Time Limit

New clause added to the daily blogging goal: life. So, if that doesn’t get in the way, here is where I will be, mustering every ounce of wit and sarcasm in my eager body to be poured out onto this shaky computer monitor for your amusement. Like a little dancing monkey, using words instead of a two-step. But for now, I’m going to the bar on 7th. Don’t wait up.

Master Carpenter

Almost like Jesus, but not quite. Jesus did not buy pre-cut, some assembly required bookshelves at Big Lot’s for $24.95, but I’m sure he would appreciate the ease in which I put it together.

Tonight I have two stinky boys bent over a Star Wars shoot-em-up game instead of one, leaving me alone with my blog for company. (It seems sadder typed before me than it actually is.) Joey and his new friend Greg have spent the last few hours in front of the computer, and I’m curled up with my laptop on the couch, the French glass doors closed to block out the sound of storm trooper snipers.

I spent evening building the bookshelf and arranging the stacks of books that littered the floor while chatting with the fellows. Unfortunately, I still have too many books, and not enough shelf space. I probably should have splurged and bought the $29.99 bookshelf with the extra adjustable shelf but hindsight is 20/20 and I thought the 4 shelves would be enough. Since it’s already assembled, it’s not like I could take it back. Besides, I wouldn’t want to disappoint Jesus.

"Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Lazy Sunday Blogging

I’d hint around that I actually did something productive today, but I hate the word “productive” for it’s phonics alone, so I’ll curl up with my honesty and leave the productiveness for Mondays. Saturday night Joey and I joined our friend Quinn for an excellent vegetarian Chinese dinner at Shanghai, a million miles away down Park Rd, a restaurant that I would never have found without Quinn in my backseat pointing the way.

After Chinese beer and ridiculous fortune cookies (my fortune was: “In god we trust, all others must pay cash,” lower case “god” and all, which is lame cash register advice at the 7-11 and not a fortune), we rushed to catch a showing of the hilarious “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I was absolutely tickled by it, especially the “good morning starshine, the earth says hello” line. And after that little journey, we all hung about Quinn’s apartment with his biting cat, drinking Tom Collin’s with fancy measuring and/or “squish-a your head with squinty eyes” straws.

Today has been a lazy one; I went to my grandfather’s to fix him lunch and leave him something for dinner, and was going to visit my father, but he simply told me to not come by. So, I returned to Joey and we walked to the corner deli for lunch, then took a stroll in the sweltering-in-the-shade heat around the park sipping sweet tea from styrofoam cups and skipping over chalked hopscotch lines.

There is a rose garden in Independence Park that has a hidden Sylvia Plath poem under the arbor on the far end. Stapled on the left hand side, sheltered from rain and obviously torn from a book, “Morning Song” hangs stiff and yellowed. Wander that way if you are ever in Charlotte’s Elizabeth neighborhood. There are hidden treasures to be found.

Romance Blogging

Marinating tofu-chicken (or fricken, short for fake chicken), and watching the sudden summer shower that beats down Independence boulevard with an obsessive envy for large bodies of water, I wait the dripping day to pass into humid night, when my love will return. The afternoons are long, hot and lonely.

I could meet Joey at the door with an open copy of the Karma Sutra in hand, flash a sly smile and say, “Choose a page,” (a bit of good advice you will never hear from Martha Stewart,) but I decided to do something more uncharacteristic. So, I’m preparing fricken, marinated with a red pepper mix, served with cream of broccoli sauce over wild rice. Yum.

There is a voice in my head that scolds, “Don’t write about your dinner! That’s boring! Nobody freakin’ cares about your freakin’ fricken! You sound like a housewife!”

Well, if I sound like a housewife, I am a desperate one, and while my antics will not generate syndicated prime time dollars, they will get me some grade-A vegetarian loving from my Joey.

Random Roadside Attraction

Spotted a leg cast, (you know the kind, for people who break a leg and have to hobble around with crutches under their arms) that was complete with a fully formed foot and intact to the upper thigh, standing upright in the middle of the sidewalk under the bridge on Pecan street. Unattached to any leg. You’d think that would be the kind of thing you would notice if you stepped out of.

(I almost wrote “Maybe it was making a break for it!” but the cheesy level would have been too much for anyone living outside of Wisconsin, so I declined. No offense to Madison.)

Stay Tuned

It’s the first time in three days that I don’t have the sicky-coated-tongue taste in my mouth and actually feel like a human being instead of a background extra in a blockbuster crowd scene. I feel able to smear the fuzz away from my brain to blog again. I have every intention of blogging daily, even if it is just to say, “Ok. Look. I blogged. So there.” Then patting myself on the back with promises of Breyer’s ice cream and Starbucks (though not served simultaneously.)

But, it’s hard to blog without a computer, and last week I was away in Manhattan with my mother, so I’m adding a clause to my daily blogging goal: computer availability and health limitations.

Sure, some smart ass could cock their head in my direction, raise an eyebrow and say, “So, there were no computers in Manhattan? None?” To which I will reply with an equally smart assed innocence, “Nope. Not a one,” and smoothly change the subject to Hayden Christensen’s hair, which really suited him better in Episode III, instead of the early ‘90’s rat tail he sported in Clone Wars, wouldn’t you agree?

With that said, I can continue on my daily blogging path, so, without further adieu, my post for today.
Ok. Look. I blogged. So there.

Tuesday Night Channel Surfing

I’ve decided that the ideal job for me would be to replace Vanna White, and take on all the grueling and difficult tasks of her evening gown wearing job. She could retire in peace, never to be plagued by lit square vowels again. Meanwhile, I would step in and bear the responsibility of the harsh and unforgiving world that is Wheel of Fortune, and be the one to gracefully touch each square monitor screen that lights up whenever a contestant digs beneath their public school education intellect to scream “S!” or “T!” while clapping insanely at the level of their lapel microphones. Then I, brave against impossibly tall stiletto heels, would sashay across each cruel sentence until my extensive half-hour of labor was complete. Ideal.

Paging Dr. Freud

Last night I had a dream rich with religious symbolism, after some sleepless pillow punching and watching the little red clock numbers square dance their way from 4:00 to 4:46 a.m. The dream started out on an old-fashioned train, with blue velvet seat covers, but turned into the interior of an old house that functioned as a school. In the dream, I was a passenger, then a student, and was stressing over a Japanese history project that wasn’t complete. I was wandering around the halls of the Victorian style old house-turned-school, when I realized (in the delightful sudden way of dreams) that I was pregnant. And being pregnant, I had a sudden craving for an apple, so I decided to skip class and run outside to the gardens behind the school, in hopes of finding an apple tree. Like the house, the garden was very old, and somewhat wild, with plenty of places to hide. A few stern looking administrators were looking for me, so I made my escape into the garden by ducking behind trees.

I wasn’t able to relax even when I was in the heart of the garden, but I slowed down and walked around the edge of a small square pond while talking to my pregnant belly. I was trying to hide the pregnancy, and was wearing a billowy top that covered my growing stomach. My craving for an apple increased; I left the pond and went searching through the foliage looking for an apple tree. While I was walking, I heard a noise to my left and hid behind a boarded up tree house to keep from being seen. A group of three people were strolling the garden, and I relaxed when I saw who it was. It was only Jesus, and a few of his friends, so I knew that they wouldn’t care if I was there. I continued my search for an apple, but kept having to hide from riders on horseback, and the occasional teacher that wandered by. I reached a fenced border and was even more anxious, because I knew that my father was on the other side of the fence and would be furious to see me skipping school, and pregnant.

I wanted that apple more than ever, and sat down in exhaustion on the edge of a sandbox. As soon as I sat down, I realized that there were apples around the bend, and I heaved myself up to pluck one so large that it took both hands to hold it. I cradled it, thinking it was about the size of a child’s head, and hid myself in roots of a spreading oak tree.

This dream could mean three things:
1.) I’m not getting enough apples in my diet.
2.) My craving for forbidden fruit is not sated.
3.) I’m having a Christ child through Immaculate Conception by apples.

La Dolce Vida

My recent days are quiet; introspective. I think I’ve had enough chaos this past year to deserve a little bit of quiet and peace. Part of my rest comes from the new surroundings; as I have said before, our apartment building was constructed in 1915, and is tranquility compared to the corporate cookie-cutter hole-in-the-wall apartment we lived in before. I know this date from the plumbers who crawled into the bedroom wall to find the source of our hot water problem (or, I should say, the lack thereof.) The plumber tapped the pipes and proclaimed them to be “the original shit!” from 1915. Impressive, but at the time I just wanted a hot shower.

Truth is, I begged Joey for this apartment. Begged, because with my temporary suspension of income (a dignified way of saying “unemployed”), Joey is the one paying rent. I have as much right to claim the space as the roaches, but Joey makes it possible for me to live in this hardwood floored, crown-molded, nine-foot ceiling dream and I love him all the more for it. What’s more, he loves me just as much, which takes the situation from dream to flat out ecstasy. Though with Joey, I could live in a cardboard box behind the Piggly-Wiggly and not give a damn, as long as it was him sleeping next me.

Begin

Joey worked Monday, and when I called my mother to wish her a happy-independence-from-the-British-day, she was shocked to hear he was working.
“I didn’t think anyone had to work today,” she said in her incredulous Mom voice.
“Only waiters and firefighters, Mom.” Which, of course, my love Joey is neither, but he works for the firefighter’s union, and didn’t have the day off. I should have added police, busboys, Starbucks baristas, chefs, janitors and news crews to that quip, but a list has less comic timing.

Sunday night our internal weekend clocks were running, and the 9 A.M. alarm was coming fast. We were having a hard time falling asleep. I wrapped an arm around Joey and told him to count sheep, nesting my head in the crook of his shoulder. He made a noise of contempt, and since “count satanic goats” didn’t sound as appealing, I tried to lull him to sleep with imagery.

“You and I are lying beneath a great crepe myrtle tree; the petals are so pale pink that they are almost white, we squint and they become a blur of white against the dark, and they’re falling on us, petal by petal. When we’re covered with petals we’ll be asleep. So, count the crepe myrtle petals until we’re covered.”Joey is still, and I count to 26 before he starts to wiggle again. I shift under his chest and let the repetitive nature of counting bore my brain to stillness.

“I’m at 76,” I whisper, nearer to sleep than not, hoping Joey will follow suit.
“I’m not.” He says, “I shook the tree. All the petals will cover us faster that way.”

Block-o-text Rant

I just read the “Creative Loafing” article on this year's Hero’s Comic book convention, hoping for some insight on the event. Such as: the names of artists and actors who signed comics or autographs, or the number of vendors and sellers that occupied the yearly shindig. I was in Alabama visiting relatives during the weekend and couldn’t attend. Admittedly, I wanted a little more insight than the fact the reporter proudly wears a “geek” tee-shirt and has the ability to convince drunken older men to buy her overpriced drinks. Granted, I’m guilty of doing the same thing myself, but I wanted to read a review of the event, not commentary on how cool it is that the reporter knew enough about comics to swag a drink off of someone too drunk to care. I couldn’t even get through the article; it was boring on top of uninformative. Had I the opportunity to write the same article, I guarantee you that I would have at least included names instead of “two actor guys from Buffy”. That’s just bad writing. (Hmm, another thing I’m guilty of.)

Twitter-patted

My horoscope (capricorn) says that Saturn’s sign is changing, which only happens once every three years, so I will be all in a twit to finish projects and clean my head and space for changes. All right. So, what’s my excuse for every other month?The goal is to get back into the swing of daily writing, that little thing I’m supposed to be doing in lue of a job and in between killing roaches. I have a dishwasher now, so I have no excuses.

My daily battle of the bugs increased due to the vacant apartment next door. I suspect that the landlord bug sprayed the empty rooms, sending the creepy-crawlies to seek shelter in my bedroom. The best thing about our apartment is that it was built in 1915. The worst thing about our apartment is that it was built in 1915. The roaches have many a place to hide underneath the gleam of the all original hardwood flooring. They like the bedroom because of the skyline view.