I know what to do if I ever have to go out alone at night, I think to myself. Just put on an eyepatch, absolutely NO ONE will want to mess with you.

Except maybe Mike, my best friend, who always takes home strays with an eyepatch, without whom I would never have met Mari, or her evil bottle of Ciba acid. He’ll like me at least, right?. Ow.

The June gloom is over, the valley is boiling, the land even before you get to the mountains is melllllllting and I am losing my will to do anything but websurf dog sites. I can’t concentrate on anything important, I’ve drunk two virgin strawberry margaritas just to bring my body temperature down. My plants are dry every other minute, the air conditioner is wheezing, my fish are uncomfortable, and I am ready to stick my own tongue out and pant, whilst frying under my laptop and wondering about the capabilities of dry ice, and should I order some for a shelf device that I would put just under it on my lap…. oh but wait there’s fog…. hmmmm…. that would certainly look cool…. Would I have to have big hair all of a sudden? Get a wall of Marshalls? um……. I think I’ve just lost a few IQ points trickling down there….

I once had a mentor friend who had suggested that IQ level dropped significantly, the further down the Coast of California you went. Having looked at the roster of idiots getting themselves famous these days (not to mention showing their crotches and whatnot), I can’t agree more. The weather is part of the syndrome. Lovely sunny days just make a great petrie dish for the sugary fermenting scum to rise to the top. When you have a very hot sunny existence, who wants to do anything but veg out at the beach, or get one’s nails done, or perhaps your pet poodle’s, or roam aimlessly through a sealed mall, or hide in a designer martini bar. No one talks about anything very intellectual, it’s just too much effort. Just keep it vacuous and light, and distract yourself from anything that might remind you of difficulty, reality, strife, effort, thinking outside any boxes, integrity, or digging your way out of something you signed off on. Just keep your bikini waxed bod perfect, and life is one big beige beach.

Which is why (I pause for a sip of ice water) I want to get a northern dog, a Chow Chow. Noble, Asian dog of the northern Tatar tribes, strong, alert, hunting, retrieving, sled-hauling, yak-herding, Mongol-guarding, their roots stemming from the days when Genghis Khan went marauding and the Emperor’s tent needed alarm warnings. Their bark is short and to the point, their glam fur coat is better than a lion’s, and besides, I read about them and they actually describe them as “Expression essentially dignified, lordly, scowling, discerning, sober, and snobbish-one of independence.”  My kinda dog. “Usually well-mannered”, they continue, “but can be willful and protective. Bossy, serious and self-willed to the point of obstinacy.” Yup. “Stocky, slightly stilted gait.” Check. I have to have one. But when and how? HOW in this land of beating sun, greedy landlords, and shrinking apartment space? How in this place with more chihuahuas than grass?

The answer is go north, I’m sure of it. I can’t stay in this place forever. My dog, whenever she arrives in my life, just won’t like it. The identity of my future dog is telling me what I must do. At least as far north as say, San Francisco. Where there’s lots of nice fog. Yeahhhhhhhh. Dry ice unnecessary.

::sigh:: Some day.

Yes, I saw it. it’s what happens when you have a husband who wants to see “SHTUFF BLOWINGK UPP!!” a la Arnie movies. I have the following points to say about it:

1. James McAvoy is, as I thought, a good (potentiality great) actor who plays both the beaten down average Dilbert in his cubicle busting a vein in his forehead with contained rage as well as the buff and hardened assassin. He deserves all the airtime he can get in my opinion, so rock on, just do it, yada yada, blah blah. Of course I’d rather see him with longer hair wearing a kilt, but we’ll see if these dues give him some props.

2. Angelina plays Lara Croft again, which is pretty much a bore since you’ve already seen Lara Croft. I know you have, don’t lie. There is ONE really cool thing in this film, however, and that is Angelina’s awesome tattoos. Not the naked backshot, the TATOOS. Yes, they are beautiful.

3. Why the fuck is Morgan Freeman in EVERY FILM ON THE PLANET? WHY? What’s he trying for? Out-banking Bill Gates? Oh ya wait, he’s trying to outbank Michael Caine.

4. Why the fuck is Terrance Stamp playing the background heavy you don’t know if you can trust that he always plays? Snooooooooore

5. Who decided that after we have just elevated ourselves karmically as a nation enjoying watching animated rats that want to cook like chefs, we can take hundreds of live rats and blow them up after feeding them explosives???? What kind of sick fuck thought that was ethically ok?

6. Who knew that the director Timur Bekmambetov was Russian/Kazak???? Maybe that explains his bias against rats???

7. CGI makes everything kind of better, but only kind of. Train scene fails to note that they just killed a trainfull of people, none of whom appear to be present after impact. Again, a screaming lack of ethics. Now in MY film, all the people would be shown dead and the rats would have run out to safety….

8. The curving bullet thing is just dorky and the rewind-and-undestruct sequences have been done before. I hope it was him that did the other film, but I can’t recall the name of the other film I saw it in. Equally immemorable.

9. Nice that it was set in Chicago for a change.

10. Had fun thinking about the prop people stringing ALLLL THOSE STRINGS for all those looms……..That’s when you know the movie is lagging.

I’m sitting here eating chips, which I never do. Really. I don’t. I’m just in this mental hovering space right now which won’t allow me to eat something normal.

I’ve been told when you are truly hungry, everything seems to look good. Not so with me.
I find virtually nothing is appealing a lot of the time. And yet, I’m really feeling hungry.
So I try to eat what I would normally eat that would be yummy to me, to hit that spot that we all have that says “aH.” when we’re done. It lets us shut off the eating urge and pay attention to other things. But when I eat that thing that I usually find yummy, it doesn’t register as yummy, and then afterward I feel not only just the same, still waiting for the satisfaction feeling to arrive; I also feel like I’ve eaten, and sometimes too much, and so feel worse with regard to not getting satisfied. Full and unsatisfied is this odd place. Others might wain away with lack of eating; I wander around helplessly eating shelf after shelf and saying that’s not IT, that’s not it,….. so now I stop the wandering and put in just one chip, and wait a while. Think about it.

I wondered then, how much of what I do now feels that way — and I notice it sneaks in everywhere in my life.

-Food, for sure. Even cooking it, which I used to love for its chemical processing factor. Now I’m just done with it as soon as I think about it. Nah. Let’s go out.

-Movies (how long has it been since I saw something that inspired?. ).

Music, even. I find my attention and patience growing shorter and shorter, even with music. It all seems so …. derivative.

-Marital life. We’re fine. Really. I mean, you know what I mean when I say Fine, right?. This from a person who, when asked “How are you” on a daily basis at work, generally answers with “Sucky”, “As well as could be expected”, “I’ve been better”, and “Eh.”

-How about interest in the world at large?
Look, I’ve never been that socially involved on a civic sort of scale. But the political bullshit going on in the world has reached such a pitch darkness that I am afraid to look there. I shut it out, because I fear that another serious period of unrest is coming, and I don’t think it will be a cleansingly internal one, such as it was in the 1960s in our country.

I feel, instead, the growing impatience of the world with the United States: with its indefensible war policies, with its sheerly dunderheaded leadership, with our oblivious product-pushing and oil-seeking, with our lack of ethics, with our underhanded power plays and black ops, with our loss of integral societal values where the rest of the community of the world is concerned. And I’m not even hinting at anything remotely as loaded as gay marriage.

I mean, I was watching this sort of infomercial sneak peak of Disney’s new endeavors recently (just bumped into it flipping along on the remote).

All their new plans sounded so awesome, so over the top, so…… fucking corporate head in the sand. Their expansion is digging its fingers into all media, movies, videos, radio, internet, and recordings, but also sneaks into most of general network TV (most targeted is Fox network of course) and large, profitable reality TV shows. Those are the shows where people text in their votes — more votes than our public cares to cast for our presidential elections. Disney is everywhere handing you new “artists” (kid musicians they think will sell) and selling you everything from their faces to their sorry drugged-out later lives on air, and marketing everything they can think of based on them (lamps? jackets? Shoes???).

Then there are the real estate plans: If you don’t know what they are, they begin with new rides in various parks all over the world, but end up with their creation of complete Disney Island getaways with separate beaches for different age groups - supervised play beach for children, teen beach, adult relaxation beach, all of this on some recent purchase in some former island paradise (which means a place with great weather, low taxes and a lot of poor people). It’s all so….So Marie Antoinette. Are they going to have Haiti turned into a nice little theme park? Is it any wonder some people think it’s just …. us? It’s these Americans who are fucking over our planet. They’re the ones responsible for our global warming, our economic stasis, our dependencies, our deaths, and soon, more of our bombings.

IS that what they all think? I mean, I think it even over here looking at it all from the outside. And I’m not there, in a place where I’ve had half my family killed and don’t know where my next meal will come from, and gee, maybe taking tickets in a giant theme park with a huge loss of my personal dignity might be a step up from not having any potable water or electrical infrastructure. I don’t know. Should I kick them out and blow them up and continue with my poverty and pain and hatred and bitterness? Or take tickets for Disney parks and watch my culture vanish irreparably when my kids steal our food money to buy training shoes with a mouse logo on them? Hm. It’s really a toss up. Your belly or your soul? You can’t trade out of this one, see.

But I digress. I was talking about lack of interest. See I’m over here on the Antoinette Island, the BIG Island, and I can’t really feel all that stuff for too long since I’m soon distracted away from it into buying new nailpolish or finding just the right shade of green for the rug in the bathroom, where I have enough running water to save whole towns in Africa, but for a shift in the earth’s plates. Perhaps it’s that I’ve seen so many good intentions get lost in corporate machinations; Perhaps it’s guilt; perhaps it’s that I really don’t like people much and am intrinsically antisocial due to an upbringing of isolation; but I really can’t stay on that channel for very long or I WILL DIE. I will lose further interest right down into the soil in which I will be buried if I shoot myself over it because I can’t fix the guilt because it’s much too big for me. So I guess I show a little interest in myself that way. But otherwise I’m disinterested.

I can’t dress myself up as art anymore. They’ve outmoded my mode. I don’t like this model, and want a total trade-in. There’s no point in starting from here. I take weight off, I put clothes on, I take them off, I don’t like it, I gain more weight, I put clothes on, I take them off, I like it even less, I just want a hejab at this point. Probably a designer hejab, which in fact, they do have.

Making art has been fun, but I fear I’ve out-envisioned my talents. I can’t possibly make the stuff I want to see. Um. Yah. Ok. You can’t see it, but I’m making a You Tube video in my head of it.

I no longer want to duplicate playing others’ music in voice, guitar, or piano. I want a new genre to magically present itself and become my messiah.

Did pretty much what I wanted to do. There isn’t enough psychological buoyancy in me to be an altruistic, energetic youth anymore and go save the entire world, let alone this thing I’ve become.

I cry a lot that I should have had a child. Then I have someone else’s child with me for an hour and feel certain I would have gone through SERIOUS CHANGES trying to endure raising a kid. Would that have been better? Perhaps. But it’s moot.

“What do I care about?”, I ask, as I chomp on a chip, wondering if this is all I should eat today since I won’t become any more certain of its satisfaction….

Strangely, I care about being needed. Being heard. Being here in print. Being at least mentioned. Being noticed. Being recognized. Leaving a piece of my confusion as legacy.

Being something other than certain of my own dissatisfaction.

See I just had to put this after the one I made. There was just a reason; you have to hear that there was more. And this is why one goes on and
padam
padam
padams along with Edith Piaf and keeps running along to see if that second wind is coming, because I do think something changes. The thing is I’ve realized in my life things take much longer stretches to change than for other people. My life takes long panning shots; other people have crashing disastrous cameos and short outtakes, but I’m just from another genre or something…. my oevre, whoever it is, has a different plan for my story.

There was a lovely breath of fresh air this last week on my birthday. Why I couldn’t say.

I really didn’t think about it coming; had other things to worry about, wonder about.

But suddenly in a day or two everything goes all bunches of flowers and people go away on vacation who are supposed to leave you in peace and they suddenly GO WOW what a relief, and then suddenly your obligations are reduced and you turn off your phone and get some late morning re-drifting sleep. People who were tense and ill the last time you heard from them are suddenly cheery and wish you well; sunshine sneaks into the room like a prodigal; the skies lift; and small animals who were fleeing your touch have suddenly come around and sit on your shoulder like you were their new property. The funds come in; the roads get repaired; the baby stops crying and says words; and dinners are too good. Air conditioning works. Water is cold. There’s even ice and lime. Sometimes it’s really worth it. What the hell.

One particular gothic abyss of a day, those I trusted, those people, said of me, Ah, whatever. She’s a survivor. She’ll come round.
And I was so astonished and bitter that they said that; it’d sounded so slighting; so abandoning. I needed them to hurt with me then.

But they did know me, after all. I guess they do. Doesn’t mean I don’t need what I need when I need it, but I suppose there is strength here I can draw on. What I have to tell them in those dark times is how that strength came to me, and how that just wasn’t pretty; how much I had to fight off, pushing the edge, nor did I ever ask for it. And when I say I’m a small girl after all, they just kick me in the teeth and don’t believe me. I mean nobody likes that much Disney anyway.

But all of you, you know, all it takes is that odd little song sung into your answering machine; some silk, some time to turn it into something well-sewn; some adornment, that new movement to a new tune, some finery, some unfamiliar delicious smells in the kitchen. Some of you there making sure that those things occur.

All it takes is something that will allow breathing room. The ability to drop it all once it comes. To say What the hell. It takes lace at the window at a cheesey Wyeth seaside. It takes someone making sure you know. And it takes inexplicable suspension of disbelief. And sometimes, when there are enough indications, I can do that.

I can do that.