Waiting

29 Wednesday May 2013

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My 22-year-old son moves in with me tonight. As I write, he is boarding in Cincinnati and will show up at Logan in about two and a half hours. I hope. My son is a lot like me; he has adventures, and with the whole state of Ohio to have them in–whoa nelly! Anything could be happening, and since “phone” is still an exotic concept of which we speak, there’s nothing I can do but wait.

As always, there are complicating factors–maybe it will thunder, maybe it won’t, and maybe Logan will get a wild hare up its ass and throw down some dramatic security measures for Mrs. Obama, here today to talk to the Marathon Bombing survivors.  But as of now Delta assures me things are A-OK, and I refuse to hear any threatening music in the background. Instead, I wait here at the office until it’s a reasonable time to go wait at the airport.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been waiting for eleven years. After a court battle, custody of my two children was split between the parents, and through an unusual combination of power, spite, and the judge’s overlooking the concept “visitation order,” I’ve seen my son four times in the last decade. I can never forget burying my face in his curls that one last time before getting behind the wheel to take his silent and gray-faced older sister back to what used to home, and would be spun into a two-person home again, but for a while was just the place where we lived with an empty room.

That was eleven years ago, and after adventures, my daughter and I now have a happy (if too-tiny) home which we share with a cat and two ferrets. The adjustments will now have to go the other way: buying more food and toilet paper rather than less, having to house him on the couch instead of letting odds and ends fill a room without an occupant.  No more slouching around our bachelorette pad semi-clad. Our family is bigger now, with all the excitement and stress that entails.

My own adjustment has to go the other way too. In order to keep it together at least for a few months, I sat as hard on all that horrible ugly pain as I could. I’ve survived many nightmares, but this was the worst.  I couldn’t dissociate away from it, and nothing helped–nothing except focusing on my daughter, who was dealing with her own trauma over a judge who hadn’t believed her and had taken her little brother away. Shutting myself down was all I had, and it wasn’t healthy.

I have to open the cupboard, now that it’s safe, now that it’s over. As I write this, my Pandora is playing the title music from Star Wars–which seems only appropriate. I’m one of those annoying people whom John Candy apostrophized at the end of Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “What? Was your mother a key grip?”–I have to sit through all the titles or It Doesn’t Count. The resolving chord, that weird little MPAA symbol. (My tribe has no apologies now that movies have occasionally started rewarding us with extra scenes as Easter eggs. Bwah ha, oh daughter pacing in the lobby!)

I waited. Am waiting. They’re running the list of post-post-production assistants, and my son’s plane has left Ohio (with him on it oh please) and is in fact running twenty minutes early. Tomorrow I will have the nuisance of tiptoeing through a morning routine that doesn’t involve lolling on the couch, and in the days after that, so many little annoyances involved in getting my country mouse installed in the Big City. Many annoyances. Sibling opera. Crowded house. Can’t wait.

But is Zen *fun*?

26 Sunday May 2013

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Plinky prompt: Tell us about something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail (and tell us why you haven’t tried it yet).

Well, that could be a long list: Go on craigslist and get a kitten. (Due to two weird experiences with craigslist I am now phobic of it.) Join my friend Jacques' writing groups and make some contacts. (Am (a) spacy and (b) shy.) Get back into life drawing. (Severe shortage of people willing to sit still for long periods without being paid). And so on.

But let's go for the pertinent, the looming: I need to clean my room.

I have several room-cleaning issues piled on top of each other. My room is very small and what furniture I have is very big. You have to move the desk chair around in the aisle to pass, and let's hope you're not really fat if things catch on fire, because the angle between the desk and the nightstand to get to the fire door is a bit on the narrow. (And please don't knock stuff off my desk with your butt as you pass.)

And oh yeah, the stuff on the desk: I make jewelry. Not very complex; it's not like I have a bench or even an anvil. Just a bunch of beads, findings, Lego, stretchy string, polymer clay, gold leaf, empty vials of beads, torn packets, a box of Asian newspaper pencils I got in my stocking, two or three broken or old pairs of reading glasses in the wrong prescription, watch parts, sorting bins, empty water glasses, my mouse, a hand-pieced & quilted coaster rescued from a project not meant to be, tiny ziploc bags of the sort used for illicit drugs, a wafer cookie tin filled with polyhedral dice, my keyboard tucked to one side on top of a cookie tine now holding more Lego and the like, a paper clip holder, loose earrings without mates, scissors . . . we are now squarely at the obvious issue as to why I haven't tried it yet, which is that I have less organizing skill than the average small animal who steals random things.

I wanted–want–a Zen desk, but that little cardboard box with the teeny rake and the sand and the pebbles got knocked off the back.

The closet is piled with clothing I have worn, might wear, and might wear again if I can Do Something To Fix It. Very little of this is the canonical five-more-pounds, as I have recently lost ten and am thus faced with but-it-was-pretty/pricey/I might gain it back and then what?

My nightstand is filled with everything I could possibly need from getting into bed until waking (except the wand that pees for me, which is lost). My stuffed animals take up half the bed–and we're not discussing under the bed, because we had a surprise inspection six months ago by some agency installing some sort of little white plastic thing that does nothing, and it all had to be very quickly hidden.

And no, I don't have bugs or anything. Just . . . stuff. Lots of . . . stuff.

Worst of all, I have to move soon, and as always I am determined to somehow have a room like my exceedingly organized daughter, with many charming little tchotchkes and everything in the places she designates as if it's *easy*, damn it. And it's never going to happen. But . . . what if it could? As a guaranteed success?

And there's the rub: That room could exist; but I'm not the non-ADHD person who lives in it. I do too many things at once. In the process of writing this essay, I have washed out two shirts (nuking the mysterious carbon stain on the linen vest YES Mr. Billy Mays!), made 17 polymer clay beads with the gold leaf, hennaed my hair, eaten two small meals, watched 5 episodes of The Vicar of Dibley and gotten most of the beading stuff into the very nice organizer thing I got for it last month. Traces of this day are spread throughout my house.

But it's only been four hours. Daylight remains. I will rinse out my hair, scrub the henna out of the measuring cup, make the bracelet with the beads, and (I think) throw out at least three bags of junk. I have to now. It's in print.

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Trigger Happy

25 Saturday May 2013

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I was once adopted by a stray kitten whom we named Mathom (which as many Tolkien fans knows means “one of those objects you just can’t throw away and pass around,” and as far fewer Old English students know means “treasure”). He was patient, gentle, and brilliant even for a cat, with a large command of understood English; the kind of cat one can talk to. He would listen, and he understood the logical progression of things: One evening, he lounged nearby while we completed a jigsaw puzzle. He watched us admire it–and then his eyes bugged when we began to take it apart once again. We had clearly fallen off the interspecies ledge of mutual understanding–we had taken so much time on it! Had refused his help so politely! I have never seen that expression on a cat’s face again–not even on the Interwebs.

Mathom hated the vet. Far beyond the average vet-hating of hiding and swearing and an occasional irritable swat. He would turn into twelve pounds of tabby predator, snarling and screaming and lashing out at demon speed.  It took at least two people (one of them me) to pin him down long enough to give him his shots; one vet announced that he was clearly quite healthy and no exam would be needed! And the head of UW’s vet department looked very, very concerned as he washed off his wounds while looking at my load of two-week-late Annie.

“I’d keep the cat away from the baby. Just to be on the safe side.”

We followed his advice and shut him out of the nursery the first night we brought our daughter home from the hospital. Just in case.

Well, Annie coughed. Or something. Not even a fuss. But I had brand-new-mommy-ears, and off I went. OK, that sounds speedier than it was, considering I was clutching my cesarian staples as I lunged out of bed. The nursery was next door, and I was there easily within twenty seconds at most–

–and there was Mathom, pawing at the door and yowing that I had better get my sorry ass over there and see what was amiss with HIS BABY. We didn’t bother shutting him out after that.

But Annie wasn’t The Vet.

At long last (too long, really), after too many visits of them taking out the Dangerous Feral Cat Equipment (carpeting, gloves, and the stick with the gizmo that traps their heads) we all decided to just shoot him full of la-la while he was still in the carrier and come back the next day. Wayne, the vet who came up with this, even cut us a deal on the overnight–it was the best solution for everybody. (And it gave him bragging rights on what a nice bellyrub our jaguar allowed him in the morning.)

Somewhere along the years I found out that there was a word for this: Triggered. It was just that when Mathom went to the vet, he fought for his life–because when Mathom was at the vet, that was where he fought for his life, vets being the places where fighting for your life tended to happen. And so forth. He was triggered. He was already four or five months old when he found me–and intact–so God knows what vet experience had done it. Then again, I suppose being put into a box and taken out by strangers in scary smells and having a cold glass rod shoved up your butt isn’t a primo day for most of us, so maybe it was just business as usual that he was voting against.

Psychology is a horrible, desentientizing thing, to turn such a noble soul into a frantic killer, at the mercy of a fear that not even I could save him from. The vet trying to kill him was in his head, out of claw and hiss range. Nothing to be done.

What made me think of Mathom was that I’m about to move. I have all reasonable ducks in a row–no real shortage of apartments in our comfortably large area, a sufficient chunk of the ready saved up for the exorbitant expense, a now 24-year-old Annie willing to do the anxiety-provoking things of looking and calling and making arrangements–but I’m terrified. I have a huge life change happening right before then (baby #2, now 22, is coming to live with us) and it’s dwarfed by The Move. Because I’m triggered.

Moves have been places where I’ve fought for my life, albeit behind a cheerful nervous smile and hidden tears. Horrible screaming matches. Not being packed. Friends coming and going grim-faced through teetering walls of one’s crap as if plunging through jungle in 100° heat. Annie needing stitches in her eyebrow when crashing her tricycle onto the ramp of the truck. The humiliation of piles of debris that really, really, really should have been dealt with before other people had to catch you in the midst. The truck being too tall for the overhang. Rain. The inevitable mountain by the trash of didn’t-really-need-it, no-room-for-it–but DAMN IT still my STUFF!!! (Although I will always cling to the snapshot of pulling away from the curb as a happy man stood strumming our second-best guitar, already gone to a new home.)

None of these moves were presided upon by the sheriff, but a couple of them only beat him there by a couple of days–those occurred when I was at my most ill and thus most vulnerable, and so those triggers are the deepest of all. It doesn’t help that my best friend is moving too, and is in the midst of her own eddy of uncertainty about what and who goes where when. As I write this, I can barely look at my own possessions without wondering if I will ever find them after we pack and unpack, or wondering which bits will end up on that pile by the dumpster, of being afraid I’ll cry.

But I make myself remember the last move, when I visualized already being moved into my perfect apartment. (Not this one. Trust me.) And . . . my life was still my life, for good or ill. And that’s how it turned out. Unpacking happens, and there are worse things than driving home with somebody who got a good bellyrub and a clean bill of health and is sharing a loud still-drunken purr.

Got any for me, Dr. Wayne?

 

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

21 Tuesday May 2013

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No fat pigs purchased, though.

It’s been 16 months. I am embarrassed; I feel I owe the two or three of you who were reading me an explanation. But I have none. Somewhere in the beginning of last year I became unplugged from Nova Terra. I’ve missed it; I’ve missed the tiny piece of my identity that said blogger, which snuggled up to writer. Where did it go?

Every time it would slink through my brain that I had this blog thing to do, I would wring my mental hands in panic, exclaiming that I had nothing to say! No, nothing! I knew that I could well enough foam out of the corners of my mouth about the on-going clusterfuck that was the Earth-grazing meteorite named Mitt Romney–but I was doing enough stress about all that. (So much stress that I spent Election Day in bed trying not to vomit. I didn’t realize until a recurrence several days later that I’d merely been reacting to an new medicine I was trying–I used to get sick over excitement all the time as a kid.) This election threatened to make dramatic changes to my life–I’m on disability–and I don’t even want to feel that powerless, that terrified ever again. So writing about that would have salted the wound–and I am sure sooner or later I would have moaned over its pretentiousness and redacted it.

(Think about it: Isn’t a good thing that Facebook keeps scrolling our momentary faux pas into the past where we don’t have to see them with more dispassionate eyes?)

But on looking into my documents folder, I see that the big thing sucking down my writing energy was trying–and failing–to make something real, something an agent would like to see, out of Monsters. I’d started writing this book back in 2005 and then when my life fell apart in various dramatic ways, I’d just kept writing the damn thing. And writing, and writing, and then when the story was finally finished in all its badness, I had 300,000 words. I was shocked. So I split it into a trilogy. All I could do, really, not being an established writer who can get away with that sort of overkill.

The problem with the first book of a trilogy–well, mine at least–is that unless you have Peter Jackson and New Zealand to distract today’s audience, you only have a third of a plot. And the first third, yet. I sat down and said, “So much for that.” At some point I’m going to take it apart–there’s a lot to take apart, as one of its flaws was that the structure was too complex–and see what just one of them looks like. I majored in watercolor, and every so often my professor would mosey behind me and tell me I had too many paintings going on in my painting. It was sort of like that.

I just had all this STUFF exploding out of me! Characters and backstories and biology and history and culture and . . . it was fun, but it wasn’t a novel, and that was the job I decided I wanted to do. So I iced it, and went on to Book #2. That one also started being too many books at once, so I took the advice of my ever-patient editor (he’s a beta tester software engineer, proving that skills transfer) and knocked it back to a single one. It’s a decent length right now, and we’ll see where we are by the end of the summer. As I get better at writing, and he gets better at editing, we ask more of what I pull out of my head and fingers. (And yeah, sometimes other body parts too. It’s science fiction. Give me a break.)

But it occurs that the more one writes, the better one gets, at least a little bit, so I’ll start trying to keep Nova Terra up to date. I might tuck in a longish story here and there; might have some painful recollections. It might devolve to crappy journaling and whinging upon occasion, but whacks to the head with the dead fish are acceptable, and I suppose practicing my writing is better for me than doing the 3 am squirrel o’ obsession thing.

At least from my point of view. Welcome back!

 

 

And the Snow Came Over My Knees

27 Friday Jan 2012

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Old House

When I was small, my parents both worked in New York City–my father was an early systems analyst, and my mother was a proofreader. To tell the truth, my mother wasn't cut out for the job of full-time mommy, so they made a radical decision for the mid-60s, and shipped me upstate to my grandmother, who lived in Walden, NY.

Her house was on Main Street, which really was a Main Street–a long hill with our neighbor the Presbyterian church at the top and the bank at the bottom. Along the way was the Woolworth's, which was still a 5 & 10 cent store. The local beauty parlor was at the foot of the hill around the corner from the bank, and so my Gaga and I made the trip about once a week. I would run or skip ahead of her as fast as I could down the hill, and turn around at the telephone pole at the bottom, to wait for her more stately progress with her cane.

Walden was like most little upstate towns: almost all white; and I am not. So it wasn't too surprising that one afternoon this outing turned sour. A bunch of older kids started to follow me down the hill. (I was three or four; they were about eight.) I could hear their whispering and giggles; I could feel their hostility burning through my back. I was terrified.

But I instinctively refused to give them the satisfaction of my panic. I didn't look behind me, but continued down to the telephone pole, my heart hammering. There, I turned around as usual and faced them–with my eyes shut–to wait for some piece of future that was a blank grey of anticipated horror. But I was stoic Tiger Lily. No blood in the water for those nasty little sharks.

Then there came a wonderful screaming. My 75-year-old Gaga came thundering down the hill, brandishing her cane. I wanted that cane to break their bones; they sensed doom too, and slunk off. She gathered me up and I began to cry hysterically. It took a long time for me to be brave enough to leave Gaga's side when we went downtown after that.

But when I was alone in what to me was a huge backyard, it was heaven: Rosebushes and beds of tulip and hyacinth; my tricycle and the jungle gym my dad put up for me. (My favorite part was the post-hole digger and pouring the magical cement.)

And when it snowed, it covered the quiet streets as snow should always do; I would look out at it through the dusty-smelling lace curtains and watch the whiteness turning everything into a something else from a tale of wonder. And when bundled into the inevitable snowsuit and boots, even with less movement than an astronaut, the snow came over my knees. It didn't do that again until I moved to Wisconsin as an adult; I spent the rest of my childhood thinking about Walden as a Golden Age.

Fifteen or sixteen years later, I was on a trip with some friends, and we passed the sign on the New York Thruway. So I coaxed, and there we went. Main Street was, of course, easy to find. The bank was still there, and so was the church. (I think Woolworth's might have been gone.) And there was my grandmother's house.

It was a big staggering eyesore, with clapboards held together with chunks of peeling paint–just another rental house in just another small town in upstate New York. And when I went around back to the backyard, I was stunned at how tiny it was. I was in tears; partly from missing my Gaga, and partly from how shoddy the reality behind the magic was.

Thirty years later, heaven alone knows what it's like–and I refuse to Google to find out. Maybe it's gone the way of the kids around the telephone pole. But I prefer to think that the snow still makes a Christmas card that a toddler can take for granted, because that's what a small safe world is. That's what we need our small towns to be, peeling paint notwithstanding.

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Walmart and the Village Blacksmith

12 Thursday Jan 2012

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“I would never go to Walmart!” I don’t recall what I said that evoked this remark. It was at the church coffee table, and I think I brought the W-word up in some casual, iconic sense. But I clearly offended her yuppie sensibilities. It was almost as bad as if it had been the F-word. (Note to loyal readers: I only use “sheep” in print.)

What I wanted to snap in return was, “That’s because you can afford not to.”

For a while I lived in a town with a Main Street, USA, and let me tell ya, those small businesses are pricey. You’re not paying “just a little more” (and who gets to tell you and your budget what “a little” means?) for “better service,” you’re paying at least ten percent more with every chance of the shopkeeper being surly. OK, this was New England and I’m not white. Always got to have that as a possible factor, that being a primary annoyance of the non-whiteness deal. But still.

I’m not talking about the niche stores–comics, hobbies–I’m thinking of the main things, like clothing and food and what I think of as “drugstore stuff” like toilet paper. Necessities. You can’t get on without them, and more and more these days, they’re harder to come by on what America has in its 99% pockets. Every time you go to Walmart and buy some jeans and Turtle Wax and the economy-size jumbo pack, with some toys for the kids, you save at least $10-20. That’s real money to me.

My Walmart is such a long bus ride away that the driver stops in the middle and collects an extra fare. So the richest people in America get none of my money. Who does?

Walgreens. Macy*s. Best Buy. Shaw’s. I used to get toys at K-B and clothes at Lane Bryant, but they’re gone around here. And for all that miscellaneous stuff like shower curtains and lamps, there’s Target (which is merely an inconvenient dogleg of a ride from here). Note the shocking lack of small business names. There are some smallish ones: Boomerangs (an upscale dead-cheap Goodwill’s benefiting AIDS Action), MacKinnons (a butcher store where even the poor can eat high-quality meat)–but in both cases, money is a factor.

I mourn some small business types bitterly: Remember the local hardware store, filled with bins of loose nails and weird widgets that stirred a sense of longing creativity? The most important resource these stores had was the old guy in the back who knew everything. Ace does a decent job, but the dusty dimly-lit romance is gone, and although our local one has old guys, they don’t have walrus mustaches and dirty hands, and are thence less trustworthy.

But the market is what the market is. Unlike most of you, I actually know a blacksmith, who is the son of some friends. I don’t know if he shoes horses per se (he’s an artist), but he has those rare skills. There are still blacksmiths, because there are still horses who at last check still had feet–but horses are a luxury item now, and you don’t have a smithy in every small town. But we don’t think of the blacksmiths as having been run out of business by Ford, we think of it as history, if not progress. (Don’t get me started on how idyllic the pre-industrial age was, or you’ll know a lot more about really yucky things than you’d like right before dinner.)

Before the current cycle of robber barons (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose), the free market system benefited the poor. You made money by offering the best goods at the lowest prices, and if Joe down the street was doing a better job, you were tanked just as surely as if Joe was a multi-millionaire corporation. Now I know that Joe had hard work and ingenuity, instead of the biggest bankroll in the industry, but Jane Customer went home with the same change in her purse either way.

So don’t just mumble something liberal about Walmart, do something to change its abuses. If you’re a mumbler, you already know to think globally and act locally: Actively vote, volunteer, and organize. Support the unions, which despite their own problems are the last fence against employee abuse. Demand fair trade on a national and political level, and the enforcement of human rights issues against countries with sweatshops. (Thereby increasing the poverty and misery of their inhabitants, who otherwise don’t have jobs at all, but you can’t have it all; I mean that without sarcasm.)

The people who need their $20 in Walmart and who work the two jobs can’t do that as effectively as you can anyway. So just remember that every time you sneer at Walmart, you’re sneering at the poor who keep them going out of necessity. And then go out and say, “I would never live in a country with rampant poverty and unemployment!”

I’m waiting.

Redaction, Retraction, Deletion, and Moving On

23 Friday Dec 2011

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I just made the decision to go through this blog and remove a whole bunch of highly personal information. So some eight or nine posts have now been trashed and only exist in my documents folder. I thought I’d feel self-censored, but I feel relieved.

I’ve written before about my weird blind spot over self-deletion; added here has been a sense of honesty: This is who I am; this is what’s happened to me; this is what my life is like now. Like many bloggers, what I’ve been posting here has also served somewhat as a journal. But now that (some) people are reading this (You Are Here), I’ve been feeling slightly naked.

The impetus for finally doing this was my Googling simply my unusual first name this morning. I pop up on the first page of hits, and I take up at least half of them for the next page or so. I’m apparently a busy little bee! I didn’t know my tweets were just plopped out there for all to see. Yeesh. And public Google+ posts are indeed public. (I think I thought it just meant everybody in all my circles, not . . . everybody.) My Klout score is 44 now, which means . . . well, something. I think it mainly means that some random people follow me on Twitter in the vain hope I’ll follow them back.

I find this disturbing.

I don’t have anything to hide particularly, but I’ve decided to start treating my public persona a little differently. Although I’ve never been the sort of shamelessly constant tell-all that many are, I now think I should at least leave out whatever I wouldn’t necessarily want the stereotypical example of a client to read without knowing me. Duh.

I hope this doesn’t disappoint; in all other ways my silver prose will remain unchanged.

Well, I hope not in one way: At the beginning of the year, I resolved to post at least once a week. Now here we are, in Week 51–and I’m thirty posts short. Cowabunga! Fail! I wouldn’t try to shamelessly sneak them all in now even if I weren’t pushing hard to finish Max, but next year, things will be different! Or at least improved.

Putting Up the Thanksgiving Tree

25 Friday Nov 2011

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We put up our tree tomorrow. I hasten to reassure that this disgusts me. If I thought harder, I’d tie this in to the rather narrow-viewed thing floating around Facebook now exhorting people to drop “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas,” Christmas being of course the only holiday of the season. I think the common link is the general societal unease about The Birthday and how it turns winter into a melange of hope, dissatisfaction, and the words you say when you’re trying to get that sliver of broken glass ornament out of your foot.

As faithful readers know, I had one of those childhoods, and thus my holiday memories are fuzzed with things like my Dad’s drunken statement that “Christmas was just another day in the year.” This was at Thanksgiving dinner when I was 11. Put a damper, let me tell you. Not a lot of reindeer on our roof, either. So after a deliberate intention as an adult to NEVER have that happen again, I married into a family where the red-veined screaming needed no alcohol whatsoever. Trips to my in-laws were a mixed bag of anticipating my wonderful mother-in-law’s godlike corn pudding, and anticipating the time when I got fed up and became the only member of the family to scream BACK at my father-in-law. Fun times! However, seeing as he was a lawyer, it did serve to promote my talent for on-the-spot argumentation and strengthened the lower part of my mezzo range.

Nowadays, I’m just after peace and warm happy fuzzy stuff like carrying a Louisville Slugger to keep people from sheeping up my Christmas. And this understandable goal is forwarded by the Thanksgiving Tree.

For a couple of reasons, we have a fake tree. One, if you can afford one without serving the smallfry coal porridge for two weeks, good on you. But you don’t live in my house. Two, we don’t have the vehicle or the moxie to haul the damn thing home from the tree place and up the stairs to our palatial abode. Three, between making sure your tree fits your tree stand, having to water it, and needing to bring it back because it died the same week-before-Christmas day that your cat curled up and died underneath, it’s just not worth the energy. (OK, maybe that last isn’t a common experience for the rest of you. But still.)

As I write this, our tree is in the pet room (meaning the tiny storage room where we also store the ferrets and the cat accoutrements) in several red’n’green plastic bins. (The trunk sort of surfs around loose, just to further the joy of early-morning navigation already punctuated by kitty kibble under bare feet.) The branches are of course color coded by shades that are as close to each other as mechanically possible, and because they are all scrunched in there, are now far more like green wiry hairballs than something pretending to be tree-like.

My daughter owns the tree-construction process. She hates it, but will not give it up. The branches scratch, the color codes confuse, the lights get tangled. And she radiates such (understandable) rage and loathing that it makes me cry. (I’m a cream puff about the crying thing, but it is a crying occasion if you have any misconceptions about the family closeness Hallmark tree-trimming thing.) If I offer to help, she sees this as a criticism and stomps off to her room. And a Merry Christmas to you too, sir!

Needless to say, this unpleasant task gets put off until it can’t be put off any longer, and the closer to Christmas it gets, the more of a holiday-killing bummer it is. Days aren’t merry and bright when loving mom and devoted daughter hate each other over the seasonal symbol of joy. (And of course we have to have it. It’s a Christmas tree. I’ve had tree-less Christmases. Please. Moving on.)

So instead we have a Thanksgiving tree, so the passionate spasm for hatred gets dissipated on her bus-ride back to school. Sure, it makes it feel like the holiday marketeers have taken over my living room, but when it comes down to it, a little peace at Christmas itself is something to be thankful for.

Just stop me from getting all Martha Stewart with the gold leaf and the turkey bones.

 

Sheeping Awesome

23 Sunday Oct 2011

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Loyal readers will by now have noted my use of the word “sheep” in non-ovine situations. I started seriously cussing at eleven, because I thought Harlan Ellison was really cool. Now that I am in the middle of my life, I have determined to restrain myself, at least in print. But sometimes I just need . . . a word. I went to the Random Noun Generator, et voila!

Because this word is thus dear to the Nova Terran heart, and because border collies are my favorite superdog, I will now break with my tradition of all me, all the time, and share the following. All the way from Wales, it’s the LED Sheep!

Don’t say I never did anything for ya.

 

Putting a Target on My Head

29 Thursday Sep 2011

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Anybody got a button reading “Not in the Tea Party?”

I was grabbing some painting shirts in Boomerangs, and there it was.  A hot pink baseball cap. Score! (I wear caps instead of sunglasses. They look kind of dorky, but they’re way cheaper than prescription shades.) I turned it over, and there it was in large yellow letters: Smith & Wesson. I immediately got a big kick out of this–girly pink ‘n’ packing.

It was bright pink. It said “Smith & Wesson.” It was only a dollar. What’s not to love?

Now, understand that my views on Guns and All That Stuff are moderate. I have no problem with guns. They’re nifty little machines and shooting them is fun; I’m talking about targets, which are the only things I’ve shot at, although hunting for food is A-OK in my book. I don’t own any, but I might well if they weren’t pretty expensive. 

On the other hand, I hold gun nutdom in mostly amused contempt. It’s a fetish; it’s a collection of dangerous paranoiacs clinging to a few carefully selected myths about American culture so as to support their insecurity and yes, racism: When only criminals have guns, we all know that the criminals are black and Latino. I strongly suspect that this issue, like immigration, would be profoundly different if the well-armed interlopers were white.

A few of my friends shoot, but one of them is a gun nut, and I am dismayed and sad. Guns and railing against gun control have become this man’s entire life. He used to have other interests–music, books–but not any more.  In fact, I have become morbidly fascinated by his ability to doggedly bring any other topic around to the 2nd Amendment. He is passionately convinced of his need to defend himself; he is overwhelmed by the fantasy of somebody attempting to mug or carjack him. (He lives in a comfortably middle-class neighborhood, not Harlem or Dorchester or North Philly.)

I believe that it’s foolish to have shooters wandering around loose with no gun laws at all; I think the issue should be handled much the way driving is: You need to be taught how to do it responsibly before you are allowed to do it at all, and you should be held strictly accountable for yourself. (Consider how very many more people die at the hands of drivers than at the muzzles of handguns, and consider how laughable our drunk-driving laws are. Parity isn’t a lot to ask here.) That’s pretty much what Massachusetts’ gun laws are, and it’s one more reason I’m proud and happy to live here.

The people who taught me how to shoot also insisted that I be able to take the thing entirely apart and put it back together, and they took my being able to do all that completely seriously. And if you think about it, that’s a good thing, because soldiers are the end of the gun-using curve and nobody wants them to be bad at it. I wasn’t physically tough enough to get out of basic training, which is where I learned I have exercise-induced asthma and that my upper body strength allowed six pushups maximum, but I learned to respect and admire the M16A-1. Hell, I loved it–the sensual feel of it barking forth the bullets, the smell of the gunpowder, the feeling of accomplishment when I hit what I was aiming at, the intimacy of the mastery of screws and spring and firing pin. (We’ll skip over the time I put the cleaning brush down the wrong end of the barrel.) I would be well willing to be responsible for a gun, as I am for my pets and my children.

But I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is a very progressive community–and by and large, that’s one of the things I love about it, being on most issues a screaming liberal myself. I had a vision of the possible consequences of wearing this item, but encouraged by some friends, I went in and got it today. Put it on and after five minutes or so, I forgot all about it. As far as my head knew, it had on my usual nice khaki from Eastern Mountain Sports. I continued on my errands.
Upon exiting the post office, I passed a man who gave me one of the scariest looks I’ve ever seen. I cannot adequately describe the hatred, the loathing. In sheer malice it was right up there with an occasional look I’ve gotten in KKK country.

“Whoa! What’s that about?” I thought–and then I remembered that I was wearing the hat. This man would have signed a petition to have me run out of the neighborhood. Or maybe beaten or something. Glad he wasn’t armed.

Unlike the hat which was a freebie from American Idol, this is after all Smith & Wesson and they don’t make crap. And I shouldn’t care that every liberal in Cambridge will now judge me despite our common grounds on at least 90% of the issues, because I am who I am and I believe what I believe.

And it’s pink. But man, do I want that button.