The Hangover Journals

Dogs Are Stupid

2010-09-08T11:51:00.001-04:00

toad 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

For years, I have been laboring under an incorrect supposition: namely, that my dogs are, if not Eal-ray Ight-bray, than at least no stupider than other members of canis domesticus. Well, that turns out to not be so true. All three of my dogs are challenged, bless their hearts. How do I know this? It's a simple question of doors.

My house has two levels. There is the upstairs level, which is elegantly decorated, immaculate - for, um, certain values of immaculate: basically, there's hardly any big chunks of rotting food around - charming and inhabited by me, the resident Middle Aged Person and the fish. Then there's downstairs, where the kids live, which is also nice. Nice as in we used to call it Teenage Wasteland when my son was the only person holding court down there but now that my daughter has moved downstairs as well, this name is no longer applicable. I refuse to give in and call it the Dungeon, as my daughter does: okay, it has certain dungeonesque qualities, namely, the lack of windows, the low ceiling, the slightly dank aroma and the overwhelming concrete but hey, it's lovely down there. Lovely, I say. The dogs and the cat move freely between levels for the most part: the dogs mostly like to sleep under my bed while the cat tries to alternate beds so as to maximize her chances of completely destroying some unwary sleepers ankles. She doesn't like it when people move in their sleep and she has ways of expressing her displeasure, oh yes.

Anyway, due to this two level construction, there are several sets of doors to my house, which is one of the reasons why we are all gonna be toast when the long anticipated zombie apocalypse comes. Is it weird that I worry about this? I actually contemplated not buying my house due to its very lack of defenseability - we are fresh out of escape tunnels, moats, barbed wire and enchanted swords, not to mention machine gun emplacements and while we may not have enough windows downstairs to bring in the desired amount of light, we have way too many to keep out your smarter run of zombies: the ones who have figured out that glass breaks.

However, I digress! The thing is that you can enter - or exit! Hail Janus! - my house any of four different ways. On the upper level, there is the front door, which comes in off the street and then there is the kitchen door which takes you out onto the porch, from which you can then descend via stairs to the backyard. Downstairs, there are two sliding glass doors on either side of the house that lead into that same backyard. There's also a door from Audrey's room to what might be called the driveway, although it isn't, really, one, but for the purposes of this narrative we'll forget about it. Anyway it's locked with a combination padlock on the outside and the combination has long since disappeared. Early in the morning it is our custom to blearily prop open one and sometimes two of these doors so that the dogs can get in and out, attend to their toilettes and keep a vigilant eye on the ever present danger of squirrel activity. The open doors also make sure that we maintain requisite levels of in house insect population - right now it's stink bugs, who are fucking everywhere, and I am using that as a verb.

The dogs cannot figure out that they can go out one door and in another.

No, seriously. They don't get it. They think that if they go out one door than that's the only door they can go back in. Or, conversely, they can't seem to grasp that if they are up on the porch and want to come in, it might be worth running down the steps to see if the downstairs door is open. They'll just lie there sorrowfully on the porch for hours even when the downstairs door is open. I have even tried leading them downstairs - there is very little, I find, that makes you feel stupider than earnestly attempting logical discourse with dogs - and explaining the whole thing to them and still, they Don't. Get. It. The cat, however, gets it just fine, which kind of reinforces those mean things that cat people on the internet are forever saying about dogs.

Nostalgia

2010-08-30T10:17:00.002-04:00

rocks
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Recently I have been on a quest to rediscover the hotties of my youth. My youth, you understand, was so long ago that we did not even use the word hotties. We said hunks, or, well, actually I didn't, but I think it was occasionally used in magazines. However, oh youth of today, some things do not change and no matter how uncomfortable it must make you to contemplate it, we had hormones too back then. I believe my own personal hormones were first activated by the Monkees, although my great love for Davy Jones was tempered by several issues, namely, that I was nine and he was, like, a grown up who was shorter than me. This was also the problem with my adoration for Chekov on Star Trek: all the fantastic fake Russian accents in the world cannot make up for someone who is shorter than your ten year old self.

Early loves are all very well and I'm not going to get into the first R rated movie I ever saw, because Robert Redford deserves his own blog post. Still, even with 3 Days of the Condor behind me, I didn't know true love until my mother and I watched every minute of Poldark on Masterpiece Theater. My mother was an intellectual snob par excellence - she never watched TV unless it came from England, in which case it was Educational and Culturally Superior. Well, except for Beat the Clock and the Doris Day show - she liked those too. Still, she never watched soaps or sitcoms or anything like that, unless you count Upstairs, Downstairs; Mystery; and every single damn BBC production that was ever introduced to the States by the mellifluous tones of Alastair Cooke on Sunday nights. Be careful not to get mixed up! Masterpiece Theater was hosted by Alastair Cooke, not Aleister Crowley, who would have put together quite a different program, no doubt.

I was usually kind of bored by Masterpiece Theater, even when I was allowed to stay up to watch it (we were properly raised, which is to say we were put to bed hideously early) but since it came on after Mutual of Omaha and then Disney, both of which we were allowed to watch, sometimes I got to see it anyway. My boredom, however, changed with the advent of Poldark, which was basically a filmed adaptation of a slightly more literate than usual series of historical romances set in Cornwall. I have never been to Cornwall but I have read any number of novels set there and those, with the influence of Poldark, make me feel as if I know the place. It's infested with elves, holy Grails, sleeping knights, smoldering smugglers, ghosts, ladies in strategically torn white nighties, thrashing dramatic scenery and lots of cliffs that people throw themselves off on a regular basis. Excellent, in other words. Poldark was something else again and my mother and I were completely, absolutely and totally hooked. The tempetuousness of it all! The incredibly good looking Ross Poldark! Oh my god, Ross Poldark. Be still, my twelve year old heart!

I inherited my mother's beliefs on TV - if it comes from the UK, it's good; from the US, it's bad - and thus in the early 80s I was ripe for Robin Hood. Robin of Sherwood was not only one of the most beautiful men (in a specifically early 80s kind of way) I had ever seen, it also had veiled references to Celtic mythology and a kind of Enya meets the Temptations proto New Age soundtrack. I was hooked, even more than I was hooked on Excalibur, which is saying a lot, since Excalibur was apparently the only movie that the Charleston, SC infant cable company had full rights to - they played it more or less 24 / 7 and I knew every word. Still, there was nobody gorgeous in the entire cast of Excalibur while Robin. . . oh god. . . Robin.

As we age, our hormones settle down a bit and these bland young actors cannot stir them. I tried watching the new BBC Robin Hood early this summer - I have had a thing for Robin Hood my entire life, okay, I confess - but I was unmoved. My daughter, who does not have a thing for Robin Hood at all, possibly because of all the various Robin Hoods I, her mother, have made her sit through, said something cranky about how stupid Robin Hood was, really. Nonsense! I said, wait until you meet the real Robin Hood, the sexiest Robin Hood ever! And I launched myself on a quest to find my Robin Hood of memory and lo, since one of the truly all good things to come out of the 21st century is Netflix, I found it.

Huh. It's very, um, early 80s. Robin does seem to spend a lot of time sweeping his hair out of his eyes. He's kind of cute but. Well. It's just . . . just not the SAME! I can't stand it! And neither could my daughter, who said cutting things about the soundtrack - "Are they singing? They're singing! They're singing ROBIN. . . ROBIN IN THE WOODS!" and the hairdos. And then I, in some kind of defense, went online and discovered that I was not the only middle aged woman in the world who still harbored a secret crush but that at least I had not devoted my life to a fan forum. Which, all power to them, but in new pictures of Robin he's wearing kind of an alarming amount of eyeliner and, well, I just can't go there. He's aged, too. I mean, a lot. Not like me. Um. Sigh.

That was Robin Hood, though. He was never on Masterpiece Theatre and thus, despite his undeniable Britishness, was probably less cultural than Poldark.. Poldark must be different and so, when I saw that I could get Poldark from Netflix on demand last night, I forced Audrey to sit down and watch the first episode with me. Oh. Oh dear. It's rather slow. And Poldark's original love, Elizabeth, is really strange looking, as in, she looks and acts not unlike a standard poodle. A standard poodle made of wood, at that. And the titles are tempestuous, as is the scenery and the extras and, frankly, Ross Poldark is, as my daughter pointed out, kind of an asshole. I googled him too. He seems to have turned into a rather jovial old man and, damn, another idol has bitten the dust.

Hmmmm

2010-08-29T19:22:00.002-04:00

bug and bead 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Blog people tell you sincerely that you should never apologize for not posting more often. This, apparently, is the kiss of death that will render your blog pointless, sad and alone, unvisited. Like this one is any of the opposite of those things, but still, I try occasionally to bow to the wisdom of the Blog People. However, it feels kind of weird to come back in here like, oh yeah, I took a couple of weeks off there, no big, without saying um, sorry about that, whoops, did I have a blog or what? Although, honestly, that's kind of what happened and I cannot guarantee it will not continue happening. Although it might not, too. One never knows with this roller coaster of life! ROLLER COASTER!

Over the last couple of weeks I've basically been consumed with my show at the De Soto. It is up now and it looks good and oh my god, I sold quite a few pieces at the opening and that is mindblowing and fantabulous. It's interesting - I haven't had a show in 12 years. I set out in my twenties to become a famous artist - that worked out well - and then as the years passed and I got various things like kids and real jobs and dogs and so on, the art kind of faded away. Now, though, the kids are grown, the jobs are nonexistent and the dogs, well, the dogs are okay. So I can make art again and lo, there it all is up on the wall at the De Soto, making me feel kinda weird and also thrilled. Jodi had to rehearse me before the opening - "You're going to hate this," she said, "You don't take compliments well and you don't like being the center of attention. So what are you going to say when people say they like things?"
"I don't know," I said, "Maybe something like "Can't you tell it sucks? You must suck for liking it! I suck! My art sucks! LIfe sucks!" and then I run into the bathroom to cry and do drugs?"
"Or," suggested Jodi, "Thank you. I had a lot of fun taking them."
"Hmmm," I said, "That's an interesting approach."

In other news, there are a lot of bugs around. I like bugs for the most part - unless they bite or shit in my food, in which case all bets are off and it's war, baby, war - so I like this time of year. I don't get why people are so wigged out about insects anyway: frankly, there are daddy longlegs out there I trust more than some humans. I like listening to the cicadas going nuts every night lately and I don't even mind the stink bugs who seem to live in my house. They come lurching around every early fall, flying drunkenly into things and then landing to sit in one place for hours. They're friendly, or at least I think they're friendly, so it's all good. The daddy long legs are back and so are the orb weavers, who make the giant incredible webs. A couple of weeks ago I went out on the back porch around midnight and found a small spider battling with a giant beetle by the light. My sympathies were with the spider - I don't like beetles THAT much - so I left them to it. When I came outside the next morning, some eight hours later, they were still at it. I was impressed.

Busy

2010-08-18T18:05:00.003-04:00

Please Join Me on the 26th
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, I am busy. I have this show coming up and that means I have to frame a whole lot of stuff, which I am doing in a highly haphazard and so far mostly theoretical way. It is weird as hell to have a show: I haven't had one in, um, like twelve years. Yes. That is a long time, long enough for one to forget that one used to be, like, an artist. I certainly had mostly forgotten it except for the odd compulsion to occasionally paint things and, of course, the carrying of the camera everywhere with me. So the fruits of all of this are going to be on view at the De Soto starting, gulp, next Thursday. I promise that there will not be 12 entire years worth of stuff on the walls. Anyway, you can come to the opening and enjoy a delicious beverage and perhaps some cheese cubes and see me as well trying to be all artisty and yet not get riproaringly drunk, which is my usual response to openings. Or you can come any time during September and point and laugh to your evil little hearts' content, which is worth doing if only for the De Soto jukebox, which is a highly excellent one.

But enough of that! I will start getting all freakazoid again if I think about how much I still have to do! And I'm doing it on very little sleep, due not only to a few major non art worries I have been overthinking late, but also because the night before last, my phone went berserk. Lights began flashing and it started to emit little happy beep noises and, one thing leading to another, I woke up. I looked at the clock and saw that it was 4:20. 4:20, yes, and then I looked at my mysteriously behaving phone and saw on the screen a small picture of a present. A wrapped present with a big ribbon and stuff and so, hey, given the time, the state of my not quite awakeness and the image, can you blame me for thinking, oooh, my phone has given me a special present? Yeah, right. I tapped on the picture and the stupid phone breathlessly informed me that it had updated my operating system. Listen up, Sprint. The next time you wake me up at 4:20 it had better not just be an OS upgrade or . . or. . something. Something bad.

August

2010-08-12T13:37:00.003-04:00

birthday girl
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It's hard to leave a zit alone, isn't it? I have a zit on my upper lip and all indications are that if I leave it the hell alone, it will fade and go gently into that good night without anyone except me ever noticing it.. My friends, like me, are just not all that observant. Besides, we're old. We can't see tiny things like lip zits anymore - it's one of the few, the far between, compensations for aging. On the other hand, if I pick at it, as I am oh so driven to do, it will become a massive weeping sore that will make me look like I'm actually an 18th century prostitute in the last stages of syphilis and that will be hard for even the blind to ignore. So of course I'm fucking with it. Of course.

In other news, August is a month of my friends' birthdays. Last night we went to Kathmandu (the restaurant, not, alas, the city, although Krista, who has been there, says that it is kind of a horrible place anyway - the city, not the restaurant.) to celebrate Jodi's and Charles' birthdays. The food was fantastic; the service was utterly inept but at least good natured; an excellent time was had by all and because Annie has discovered the wonders of the dollar store, we all got bamboo back scratchers as unexpected party favors. Eating great Indian food in a companionable, if damn near unphotographable, bright orange room (yes, India, there can be too much heart chakra for lenses) with awesome friends and getting a back scratcher! Things do not, really, get much better than this: I have been wanting a back scratcher for months. I was even toying with putting one on my Christmas list.

As it is the month of birthdays - I get along well with Leos, apparently, and when you realize that in my lifetime I have dated FIVE left handed Leo musicians named Michael, it all becomes opaque - I also ended up at a birthday party last Saturday night. It was a cool party although I knew basically nobody and was therefore kind of nervous, which is probably why I was texting my daughter from the bathroom. Therefore, in the inimitable spirit of Texts From Last Night, or, okay, last weekend to be pedantic, let me offer the following, with the caveat that actually it was a very lovely party.

Me: Am trapped at sorta weirdass birthday party in n. asheville w/ bunch of 20 somethings. Every time I go to leave everybody's like but the stripper will be here soon!
Auds: Oh no. How did that happen? that is crazy as hell.
Me: Dillon & Jodi lured me out. Stripper is on her way out now. Am not allowed to take pix. Yikes. Stripper looks like Wiccan. Me I feel I have seen enough skinny naked wiccans for one lifetime.
Auds: Dear lord. I wish I was there!
Me: Yeah me too!

The stripper did a kind of belly dance routine, very elegant. She never did get naked, the people were really nice and as far as I know there was no black magic going on at all. And after that we went to the DeSoto where I ran into several friends I hadn't seen for a while and watched the people from the LaZoom bus polka tour. I had never thought of Asheville as exactly a sort of Polka Mecca but apparently there's more polka here than you would think. This is fine by me and if only these two things could be combined so that we had wicca polka, well, then that might be Asheville and August in a nutshell: the Wicca Polka Mecca.

Lazy Sundays - Featuring Twilight Spoiler So Don't Read It If You Are One of Those People Who Get Freaked Out By Spoilers, OK?

2010-08-08T17:48:00.002-04:00

cat and green
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Last week I went to Mr. K's used books. For once I had the intelligence to bring a list of possibly decent authors with me so I was spared the usual total blankness that overtakes me whenever I walk into a book or video store. I swear, when I'm just sitting around I can remember the names of dozens of authors I want to read and all the titles of the movies I want to see but the minute I walk through the doors, poof, it's all gone. I react more or less the same way I did when I wandered into TJ Maxx recently for the first time in years: I turn into Goggling Fool Just Down the Mountain From the Cave Where She Has Spent Her Whole Life. "Ooooh," I say, "Shiny! Lookee there! Wowee! What's that?" and bam, my entire long term memory has vanished and been replaced by pure bemusement. This is how I end up leaving used book stores with paranormal romances featuring alien talking dog lawyers and movies about more or less the same thing. This time, though, I had a list and so I have been pretty happily working my way through a pile of relatively decent books, even if one of them was just a lengthy paean to the joys of dying in battle, preferably with a silver axe by your side.

Audrey, meanwhile, has been reading the Twilight series. I have avoided this thing like the plague, because I've read all too much about it on the internet and know that I would be immediately hooked, absorbed and unable to come to until I crawl out the other side feeling vaguely disgusted with myself. I know enough about Twilight from reading the online mockery, actually, that I was able to completely spoil the plot for Audrey by saying, innocently enough, "So, has she had the vampire baby yet?"
"MOM!" screamed my daughter, "She does not! Vampire baby?"
"Oh I'm sorry," I apologized insincerely, "I'm totally making that up."
"You are not," said Audrey, looking at me closely. "Vampire baby?"
"Well," I said, "It's not like it claws its way out of her or anything."
"MOM!!"

Now whenever she walks in the room, bemused from another six hour session of straight Twilight, I raise my hands above my shoulders, hook my fingers like claws, stick my teeth out and say "RAR, RAR! Vampire Baby! Rar!" I find this endlessly amusing. It breaks the monotony of trying to cure Theo of his obsessive barking disorder by using positive reinforcement and lengthy calm lecturing. "Use your tail, not your bark." I say in my best Romper Room voice. "Remember, use your tail and ears! We're not going to bark today! You'll get a gold star for using your tail!" and then I pet him. It is easier said than done to pet a dog continuously when he isn't barking. Rar! Rar!

Another Day, Another Interview

2010-08-04T17:06:00.001-04:00

bottle tree
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I had another job interview today. This one is notable for the fact that it is actually for a job that I really want, as opposed to an interview for a job that I don't really want but think would possibly be bearable oh god. And by bearable I mean perhaps I could stand it for six months before starting to think about Dorothy Parker couplets involving pills and razor blades. So this is a rarity and it meant a lot to me. And even after the interview I still want the job, which is even more of a rarity.

It is damn lucky that I even made it to this interview, because as of yesterday I was still in the throes of believing that it was happening Thursday, which is to say, tomorrow. I was so convinced that it was happening on Thursday, actually, that I ignored all evidence to the contrary, including the correct date written on the kitchen calendar, the email with the correct date in the subject line and my own memory of the phone conversation setting the interview date and time. I was so convinced of this that I went ahead and scheduled a hair appointment for today at noon so that I would look excellent and professional for the interview tomorrow. This was a serious hair appointment at a real salon, too, not just my usual haphazard wander, hoping for the best, into the salon where it is cheap and they give away free beer . That strategy sometimes works - and sometimes it does not. Yeah, and like the little girl with the little curl, when it is bad it is horrid.

The reason I was so convinced was that I knew it was going to happen on my old friend Ray's birthday. As it turns out, yes, it did: today is his birthday and we can all wish him a happy birthday and point out that after his two months of being two years younger than me he is again now only one year younger than me, so there. How I managed to convince myself that August 4 was on a Thursday, I don't know, but I did it and if Ray had not called me yesterday to taunt me with his youth I probably would have been sitting in a hairdresser's chair this afternoon instead of in the throes of academia talking seriously to a search committee. This would have been bad.

Men, I suspect, can go off to interviews without much preparation. They put on a suit - their good suit, the interview suit that they bought in 1988 that still is in fashion and still fits and maybe pay $20 to get a trim (or, for my peer group, a head wax - I kid because I love) and then there they are, ready to interview. It is maddening. For those of us with the double x chromosomes, it is different. I had to go shopping - three hours at the Dillard's clearance center, oh lord - and buy interview clothes and then make an expensive hair appointment . I had to plan, actually, to spend my entire weekly unemployment stipend on a chance to get a job. Oh well. LIfe is unfair and gender inequities are beyond the scope of this blog. Besides, it is rough to be a guy. I would not trade even for the twenty year old suit and the ability to write my name in the snow. And now I have a couple of pairs of interview pants - neither of which, naturally, I wore today. Although I did wear the shell and jacket.

However. After straightening my calendar out and canceling the hair appointment and indulging in the obligatory freak out, I decided that something had to be done about my hair anyway. Therefore, I talked my daughter into accompanying me to Sally Beauty Supply, a comforting shop of which I am fond. They have styrofoam heads there for $4.99, after all, and black rubber gloves and mysterious hair products and the whole place smells nicely of aesthetic chemicals. Audrey and I debated colors and finally settled on one that we thought might be too edgy but was not insanely boring and yet was close enough to what remained of my last color job so that it would not require complete bleaching of my much abused follicles first. We got the developer - at Sally Beauty you do not get the convenient little box like you do at the drugstore; oh no, you have to buy each bit separate and they assume that you know what you are doing - and the gloves and a couple teeny bottles of nail polish just because and then I came on home to do my hair.

It is not really a good idea to dye your hair a complete new color with a brand new product the night before a job interview.

Particularly when the color your hair turns is purple.

I woke up this morning and went to the mirror and LO! I was rocking me some purple hair. Now, I love purple hair. I often have purple hair. Purple hair is the shizz and it is most excellent and rather becoming if I do say so myself but it is not, perchance, exactly appropriate for interviews unless it is 1989 and you are applying to work at CBGBs or an extremely poor yet intellectual gallery on the Lower East Side. You can get away with purple hair on the job after you've worked somewhere for six months or more, usually, but at an interview? It is kind of the kiss of death. I hied myself back to the shower and shampooed it vigorously and while this did eliminate the fuchsia scalp side effect - unsettling at the part! - it only muted the hair a little bit.

Oh well. When there is nothing you can do there is nothing you can do. I put my purple hair in a ponytail and I put on my Dillard's clearance conservative, classy yet slightly edgy shell and swingy jacket and my favorite striped linen pants for luck and I went off and, oh man, I hope, I dream, I think that I may have aced the hell out of that interview. Purple hair and all.

Tofu of Despair

2010-08-03T13:48:00.001-04:00

tilt
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday I ate an entire pound of tofu. No, wait, actually it was only 14 ounces - hardly anything, as I pointed out to my daughter who was laughing hysterically at this revelation. "That's a lotta fermented bean curd, Mom." "Yeah," I said direly, "My stomach hurts." No kidding, right?

Well. I'm back deep in the land of despair again, living the mother's lament, hanging around in the darkness, darkness, no color no contrast that Joni Mitchell sang about in the early 70s. Things are not good. Things were already not good and they got rather dramatically worse on Saturday night and that's pretty much all there is to that. Kids get into trouble. Then you as the parent feel that you have failed miserably with your entire life but, actually, it is not really your drama here. It is their drama and sometimes the best thing you can do as a parent is step back and away and just hope against hope. And cry a lot. There's always that. The kid is still, after all, alive and healthy and we will leave it there, because this is not a mommy blog. Take it from me, mommy blogging is just not as much fun when the youngest is, supposedly, an adult.

So, enough of that! Life sucks - really sucks - but in a mighty feat I have eaten a pound of tofu and lived to tell the tale! Yesterday, hungover (I suspect there is a healthier way to deal with trauma than many bloody marys but I don't really want to know about it and anyway, think of the vitamins) and depressed, I turned for solace to the refrigerator. I'm on a diet and it seems I will be on a diet forever so the contents of my refrigerator are disgustingly low fat, low cal and low joy. But there was the tofu. I only planned to have a little tofu, you know, but it skyrocketed and it turns out that going on a tofu binge is deceptively simple. Be warned!

It started with tofu salad, to which I am addicted - take tofu, squeeze it mightily in your hands until the water all drains out, crumble the dry tofu into a bowl, add tamari, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, grated carrots and fresh grated garlic and ginger and eat it on crackers. It is good even without the carrots. You can skip the ginger, too, if you wish, but why would you wish? If you get bored while you are squeezing the tofu - it is admittedly kind of gross - then you can slice up the rest of it and soak it in tamari and rice vinegar and then bake it for a while in the toaster oven so as not to heat up the house. Make a sauce with garlic and ginger and tamari and lemon juice and just a little tiny bit of peanut butter and then, having finished the tofu salad, you can eat the chunks of baked tofu moodily with your fingers as you discover that your great plan to reread all your Terry Pratchett books is just not cutting through the malaise and sorrow. After your tofu orgy you will feel kind of peculiar, to put it mildly, but, hey, it's okay: you will actually not have gained any weight. Tofu, freakily enough, is allowed.

It's kind of scary: I've gotten way too good at this weight watchers diet thing. A whole damn brick of tofu is only 10 points, leaving me another 12 points or so worth of food I could have eaten yesterday, although once you have eaten all the tofu, honestly, you don't really care to eat again for some time. Possibly weeks. I knew that eventually I would start gaming the weight watchers system - I can't help myself - and it has happened. I have figured out how to eat basically nothing and still feel full, what with the help of freaky diet food, fruit (it's not all bad, this diet) and, thank the gods, light beer. And tofu.

Nostalgia Fest 2010

2010-07-31T21:43:00.001-04:00

yellow butterfly 4
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Over the last couple weeks I've finally gotten around to scanning in a bunch of old pictures and putting them up on Facebook. I have a surprising amount of old pictures, but I didn't get obsessive about them until the early 90s. I wish I had more from the 80s - I mean, there were outfits that should have been immortalized, not to mention such images as Ricky Fuckhead passing out on my parent's steps, Audrey's stuffed cookie monster cuddled up to his matching blue mohawk, but I didn't have a camera then. I wanted one but cameras were expensive and developing film even more so. Besides, I was too damn busy being cool to go around taking pictures - thank the gods I got over that.

So I have a very few pictures of the eighties - mostly faded polaroids - and a lot of pictures from about 1990 on up, all organized into the kind of cheap-o albums that are guaranteed, like a cyanide tooth in a spy's mouth, to destroy each cherished image bit by bit. Still I wish there were more. The advent of digital photography has spoiled me and I think everything should be documented, but it wasn't so easy back then. I remember wanting to take pictures of landscapes and rocks and bugs and suchlike artsy stuff - kind of like the butterfly there on the right - one summer in Vermont and stopping myself, thinking, Felicity, you can't afford pictures of bugs and flowers. Every picture you take should have the kids in it or at the very least the damn dog.

So I took pictures of the kids and the dogs and my friends and there we all are, in Charleston, in Baltimore, in Rock Hall, in Vermont, in New York, uncomfortable in Jackson County at my parents, looking younger and, okay, sort of embarrassing (my daughter, on hearing that there are more scanned things up on facebook, screams OH GOD NO NOT MORE HIPPIE KID PICTURES MOM.) But good, too. We look good, I think, and the kids, the kids. The kids are grown up now and some of them even have kids of their own. This makes me sad and then happy at the same time - that odd time passing ache, that nostalgia thing.

Old pictures stir up old emotions, or, rather, you sort of think they should but they don't, exactly. They stir up the ghosts of old emotions, frayed and faded remnants of what you once felt or said or did. I looked at one picture and thought, huh, what's he doing there and remembered, oh yeah, that was after that suicide attempt. Well. He's fine now, twenty years on. Oh look, I think to myself, that's when my marriage was ending and I was pretty damn suicidal myself. Hmm, wow. That's when I couldn't figure out what to do about the kids' schools and that's when I was fighting with my best friend and, huh, it all kind of worked out, didn't it? Or did it? Is there some parallel universe where I'm still married (yeah, okay, I broke out the wedding album. Jesus.) or maybe where I'm still dating so and so or what if I never met any of these people or, or - eep. Old photos are dangerous. That's one of the reasons why I'm okay with them fading.

In Baltimore for a while there was a lovely museum called the City Life Museum. It had exhibits on, basically, living in the city in the early 20th century - somebody else's nostalgia fest - and included in it were a bunch of photo albums that people had donated or that they had found at Value Village or something. These were the kind of photo albums where somebody in the early 30s had carefully written out captions - Caspar, at the Lake, 1927, with Aunt Iris - and fitted beautiful black and white worlds into photo corners. You could tell that they had been treasured for a long time and then one day long after Caspar the white dog had become a friendly ghost and Aunt Iris had also departed this earthly vale and nobody knew where the Lake was anymore, the album had ended up in the museum. So, those afternoons in the nineties, had I and while the kids, small then, played in the little fake 1920s grocery store I would sit on top of the fake fire engine and look through these old, old photo albums. It was the pictures of the dogs who usually made me cry but really, there is nothing sadder than an abandoned photo album, even if it doesn't have dogs in it.

So as to keep this fate from my pictures, I have therefore scanned a bunch and put them up on Facebook to be laughed at and then put the albums back on a shelf to molder quietly. It's been a more uncomfortable task than I thought it would be and not just because the scanner is so slow. It makes me question things, like, did this really work out? Is this really okay? What happened to us and where did we go and what, exactly, is this time thing anyway? I hate getting involved in asking those big, horrible questions that shouldn't ever really be looked at. Photos are dangerous.

Fish Scare

2010-07-28T14:55:00.006-04:00

cat and balloons
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

The other day I was at Ingles, as I so often am. Along with my weekly portion of diet food and the rather schizophrenic completely non diet food that my son requires to keep his buffalo chicken wing and ranch dressing counts sufficiently high, I bought on the spur of the moment some whole, albeit headless, rainbow trout that looked fresh. Even Granny, the scary checkout lady who has been checking out groceries at the Haywood Road Ingles since I was born, said that they looked like good fish. And Granny should know. I know that I try like hell to avoid having Granny check out my groceries, not because she is bad at it - she is the best, at this point, as you would have to be after forty gazillion years at the West Asheville Ingles, well, either that or a serial killer - but because it makes me feel guilty to have this ancient lady swiping my heavy groceries from one side of the counter to the other. I feel as if I should offer her a chair and an iced tea and swipe my groceries myself, ungrateful middle aged child that I am. However. We must figure that Granny knows fish.

I brought my Granny approved fishes home and put them in the fridge and then last night I made them for dinner. I put lemon slices and sliced shallots and some tarragon inside each one and squirted lemon over the whole fish and broiled them and therefore, you know, yum. They were pretty tasty and all would have been well except that half an hour later I did not feel well at all and neither did Audrey. We felt, actually, as if somebody had slipped some psilocybin mushrooms or some other frightening fungus into the trout. Extreme cottonmouth, dizziness, disorientation, nausea and, for me at least, fear, although honestly, I have in my lifetime had enough experience with psychedelic drugs that you'd think I'd react more with joy than fear.

The terror was mostly the fault of the internet: naturally, I immediately started googling and discovered that some fish farm in England had botulism on their trout once. This of course convinced me we were going to die forthwith. We even called poison control, a desperate move, and they told us to drink lots of water and monitor our symptoms, which we did by saying enlightening things to each other like, "Wow, I feel really weird."
"Me too!"
"What if trout naturally just secrete hallucinogens?" I said hopefully, "And all we are is tripping and it will be fun?"
"Mom," said my daughter, "If trout made you trip than we'd know about it. And every high school student in western North Carolina would be spending their weekends knee deep in the creek."
This was indisputable.

We told Miles, who hadn't been home for dinner, about our imminent demise. "If you get money from this," he said callously on his way back out the door, "I want some. Tell them I ate it too."
"What, you're leaving?" I said, "What if we need you to drive us to the hospital?"
"If I come home," he said, "And find y'all dead on the floor, well,"
"Well what?"
"Well, it would be upsetting." he said, waving and leaving.

Fortunately for young Miles' peace of mind, the symptoms dissipated after about two hours and we were fine, although I think I will not eat trout, particularly farmed trout, again. I'm still wondering what the hell happened. It wasn't really like any food poisoning I've ever heard of but neither was it a feeling I've ever had after dinner. Now, after dosing, yes, sort of, although that's much, much more pleasant and I can't figure out how the drugs met the fish. I mean, I really, really doubt that Granny (although, after all those years, could one blame her?) or anyone else at the Ingles is randomly dosing fish with LSD, although, let's face it, that would be kind of an appealing horror show idea.

Grumble

2010-07-28T14:55:00.005-04:00

Blogger has made it hard as hell to delete posts. The fish thing published twice but I can't get entirely rid of it. So here's a stupid placeholder. Grar. Argh. Bitch, whine, moan and complain.

Dream Building

2010-07-26T16:03:00.001-04:00

chicken coop
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It has been hot the last couple of weeks - you have probably noticed this - and I have been losing weight, which is nice. It seems to go away in the form of sweat, which is arguably less nice, but, hey, as long as it's departing, converting, one assumes, itself into some kind of energy or possibly the speed of light (I never made it all they way through the Tao of Physics) then whatever. And it's a learning experience, because in order to remove the sweat, I'm pursuing a kind of practical doctorate in fan placement.

Everyone who lives in the tropics without air conditioning - and, let's face it, as we move into the 21st century we're all living in the goddamn tropics, now and forevermore - becomes a fan expert and I am no exception. This house has a whole house fan, which is a hidden thing in the ceiling of the hallway, protected by louvers that open up when I flip a switch and start the dull yet comforting roar that means the house fan is on the job. In temperate weather, running that thing at night is enough to cool the house off nicely but it's not enough when it's this hot. Therefore, I've been adding fans. Window fans, box fans, the big round fan in the basement that my son will not relinquish no matter how much I try to bribe him. The fans have to be placed just so and I think about this a lot - probably too much - in order to maximize air flow from one room to another. Also, nobody is allowed to close any doors lest precious coolness be thwarted and the fans, which must be turned on as soon as it cools off outside, must then be turned off before 9 am. This is key, although my children sometimes just flat fail to see the drastic importance of all this. I feel like a personal failure on mornings when it's hotter inside than outside - unfortunately, that's a lot of mornings lately. You see, if it's over 85 in your house when you wake up it means that the day is going to basically suck. This is one of the laws of thermodynamics and thus immutable.

Thinking about air flow is like thinking about carpentry projects, which is what I do while I'm going to sleep. On nights when I have trouble going to sleep I think about other things as well (not THAT. Well, okay, sometimes THAT.) like walking through every house I've ever lived in and long railway journeys through Siberia and what it would be like to live on a spaceship but mostly I think about things I could build and how I could build them. I never actually build any of the things I think about but I am telling you, they would completely rock if I ever got around to it.

Right now I am thinking about shelving every inch of the room that has finally, with the throwing out of the old couch and the subsequent moving of the daughter downstairs, become my workroom / studio / office. I went so far as to go and look at how much it would cost to do this project (like $100, or, in other words, more than I am going to spend) and I even, on that exploratory voyage to Lowes, broke down and bought a drill motor. Yes, that is what most people call one of those electric cordless drills, but my ex husband, who is concerned with the nomenclature of tools, drilled into me that it was in fact a drill motor. Ha ha! A little hardware humor, there! Shoot me now. I'm glad I have it, though. It makes me feel macho and competent, as tools always do, and I like to push the trigger and listen to it go RRRRRRR. I would like it more if it hadn't just stripped out the first couple of screws I was trying to get it to turn - I think you do after all have to drill holes first, which is such a pain in the ass, particularly when you neglect to buy drill bits - but it will be really handy when I get around to making things. Houses. Shelves. Furniture. And other nifty stuff.

Think I'll Skip This One This Year

2010-07-24T15:17:00.001-04:00

jen and kitten
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I think I'm going to skip Bele Chere this year. This is not exactly an earth shattering decision - I mean, so what? Who cares? There will be 200,000 or so people there with or without me, not one of whom will give a shit that I am absent - but for some reason I feel vaguely guilty about this. I rarely miss Bele Chere; actually, I think this is only the second time in ten years that I haven't bothered to even venture briefly into the fray. This year, though, it's just too hot and I'm a little too battered in body (I think I have to throw my favorite shoes away on the chance that they are behind the recurring and endless poison ivy that is tormenting my feet to the point where I'm thinking maybe life as a double amputee would be preferable) and soul to face it. Besides, there isn't a single band playing that I really want to see, or, more accurately, haven't seen many and many a time before without having to force my way through overheated crowds. So, funnel cakes, sprinklers, street preachers and so on, lukewarm beer, games of spot the mullet and the pregnant teenager, you will have to do it without me this year.

In other news, this diet thing is working. I have lost ten pounds even despite the fact that over the last two weeks I sort of devoted almost all my calorie intake to beer - the stress & trauma diet works just fine, it turns out, if you're already on a big old diet and have stopped eating such delicious things as real bread and real cheese - and I am thrilled. I would be a bit more thrilled if my clothes were suddenly all too big but somehow they are not as much too big for me as I feel they should be. Well. That will come and one day, one beautiful day, I will again fit into the incredibly hideous purple plaid bermuda shorts of doom. That will be a happy day for me - for the rest of the world, not so much.

Drama and Baggage

2010-07-17T11:53:00.001-04:00

sketchbook page
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

A couple of months ago my children and I were discussing the topic of baggage - not the Gucci variety nor even the smart black plaid traveler's satchel on wheels that I slightly covet - and my son said indignantly that I had no baggage. That is, in pyschic and psychosocial terms - in physical terms I am the proud owner of an antique yellow duffel bag much mended with duct tape that serves my infrequent travel needs. I feel that I am also the not so proud owner of a variety of the other kind of baggage; thus, I started laughing as I considered my broke, unemployed, house more or less literally falling down around my ears, three dog owning, two adult children living at home self. My daughter looked with irritation at her brother. "We are the baggage, stupid." she said.

Well, yeah. Things have been dire again this past week around Hangover Headquarters and as usual I find this inhibits my creative process, to put it mildly. I swear to all the gods there are, including the neglected Gods of Dust Behind Baseboards and Vitally Important Cables That Mysteriously Disappear that I am really not a drama queen. I am not out there looking for drama nor attempting to create it when life gets dull. I dearly wish, actually, that I was, because that would mean that life got nice and dull once in a while. Instead, I just seem to lurch from crisis to crisis. I don't have time to go looking for trouble. It finds me on its own just fine.

A lot - maybe even most - of these crises nowadays are actually more the property and concern of my children rather than me but, as every parent knows, that's worse. Childrens' crises come to parents with guilt and grief and worry and the kind of creeping, inexhaustible angst that wraps a nice fuzzy blanket of sorrow and terror around your soul at three in the morning. It's also why I'm not specific about the nature of my griefs, here. I try my damnedest to blog about my kids only in passing or when they do or say something particularly hilarious. Since they are both smart, witty, funny people, that happens rather often, although, at the moment, not so much.

Well! Wasn't that fun? Isn't life just a fucking bucket of joyous warm happy moments, love, puppies and delicious meals? And the thing is, it is - except right there in the bucket is the fact that love is fraught, puppies eat the couch and delicious meals make you fatter than Jabba the Hutt on a good day.

Elder Gods

2010-07-13T12:16:00.001-04:00

echinacea from below
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It has occurred to me that everything that is wrong with this country - and that's a lot - is the fault of Nancy Reagan. Nancy Reagan only did two good things, ever, one of which was coming out for stem cell research and the other of which was replacing the White House china with dishes of such a staggering level of tackiness that I can still snicker at them almost 30 years later. "How do you know these things?" asked my daughter when I trotted out this bit of trivia the other night. "Are you kidding?" I said, "Saying mean things about Nancy Reagan was the basis of all my conversations with my mother for at least eight years." This is not, of course, entirely true but it's true enough.

My friend Susan says that there are some Rastas who believe that Ronald Reagan was the antichrist. I think this may be true. Certainly everything has gone to hell in a handbasket since his presidency and he's the one who started it all: the theocracy, the fervent prudery, the privatization of anything and everything that can be privatized for a profit, the giant growth of the prison industry, the erosion of the middle class, the end of the unions, the destruction of the working class and working poor, the demonization of poverty and, of course, the constant push towards the right that we have endured since the eighties, which has finally lead us to a country where people honestly believe that Obama is actually left wing. Let's not forget the Reagan initiated war on drugs, either, which has effectively destroyed most of what was left of anything resembling a functioning justice system. The fucker - and his wife, I mean, that china - has a lot to answer for. I don't believe in God, really: I prefer my gods multiple, since I feel there's too much work out there for just one and I like having individual small deities to consult on an as needed basis. I sure as hell don't believe in the Bible as anything other than a source for a lot of Renaissance paintings and an occasionally useful historic text, but if there was going to be an antichrist, I think Reagan fits the bill.

Now, to delve into the realms of serious paranoia or a possible screenplay, either / or: get this. If we assume that Reagan was the antichrist, an avatar of evil, an incarnation of doom heralding the end times, than think of his airport. It is generally conceded that Reagan National airport is a clusterfuck of amazing proportions. Well, you see (looks around, drops voice to whisper) that's because the runways are set up in a carefully designed occult web of summoning and every time a plane lands or takes off from one it's creating a more favorable climate for the eventual emergence of the Nameless Ones, who one of these days will break through the tarmac and start munching out on USAir jets. This must be stopped! I've had it with these motherfucking elder gods on this motherfucking plane!

Okay, okay. I know. Sometimes I can't help myself.

Random Wednesday

2010-07-07T14:12:00.004-04:00

sunset
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Huh, that was weird - a keyboard shortcut posted this long before it was ready. Oh well! Guess I must blog now! Actually, damn, it is far easier to post a link from Blogger proper rather than from Flickr although I don't get that tiny feeling of pride in my own mad basic knowledge of HTML skillz that I do when I type it all in laboriously. Still. And now for something completely different!

LOVE
Have I blogged lately about my great love for China Mieville? No? Have I ever blogged about my great love for China Mieville? Well. Let me fix that. I am in love with China Mieville. I am also, coincidentally, in love with Martin Millar and James McMurtry (I am not posting a link to James. If you don't know who he is it behooves you to google him immediately.) and so clearly, if I threw an apple peel over my left shoulder* it would land on the floor in the shape of an M, which is interesting and totally beside the point. Nevertheless! I have just finished Kraken, Mieville's latest book and I am here to tell you that you should go out and buy it immediately. Perhaps buy several copies, even: the book is great and so, as nice lagniappe, is the cover design. The book, though, the book is completely amazing. I mean, it is wonderfully great even for a book that centers around the random theft of a giant squid, which is perhaps the best plot premise ever (eat your heart out, Dashiell Hammett - why fuck around with a small black statuette of some random bird when you could be chasing a GIANT SQUID?): it is engrossing, thoughtful, beautifully written of course and even occasionally funny as hell. China Mieville is a genius - I mean, a genius, a serious genius - and sometimes he can be somewhat overwhelmingly abstract and intellectual but it is worth it to force your brain to try to keep up. Also, he's gorgeous, OMG, insert various girly stuff here, and I like his politics. Or, well, I think I do, but then British politics are a little opaque to we colonials due to the lack of the overwhelming stupidity factor that Americans seem to find necessary to keep in our own political life. "Why, he's dumb as dirt!" we say proudly and then reelect the bastard to keep on voting against health care and extending unemployment. "Dumb as dirt! Haw! Wouldn't want one of them goddamn smartypants progressives in Washington! Why, no, I don't get why we is so poor now and how come we has lost everything we once had - must be the goddamn terr'ists."

GARDEN
The garden has been really weird this year. It is the beginning of July and yet the garden seems to think it is the middle of August. Thus, all my sunflowers are out, half the peppers are ready, the corn is miserable, small and no good, the beans are done, the cucumbers are finishing and, well, it's not so awesome, actually. Also, borer beetles have killed all my zucchini - little fuckers! Evil insects! Forces of doom! - so for the first time in many years I am facing a zucchini free summer, which is clearly not to be borne. I am baffled in the face of the sudden uselessness of all my carefully hoarded recipes that disguise zucchini. If there is no zucchini to disguise I will probably have to start gluing mustaches on those weird ass Chinese whatever they ares and we don't want that. Or maybe we do.

WII FIT
I am having more fun with the Wii Fit than I probably should. I live in fear that somebody will catch me attempting one of the kindergarten level games, like marching in place, that I enjoy so much and yet am so, so very bad at. I confess: I've never really gotten my right and left straight. Never. Neither has my son, which is one of the reasons why we were so extremely terrible at Tae Kwon Do all those years ago. I am also bad at rhythm, as in, I don't got none and so I am terrible at most of the Wii Fit games, which rely heavily on rhythm and balance for some unknown reason that perhaps will one day become clear to me. But it is fun as hell to try. There are elements of living in the future that I adore and running in place in the basement while virtually following a small cat around an imaginary cartoon island on a large screen in front of me is one of them. As long as nobody ever sees me. I think I should probably wear a fake mustache.

INK
I decided a while ago that I would get another tattoo on my mom's birthday, which is today. Happy Birthday, Mom! Miss you every day - yeah, that's one of those things that you don't know until you lose a parent but let's not go there. It is rough. However. My mother would be completely horrified by this form of tribute - we had a sort of silent don't ask, don't tell thing going on with all the tattoos I already have, which I sort of attempted to keep mostly hidden - but, well, I don't care and I do think that as usual, my own very contrary nature, which is in large part much like her very contrary nature, would continue to amuse her. So, another tattoo is in the works. I already have Snufkin and Little My on my right shoulder blade and it is time to add my very own Moominmamma. Now I have to find a place that will do this today, because with my usual total lack of planning, I have done nothing but pick out a picture. Therefore, I'm out of here and off to find an available artist. Which, interestingly enough, one could also say about my quest for Martin Millar, James McMurtry and China Mieville.

ASTERISK PART
* This is an old fortune telling device that is infallible. Infallible, I tell you! What you do is first you must peel an apple so that the peel comes off all in one piece like a spiral without breaking anywhere. Then you throw it - the peel, not the apple - over your left shoulder and examine what it looks like on the floor. Whatever letter of the alphabet it resembles is the initial of the man you are going to marry. This is tough on people with names beginning with F or T or A or Z - that's why they never marry, as you know, while people whose names start with J and S and C marry often - but hey, my twelve year old self informs me that this method is absolutely the truth.

How I Ruined the 4th of July

2010-07-05T12:30:00.001-04:00

fireworks with girls on roof
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Whoo, holiday weekend! I hate holiday weekends. I used to like them, back in the dim time before time when I actually had a job and Mondays meant something to me but now that Mondays are just another day when I don't get my quota of junk mail, well, fuck it. I might be missing coupons from Hardees not to mention dubiously existent carpet steam cleaning services that I will never use. Besides, if you're unemployed, you might hypothetically start celebrating this holiday stuff a little early, like, say, Wednesday and then by the time the actual holiday rolls around you are over it, what with the consecutive hangovers and the loss of the diet resolve and the horrible Wii Fit saying you've gained 2 pounds and making rotten cracks about your diet. Hypothetically, that is.

However, holiday weekends and their risks aside, I am an American, no matter how much I tried to tell people I was Canadian back in the early 80s when I was traveling (even going so far as to smoke Rothmans gods help us) and as an American it is my patriotic duty to drink beer and go see fireworks on the 4th of July. Besides, Annie, fired up by the small fireworks at Susan's party last Thursday, wanted to go see real fireworks. Not that the fireworks available at BJs or in all of North Carolina are unreal: they just don't go up in the air. No, they menace your ankles by emitting showers of sparks - all fireworks we can buy here say they emit showers of sparks or shoot flaming balls, a lovely double entendre that I for one would deeply enjoy seeing imagined pyrotechnically. Actually, in a beautiful failure of the Chinese packaging industry, one of the fireworks at Susan's party claimed that it would emit showers of gummy bears. Alas, it did not and so it came about that Annie wanted to go to the big fireworks display.

It is unfortunately rather difficult to take somebody with limited mobility to the downtown Asheville 4th of July celebration. Granted, it would be a hell of a lot easier if said person with the limited mobility admitted that she had it and sat down in a damn borrowed wheelchair which one could then trick up with a horn and some flags and stuff, but no, as far as she's concerned, she's the same as she ever was: it's just the rest of the world that has become inexplicably and rudely complex and fast. So this was a bit of a problem.

We started out the evening by going to a neighborhood block party which was lovely and turned out to be hosted by a Facebook friend of mine. That's always a shock - a facebook friend! Who exists! Who knew? At any rate, we walked on down there and back, slowly, a whole block and then recovered for a bit on Annie's porch while it got, again rather slowly, late enough to where we would not be sitting somewhere waiting for three hours for the fireworks to begin, a process to which I am allergic, particularly in a beer free environment. I had this theory that we could take my brother's car and go up to the top of the Biltmore Ave. parking deck, which is where I used to always go for fireworks because it is the best place. Unfortunately, over the years since I used to do this, other people have discovered that it is the best place and by 7:45, the deck was full. Damn them. I also, of course, used to start out at the New French bar and just dash up 3 flights of steps to the top when I heard the booming begin but, see limited mobility, above, that option didn't seem as if it would work.

My back up plan was to park, using Annie's handy handicap hang tag, in front of the art museum and walk slowly through the park. Well, the art museum was blocked off, all the handicapped spaces were gone too and the park was wall to wall people, so we nixed that. "What about the Wall Street deck?" I said, "I bet we can see both the downtown fireworks and the Biltmore estate ones from there!"

Famous last words. We got up to the top of the deck and parked and stood around for a bit. Then we decided to stand somewhere else and eventually, on a hunch, we moved the car to a different place on the roof. Other people began to appear. One by one they came over to me.
"Is this a good place to watch the fireworks?" they asked, humbly. "Where do they shoot off the fireworks?"
"Why yes," I said, enjoying my new role as fireworks ambassador for my city, "This will be great. You'll be able to see them from over there and there!"
And you would have, too, if somebody hadn't built the Public Interest Building in, like, 1920. Alas, it turns out that seeing the fireworks from the top of the Wall Street Parking deck is damn near impossible - you can only really do it, actually, from the place where we had first parked the car and even there it is less than optimal. Still, there were fireworks. I mean, sort of. You could kind of see parts of them here and there.
"I'm sorry," I said as we climbed back into the car, "That I ruined the 4th of July."
"This place is no good," said my aunt bitterly, referring to Asheville as a whole. "They don't have good fireworks."
"You know," said my brother thoughtfully, "People only started coming up there after we were there. They probably thought we knew what we were doing. So look at it this way - you didn't just ruin the 4th of July for us - you ruined it for all those people as well!"
"Okay, okay," I said, "I will start planning next year's celebration tomorrow. Honestly. It will be better, I swear."
And so it will, because I personally intend to be out of town and asking other people where they watch the fireworks from, I don't know, maybe Uttar Pradesh.

Fitness For Employment

2010-06-30T12:44:00.001-04:00

ful moon from a parking lot
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

We have a Wii Fit! Yes, we are disgusting materialists who stay in their house all the time and are probably responsible for at least some of the decline of civilization as we know it, but, yeah, whatever, we have a Wii Fit! It is highly awesome and as soon as I learn to do the Segway ride without bending over like some kind of crazed knuckle walking speed skater, I am confident that it will trim my waistline as well as hurting my back. Actually it's amazingly fun. It turns out that I am horrible at step aerobics but that's okay: laughing that hard has to burn some calories in and of itself.

And, I did better at the yoga part than I thought I would. "Wow," said my daughter, "I am impressed with your total yoganess!"
"And I with yours!" I said happily even as we competed viciously for higher yoga points, which I have a feeling is not what any mahatma would recommend. Yoga is always competitive, though. I used to take yoga classes at the YMCA with about 300 other people, all of whom were better at yoga than I was and the competition was fierce. The teacher would be over in the back of the class shaking her head sorrowfully at my pathetic downward facing dog and meanwhile, the guy with the blue stars tattooed on his face - most flexible homeless man in Asheville! - would be tying himself into impressive knots while a squadron of perfectly outfitted ultra yoga young mothers of impeccable hipness gently outdid one another at breathing and breathtaking expense of yoga accessories. I was sure that one day they would all crack and just go on and knife each other holistically but I dropped out - the stress! The pressure! The fact that I don't bend! - before that happy event.

What with the diet and the exercise and all this stuff, I foresee that it is possible I will eventually get back into something vaguely resembling work clothes. This is good, because I actually had an interview this morning. The interview was with a placement/temp type service and my interviewer, who was extremely nice, gently and subtly told me I looked like hell.

"This position," she said, "is in a very conservative office. Do you," beat "Anticipate any problem with, for example, dress?" Oooooh. Ow. This is not what you want to hear when you're sitting there in your best black linen pants, which, are, okay, somewhat snug and a formal - well, formal-ish - top. Then she told me that there's a Goodwill out on Leicester Highway which will give you interview outfits for free. Ow, again. Major ow. I am apparently no better at dressing professionally than I am at step aerobics. I think I'm great at it, usually, in a sort of bohemian unique take on the concept, but perhaps I am wrong in that. Maybe there is a reason why my friends all fall over laughing when I say I feel as if I look corporate that day.

Dress is the least of my worries, though, because I had to fill out one of those terrible interview things where they ask you what your work ethic is and what motivates you. I always want to put down Nonexistent under work ethic and Rum, Sodomy and the Lash under motivating factors but since I actually need money, I did not. I also wanted to say that my ideal supervisor would be one who loosened up on the rack now and then but I didn't put that down either. Although, for god's sake, let's all be honest here: I want to work for money. Money motivates me. My work ethic depends on it. It is, of course, forbidden to mention something so crass as money when you are interviewing for a job. You are supposed to be doing this job for some kind of love of humanity or deep desire to get up close and personal with the really complex parts of Excel. Uh huh. Absolutely. Well. So I put down some nonsense about recognition and team efforts because, again, I need money. Yeah, I am crass and commercial - after all, I have to recoup my small investment (it officially belongs to Audrey) in the Wii Fit.

Weekends They Come and They Go

2010-06-28T18:07:00.002-04:00

sunflower graphic
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I just spent three hours de-virusizing my computer, which is even more highly annoying when one considers that I haven't used the damn thing since some time on Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless, it had managed to get itself all infected and, therefore, this is where I give a shout out to Spybot Search & Destroy, who not only fixed the problem that malwarebytes and avira could not but also have the most adorable software license on the planet.

So what did I do this weekend, seeing as how I was not on the computer? Well, on Friday it was of course time to go to the DeSoto and drink beer with my friends. I get to drink beer on this weight watchers thing, as long as it's light beer and as long as I have barely eaten anything all week - those glorious 35 extra points sure do come in handy for binge drinking! Whoooeee! - so I did that. I also made sure to tease my friend who is in a new relationship. "I know this is corny," he said, blushing, "But a song from West Side Story keeps on going through my head."
"As long as it isn't Officer Krupke," I said, "I think you're good."

Friday night, thus, was fun for all but there is a slight problem with drinking on an empty stomach: to wit, it leads to migraine type headaches on Saturday. Thus I was kind of a mess on Saturday but I gave in to my daughter's blandishments and headed off to the Dillard's clearance center at Biltmore Square Mall so that Audrey could buy a dress for her cousin's wedding next month and I could sit around and be unwell in air conditioning. This worked out quite well: after pulling every dress that looked even slightly reasonable off the racks, I sat in the dressing room. Audrey tried on dresses and I tried not to be sick, so it was all good despite the faint odor of, I swear to god, pee. You can put up with pee smells though, for air conditioning and cheap as hell fashion and she found not just one but two fabulous dresses, so everyone came out happy.

That night I was supposed to go to a party but instead I begged off and went to see Robin Hood instead. Robin Hood! My favorite! With Russell Crowe who is not exactly my favorite but who I would not kick out of bed for snoring and Cate Blanchett, who looks exactly like my friend Luneige and who I like, therefore, by association. I was excited and actually the movie was pretty damn good for a movie that made no sense whatsoever. I mean, none. I mean, plot holes you could drive a medieval ox team through, not to mention history holes that hurt my head. Besides, they had a fight scene on the beach, all half underwater with blood and yet somehow failed to bring in a shark. How could you do that, Ridley Scott? A shark would have redeemed the entire thing. I actually said this out loud in the movie theatre - sorry about that, fellow moviegoers, I was just so excited when I thought that maybe Robin Hood was going to save Maid Marian from a shark with his trusty bow, but alas, the stupid movie was shark free.

Yesterday, I started off cleaning the entire house with the help of an entire pot of coffee. That would have been fine and an achievement in and of itself but then I went many steps further and completely rearranged my bedroom. Redecorating is always so much fun. It always takes just as long as you think it will, right? Ha ha! It takes seven times as long as you think it will and that's not even counting reassembling the bed frame twice. The bed frame is extremely precarious at this point and I am a little worried that if I ever have company again, it's going to turn out to be one of those sitcom worthy events. Duct tape can only do so much. However, that happy event is far off and my room is now immaculate and completely different than it was before.. My back is also different than it was before and that bookcase won't make another move, but oh well, what the hell. I am pleased and the dogs, after some initial confusion, have adjusted themselves to their preferred farting positions directly under my pillow, so all is as normal in my world. Happy Monday!

Summer, Again

2010-06-25T16:32:00.003-04:00

gladiola
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I know it is summer now, because my feet and ankles are covered with mosquito bites and poison ivy. Yay! How exciting! Because I am physically incapable of itching without scratching (did the difference between those two words completely absorb anyone else's second grade brain during moments of boredom or is that just me?) soon my feet and ankles will be covered, again, with attractive scabs. Perhaps they will match the purple toenail polish. One can but hope.

In other news, there really is no other news. Mostly what I'm doing these days is dieting, which is boring to do - except for the part where I'm dizzy and out of it all the time, which has become kind of awesome since I decided not to be worried about it and instead to pretend that I was just on drugs - and even more boring to read about. Yesterday, in news of the totally damn thrilling, I even went to the store and bought a bunch of weird ass diet food. I am a little concerned about this - it diminishes my hippie cred considerably and we don't want that - but on the other hand it is amazing to not be completely starving. Fake diet food actually makes you feel full - sure, you're probably dying of some kind of chemical military industrial grade cancer the minute you ingest it, but you feel full, so who cares? It is better than miniature carrots. Almost anything, truth be told, up to and including thumbscrews, is better than gloomily sitting in the kitchen eating miniature carrots in an attempt to stop the hunger pains. And while miniature carrots are bad, dipping them in zero calorie zero fat white gluey stuff that has the nerve to call itself ranch dressing is worse, because then the existential gloom really comes down hard on your soul. I hate it when that happens.

Still, one marches on. One fixed the goddamn bathroom scale and discovered to one's horror that one is approximately the same weight as a humpback whale, a humpback whale who, moreover, has gained more than ten pounds in the last eight months. Therefore, one is fucking determined to become svelte. Svelte, I say. Svelte and scabby.

Wednesdays, Huh, What Are They Good For?

2010-06-23T17:23:00.003-04:00

fishes
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It's hot and I have miserable cramps. This has led me to realize that it would only take a good cry for me to actually embody the name of a famous 70s sort of jazz rock group - guess which one? It's not the Grateful Dead, yet, but if the heat and cramps keep up, it damn well could be - which I believe may be one of those things that normal people don't think about, but I do. However! All that matters not, because the PetSmart on Brevard Road has sold out to the PetCo and as a result, all their cheesy aquarium ornaments, plus some dog toys, are on final clearance. As a result of this changeover, the employees are wearing PetCo outfits and saying things like, "We're from PetCo and here to help the PetSmart people get through the changeover!" This is kind of terrifying, because any job that involves you wearing a brown nylon vest and a nametag and being knowledgeable about cash registers and tropical fish should not also be the kind of job where you fly all over the world helping people transition. The transition, which I guess involves having a different name on your paycheck and conceivably some redecorating in the store (which is a good thing, because it will get rid of those signs that said DOGZ TOYZ! in a cheery and soul destroying font) should not, maybe, need professional help. Well, it would be fun to be the transition manager and fly all over the world, assuming, that is, that PetCo is multinational and hey, it probably is, because who can resist small eerie castles like the one pictured, particularly when they're marked down from $15 to $3? I also got a fluorescent pink plastic aquarium flower for 68 cents. 68 cents, people!

I like to think that my fish are happy now, because not only has their decor, which had been sinking steadily since the plant died and the algae eater proved himself not quite up to his task, improved about 110%, but I added new fish. Nothing like new roommates to cheer fish up! Look, the neighborhood has gone downhill! If all else fails they can all now band together and be xenophobic about the newcomers, a bonding experience for all.

In other news, I have begun to harvest some of the freaky mystery Asian vegetables. Remember, on my klonopin fueled trip to the West Coast (I had been waiting all my life to stand on a Pacific beach and exclaim the ocean is on the wrong side! in tones of horror but when it came to it I kind of forgot, plus, it didn't really feel as wrong sideish as it should have) I bought several packets of promisingly weird looking Asian vegetable seeds and brought them home to plant. I was hoping against hope for a sort of Little Shop of Horrors experience in which I get to be that person the villagers come after with the torches and the pitchforks once my army of demonic plants has laid waste the peaceful mountain village of Asheville, but so far everything, with the exception of the eggplants, which firmly refused to grow at all, has been distressingly well behaved.

So I have harvested a few of these. They look and smell a bit like turnips, so I tried chopping, boiling and serving them with butter but the results, frankly, were uninspiring. Sure, if you were in a prison colony or possibly had villagers with pitchforks standing behind you, you could eat them, but in other circumstances, probably not. I ate a few chunks and pretended to be enthusiastic but it was a hollow sham, quickly seen through by my children. Now I wish to know, what are they?

Weekend Update With Bonus Weirdo Anecdote

2010-06-21T18:11:00.001-04:00

going home
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Today I have been rather frighteningly efficient. I applied for two jobs. I took the dogs for a run in the woods. And I have started my diet seriously, which meant that I had to spend an hour on the computer figuring out how many points are in the modified vichyssoise I made on Saturday night for my poor friend Susan, who is suffering through dental hell. I tell you, figuring out points is not for the weak. For a few moments there I thought it was possible vichyssoise had over 800 points and, actually, so it probably does, if you eat the whole pot. Which I could do right now without blinking, because I am fucking starving. That is okay, though! At least I don't have dental pain! And besides, the hunger is making me dizzy and if you just relax and go with that, you can pretend you're on drugs.

Speaking of drugs, I am mildly curious as to what the guy who sat down at my table at Broadways on Friday night was on. He was extremely strange and, which is embarrassing, I could not at first discern whether he was a) just being weird or b) a performance artist or c) on heavy, serious drugs or d) completely mentally ill. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it was a combination of c and d but I must be slipping, because I used to be able to sort this stuff out a lot faster. He was not unattractive, although not really all that good looking, but, you know, passable. Well, we are all passable, these days, us old Gen Xers, at least in the right light or lack thereof.

"Tell me a joke," he said when he sat down, so I told him my stock joke, the one about the martians and the gas pump and the wraps his dick around him three times and he laughed immoderately. This joke, which I have been telling for almost 30 years simply because it's the one joke that somehow imprinted itself permanently on my brain one day, is not all that funny. Then he made me tell him the punchline four times. That was art, possibly. Then he made a paper airplane, which would have been art and fine except it was a terrible airplane and I have no patience, really, for poor craftsmanship. I admit that my paper airplanes are pretty terrible but in their defense I say chauvinistically that I am a girl and besides, they would totally work if I had a paperclip. Nobody ever has a paperclip, so that's a good safe lie. Then he leaned in to speak to me. Uh oh, I thought, because by this point I was pretty firmly in the highly medicated and crazy as a shithouse rat camp about this guy.
"Your beer is round," he said carefully. "And your tattoos are round."
Hmmm.
"Are you," he asked, leaning in, "Round?"

Well, that's what the diet is supposed to be addressing. At this point, I found something highly important to do on the other side of the bar and he took himself off to enjoy downtown after five and make gnomic utterances at other people. Downtown After Five, this time featuring Drivin' and Cryin', a band I have a soft spot for of old, mostly because of the Kev'n Kinney song Hey Landlord, was pretty good except actually the sound is not at its best from Broadways' roof deck. Usually, the proximity to cheap beer and the distance from the madding crowd more than make up for this but last Friday ended up just being so loud and muddy that Jodi and I finally split and went to Scullys. On Saturday I did various errands and eventually went over to Susan's to sit around and drink beer and give her the aforementioned cold potato soup. Yesterday I did very little except bring in the first harvest from the garden, consisting of three fabulous cucumbers, a whole mess of green beans and two Chinese mystery vegetables that kind of look and smell and taste like turnips or a cross between turnips and jicamas. I boiled them. They were not delicious but I still have hopes, although it's possible that I'm just starving. Or on drugs. Natural, free drugs.

Dieting

2010-06-19T17:41:00.001-04:00

finished gourd corporate toothy front view 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

So I am on a diet. I am actually not officially on a diet yet - that starts on Monday - I'm sort of on a starter diet. A trial diet. A diet that is condoned by the Watchers of Weight. Not WeightWatchers, mind - I'm too broke - but the Watchers of Weight, who are a group of dark clad ninja like svelte people who come into your house to torment you mercilessly about your giant fatness. Also, they snatch food from your plate and then laugh heartlessly as they eat it themselves. Then they tease you about your fat clothes. Fear them!

Not really, although it would have its serious awesome points. Speaking of points, what really happened is that a friend of my daughters loaned her a weight watchers calculator. We have decided to launch into counting points, as opposed to calories, obsessively and as a result becoming slim and scornful, not to mention better at math, our own selves. The point system is complex. You take the little calculator and you put in first the calories of the food you just ate (if you do it before you eat you will lose a whole lot more weight, but the misery will double, so it's a toss up) and then the fat content and then the fiber. The calculator then hands you back a point value, to wit, hot dogs are 7 points while blueberries are 1. Some things, like tomatoes, are free: they have no points. Alas, when you add toasted bread and bacon and mayonnaise and lettuce to tomatoes, they gain points. This is frustrating, since I only get 27 points a day. 27! They add up faster than you'd think.

Given the existence of points, I am postulating that there must therefore also be negative points. There must be a way, mathematically, to simply confuse the fat away. Presumably it would involve something that was more or less all fiber. What if I ate 3 cups of celery? Would I go into negative points? I need to go into negative points and soon, too. Those 27 points are not enough and besides, I'm getting obsessive. I've been counting blueberries to make sure I'm okay on the points front. There is little more depressing in this life, I find, than counting fucking blueberries.

Now, you do get overflow points and rather a lot of them: 35 a week! That would be awesome except I fully intend to save all mine up for binge drinking. There are only 2 points in a light beer, which means I can have 16 light beers and a PBR (3 points.) After doing that on a Saturday night, I should be sick for at least 3 days, which would further reduce my point intake and again, lead me into the much desired negative point status.

You can see I have thought this through. My brain has already been sharpened by starvation and there is no system I cannot beat. Look out, thin people! I"m coming to join you! Slowly. Oh, so very slowly.

Thunder Drugs and TMI Boy

2010-06-16T15:57:00.002-04:00

haywood road
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Thunder and Drugs
The weather broke, thank the gods, as you probably have noticed if you live here, broke with one of those afternoon thunderstorms that are so amazingly fabulous for everyone but Theo. Poor, miserable, anxiety prone, panicking Theo goes down to Teenage Wasteland and hides under Miles' bed, where the floor is concrete and no bad things other than dirty dishes and towels from last March can befall him. This would be fine on many levels - the house is far calmer with only two dogs instead of three, go figure - except that he gets stuck. It takes me a couple of hours to figure this out and then I have to go lift the bed off him. When stuck, he lies very still and doesn't answer when he's called. This is a problem. If you, like me, are all occasionally slightly paranoid and prone to being kind of introspective - as I am on some evenings - you think "Oh god, what if he's dead? What if he had a heart attack? What will I do if there's a dead dog stuck under Miles' bed? Should I call 911? Probably not. Bad idea right now. Besides, they might laugh at me. What will I do? What if I freak out? What if we all freak out? Would it be appropriate to run wailing down the street? This could be bad - very bad. Very, very bad." and thus, you see, you're kind of afraid to go down there. But you must and then, honestly, lifting the bed off him is a total relief.

I would take him to the vet for doggie downers but given that there's a thunderstorm every single afternoon, he'd almost certainly get all addicted and then I'd either have to check him in to doggie rehab or face the terrible, motel room wrecking, Keith Moon-esque consequences. You never expect your own dog to become a drug addict but damn, turn around and there he is, pawning his milkbones. Post modern life!

That is a very good link. Yes, yes it is.

TMI Boy
There's a convenience store I frequently frequent which is apparently all run by one large, dysfunctional and sitcom worthy family. Actually, wait, pretty much all convenience stores seem to be run by large dysfunctional families and perhaps I should consider obtaining one as a retirement option if my other plans, namely, taking a lot of heroin and waiting tables at Waffle House or opening a biker bar in Marshall, don't pan out.

At this particular store, though, there is one clerk we like to call TMI Boy. TMI Boy is clearly bored to tears by his job and who can blame him? This is why he likes to come up with Wacky Antics which are almost, but not quite, amusing. Well, I'm being unfair. Sometimes they're amusing and sometimes I'm in a goddamn hurry and then, dude, the small dance routine or the pretending to not know what cigarettes are grows old.

Performance art is what TMI Boy is all about. He likes to talk and the subject he likes to discourse upon is himself, which is how I know more about TMI Boy, from the state of his finances (always dire) to that of his step grandfather (really dead this time) than I really, really want to know. Still! I bitch but also, in certain moods, I get a little frisson - a little frisson, mind you. Tiny. Minuscule, actually. Sort of a frissonette. - of excitement as I pull up, wondering just what thrilling thing I will learn from TMI Boy today.

Summer

2010-06-14T21:18:00.001-04:00

okra on the porch
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Summer is indubitably here and I don't like it. I have sweat running down my face; I have to keep my hair up and I'm afraid to wash the dishes because that would require hot water. Last night I woke up over and over again with an inexplicable stuffed nose and my hair soaking wet and all in all, I am feeling extremely sorry for myself. Look, I am a woman of a certain age, which means that my core temperature has been hovering, lately, somewhere around the same mean level as the surface of the sun. Added heat, therefore, is a problem and is probably why I was shrieking and throwing dishes and shoes around this morning although, honestly, that's a perfectly sane and reasonable response to a stubbed toe. Right?

We do not have AC. We do have a cheap and terrible window unit that is lying around in the garage somewhere but even if I wasn't afraid of the killer attack garage mice and the hypothetical, just barely possible, killer attack garage snakes (Audrey claimed out of the blue the other night that snakes love garages. It would explain why the mousetraps have not been sprung. Eeee!) and, hell, why stop there, the killer attack garage gnomes of death, I wouldn't put the AC in a window. You see, each window in this house takes two people, a hammer and an alarming amount of foul language to open or close. That is why they get opened in the spring and closed in the fall and since even I have grasped the fact that running a window AC unit in a room full of open windows accomplishes nothing much else than further destruction of the environment, ozone and, I don't know, happy kittens frolicking on doomed green lawns, I'm not going to do it. So we suffer.

The house has a whole house fan which works miracles when it actually gets cool at night. Asheville should get cool at night. It used to get cool at night, goddamnit, when I was just a young and thoughtless slip of a thing but now the incredible weight of cool that came with all the hipsters has heated up the mountains and we're trapped in a sauna. High eighties and not dropping much below seventy at night is not cutting it: when it doesn't cool off enough in the evening, the whole house fan tries, but it can't really do its job.

It could be worse, I know. I used to live in Charleston, long ago, where even the whole wee slip of a thing who was me, staggering drunkenly from the Fulton House to ACs and back again, bitched more or less continuously about the heat. I also used to live in Baltimore, which is just as bad as Charleston - Baltimore pretty much has the worst of all possible weather patterns, always. I have never forgotten the time I was driving down the JFX with my friend Noelle, coming home from a party in Hampden when the radio said "It's 1:33 am and 104 degrees in downtown!" Actually I have often thought that would make a great beginning for a horror movie and it kind of is, because that sort of heat makes many of the scarier people of East Baltimore, the ones who ordinarily don't often leave their basements, come out. As my then small son said, one blazing day driving down East Pratt Street and looking in shock at a very, very large man on his stoop, "Look! It's a . . it's a NUDIST!" And it might have been. One couldn't tell. So all in all, I know, I'm lucky and it will cool down here again for at least a little while before the summer ends.

Quizzes

2010-06-12T12:28:00.001-04:00

pink roses yet again
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Audrey snagged a copy of Real Simple from somewhere and brought it home. We're not much of a magazine household except for the New Yorker, which I have been reading my entire life and intend to continue reading for my entire life, despite the elitism, the cartoon contest on the back page that I hate with the passion of 1000 suns, the annoying ads for stuff I will never be able to afford and wouldn't want even if I won the lottery and the fiction, which is so often of the Overprivileged White Person Sits in Fabulous Kitchen in Connecticut and Ponders Last Affair variety. Wait, though. Not if - when, I mean. When I win the lottery. Power of positive thinking! The Secret! I already promised Miles a Rolls Royce when I win the lottery anyway, which purchase will seriously cut into my ability to buy hideous jewelry and mysterious financial bond thingies.

However, Real Simple, although I have often thought it should be called Real Expensive and pandering as it does to the demographic who believes that buying lots of stuff equals simplifying your life (a demographic to which I most firmly belong, hells yeah) turns out to have that good thing, quizzes. Who doesn't like magazine quizzes? Magazine quizzes used to be the shit, back in the day when you had to find an old envelope and a pencil to take them and the internet hadn't cheapened them by ceaseless repetition into nothingness. Back when they asked the real, the important, the burning questions such as "What is your fashion style?" or, in the case of Cosmo, "How much do you like oral sex?" as opposed to the inane Facebook variety that simply queries "Which boy band are you?" (O Town, not that I would take such a foolish quiz.) Therefore, Audrey administered a Real Simple quiz on my organization style to me with an old envelope and a pencil.

"Do you think everything should have a place and be in its place?" she asked.
"Um," I hazarded, "Theoretically. I mean, yeah, in a sort of Platonic ideal of a house. But, you know, that's impossible in real life."
"We'll say yes," she said firmly and wrote down a number.
"Do you prefer symmetry in artwork and in your home?"
"Gah! No! What a horrible idea!"
"Do you often drive with the empty light flashing?"
"What's the empty light? Oh, do they mean if you're almost out of gas? Well, of course."
"Do you feel guilty if you don't follow the rules when playing board games?"
"Honey, I feel guilty if I knock the little dog off the Monopoly board by accident (or the iron. Actually I had to remove the little dog from Monopoly years ago because otherwise the entire family fights over it. Including me.) Of course I feel guilty. But rules, now, I mean, define "rules.""
She glared at me. "Yes," she said, "I'm putting yes."

There was a silent moment or two of intensive calculation. "You're left brained." she said.
"Whoo hoo!" I cheered, "Wait. That's the bad one. That's the only one where left is bad and right is good, right? It's like that thing Noelle said about free radicals - they sound good but they're bad!"
"That can't be right," said my daughter, "No way are you left brained."
"No," I agreed, "Not possible. The quiz must be wrong."
"Oh wait," said Audrey, "I think I screwed up. You're right brained after all!"
"Yay! What does that mean for my organizational style?"
"It's hopeless," said my daughter sadly. "Hopeless."

See? Quizzes are useful.

Shopping

2010-06-10T19:16:00.001-04:00

perdita like water
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I have been resorting to retail therapy more than is my usual wont (wont! wont! What a lovely word, that can be used in so many ways with just the addition of a handy apostrophe.) lately. This is highly stupid, like, 10 out of 10 on the stupid scale since, as we know, my income is essentially nil. That is, the state of North Carolina, in its infinite wisdom, is handing me approximately 3/5 of my previous pathetic salary as long as I log on to their website every week to apologize for not having a job. Also, I must keep a job hunting log of failure, desperation and rejection, which is big time fun, let me tell you. Still, I feel it is my duty to spend this NC money, thus stimulating the economy and also netting me stuff like this pair of not all that hideous and highly comfortable pants for $6.24 from the clearance racks at Target today. Score!

Well. In a strange quirk of personality, fluorescent lights and the smell of fabric softener have the power to cheer me up, and being unemployed gets old. I have time if not money and so I have been doing some shopping. Today, I had things I had to get for Annie anyway, so that was the ostensible reason I was browsing the clearance racks at Target after a visit to Michael's crafts, where I nobly held back from the extremely groovy plastic chip bowl and took away some of those all graphite drawing pencils to which I am so addicted. I need them to draw with and then the dogs eat them, so a constant supply is a necessity. Besides, Michaels is always like a small trip to the nether reaches of the solar system in itself. There are entire Chinese provinces devoted to making peculiar things, like terrifying plaster bobblehead dolls, for Michaels.

Michaels and Target are conveniently located practically next door, so when I left the land of freaky crafts, I went to Target, where I found the aforementioned pants. Then, since I was going to do the dressing room thing anyway, I went ahead and plopped two heinous dresses and a pair of, gods help me, purple cargo shorts into the cart.

The clearance racks at Target are as interesting as clearance racks anywhere. When I'm shopping, whether it's accompanied by the Goodwill screech of hanger against metal rack or the Target / Ross / TJ Maxx searching for the size and price tage, my mind inevitably goes into a sort of stream of consciousness fugue state that swings happily from "What the hell is this dress? It looks like a post ironic take on some kind of construction worker Village People thing? Who would wear this?" to "Oooh, lady with scary hair. Do not look. Scary hair! Scary! Does she know it's scary? Did she pay somebody to do that to her hair?" to "Is that a . . . gingham romper? Oh god, it's a gingham romper. Wouldn't it be kinder to equip all gingham rompers with body heat activated laser beams so that anyone over the age of eight who puts one on is immediately and painlessly dispatched?" The answer to that question, by the way, is yes. Yes, indeed.

In the dressing room, I tried on the post ironic denim dress and it was fabulous, if, that is, you are living in, I don't know, the year 2123 and have a very specific task to accomplish, like, perhaps, mining something radioactive out of one of the smaller Jovian moons. For all other occasions, I felt, it would be unsuitable. Plus it was tight across the hips, a sad factor of my recent existence. Then I tried on a dress that, as far as I could tell, was created when a classic Burberry trench coat had a midlife crisis, felt that it had missed out on disco and thus, in a feat of transmogrification, became a mini dress! A minidress that is, alas, equally inappropriate for the dance floor or the spy novel. Still, points for trying, raincoat! Then I tried on the purple cargo shorts. Yeah, okay, the result of that was pretty much what can be imagined and we will not dwell upon it.

Greatly cheered up - I saved probably $27! I could therefore go and spend that money on nail polish and discount diet drinks! - I left the dressing room and spent the rest of my Target visit ducking around corners to avoid Scary Hair Lady, who was everywhere. Perhaps there were two, identical twins, although that' s the stuff of B rated horror movies everywhere. Ah shopping. I have done my part for the economy, America.

Life in These United States

2010-06-09T12:07:00.003-04:00

theo in the morning woods
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Audrey's purse was stolen yesterday from her car at Carrier Park. Fortunately, she had her phone with her and no money in her purse, but still, it's a total drag, as everyone knows. There's the bummer of losing the wallet which belonged to her grandmother and then there's the terrible mess of replacing all her ID, bank cards and so on. It is a frustrating unhappy time and the kind of thing that makes you go all Republican for a few minutes - wait! you think. I am the victim here! Yet this is making my life suck! Go ahead government! Start shooting poor people! Then, hopefully, you come to your senses and realize that honestly, the government should not shoot poor people but conceivably, they should totally shoot the bureaucrats. And we should all eat the rich, of course, but that's another story.

I remember when my purse was stolen in Baltimore years ago and I had to go to the DMV for another driver's license, which they decided not to grant me on the grounds that I had no ID, so clearly could not get an ID. This was most unfun - the Mondawmin Mall DMV in Baltimore makes Kafka's castle look like DisneyWorld - and I had to go back three times. Nothing would have ever proceeded and I would probably still be licenseless and gibbering from my cardboard box under the JFX if on the third try I hadn't finally lost it. I took most of the contents of my filing cabinet including the huge folder containing all my mortgage paperwork to the DMV in a big box and dumped it all across the petty bureaucrat guy's desk while screaming incoherently. This worked and I got another driver's license. Due to this incident, I was not sanguine about Audrey's chances of getting another ID.

Therefore, this morning early we went through the filing cabinet to find her some proof of identity. "What about your fifth grade report card?" I said, "Surely no identity thief would be that thorough." She settled on her 9th grade Hereford High School ID card and the commemorative unofficial birth certificate the hospital gave me when she was born, the one with the unbelievably cute little ink stamped foot prints and a grainy black and white photo of Boulder Community Hospital on it. I tried to get her to take her varsity badminton letter - yes, my daughter was on the varsity badminton team and we were all so proud - and maybe her SAT scores or perhaps her tennis camp group picture, but she refused. The DMV, which is overall way nicer in Asheville than in Baltimore, were nice about everything and she eventually got another license.

Or, rather, not a license, because due to all the terrorists who want NC driver's licenses (they use them for currency in Baghdad! Cue frothing at the mouth!) or something (those goddamn brown people from South America! Think they should have driver's licenses! Froth froth rabies greeeeeearrghh snorf snorf! Thank you, modern conservatives, for yet again making everyone's lives that much more annoying) you can't actually get a driver's license at the DMV anymore. No, they can't just make them there; instead, you get a piece of paper that says you have a driver's license and it will come in the mail eventually. In the meantime, of course, you have no picture ID at all and if your bank card has also been stolen and duly reported, you have no way to access your bank account. That is why Audrey is going to Wachovia today with her 5th grade report card and a note from her mom, namely, me, saying that she is in fact my daughter and please can she have some money? We will see if it works.

In other news, I have been on this huge major ska kick all of a sudden, listening to the Specials and the Toasters (that one's even appropriate to the blog post! Whoo! We have context!) and UB40 and Madness and so on and I must say it is making unemployment and the dole and the whole thing, which has been kind of glooming me out a bit lately, much more bearable, because, you know, fuck Reagan youth and Maggie Thatcher is the antichrist and where, oh where, are my checkered wayfarer clones and my pink Chucks?

Mondays Are Still Rough: Some Random Shit

2010-06-07T15:10:00.001-04:00

in my window
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

GOURDS
I have just been scrubbing gourds on the back porch. These are the gourds of last summer: they've been (literally) mouldering in the garage since the fall. There are about 25 of them, fabulously cool big bottle and birdhouse gourds that somebody - who probably isn't me - could turn into either great works of art or something so tacky it would make Thomas Kinkade wet his pants with joy. That part I may be able to manage. First, however, they have to be scrubbed and that is, as I am finding again, a royal pain in the ass.

I'm not big on scrubbing at the best of times. I mean, hey! Dirt is good for you! It builds up your immunities! You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die! I am all about the dirt, and not so much about the cleaning. Besides, this isn't like just washing out a glass or something. I am used to washing glasses: I have children. They use a separate glass for each sip. Washing the gourds, which are supposed to soak first in a mild bleach solution which they stubbornly refuse to do, being buoyant as only hollow woodenish objects are buoyant, is a major drag. After the soaking you have to scrub them with, preferably, a nylon scrubber to remove not only the mold but also the waxy sort of skin stuff that the mold feasts upon. You are not supposed to use steel wool or anything for fear of scratching them. That would be dandy if it worked. Personally, I am using steel wool, wearing rubber gloves and meditating unhealthily on how all the gourd mold and weird ass gourd waxy skin stuff is going to kill me, probably tomorrow. If, that is, the elderly sandwich I got from Earth Fare doesn't kill me first. So many ways to be morbid!

SOAP FAIL
I have this wonderful green soap with little bits of purple flowers and bits of stem and so on in it. It smells nice and I believe it gets me clean and all but I'm a gardener: I get in the shower to remove small pieces of plant detritus, not to add them. It confuses me when I step out of the bathroom with foliage still all over my skin.

MARY PRANKSTER
I love Mary Prankster. If you have not heard her stuff, you should go listen to it because it is excellent and hardcore and funny and sort of heart wrenching all at the same time. That said, I do not love Mary Prankster as much as my iPod does and I am at the desperation point where I'm going to have to resync the damn thing and remove her. I know, I know, I have to learn to make smart playlists and stop relying on shuffle but frankly this annoys the fuck out of me. I want the iPod to sit on its little iHome being iCute and playing iMusic, which is to say, MyMusic, one random song at a time without a whole ton of repeats, which, you would think, given that there are about 3000 songs on the damn thing, it could manage. But it cannot and it's driving me crazy again.

RELATIONSHIPS
I'm not very good at them and I'm not in one anymore. No big surprise there, no big drama either, although I'm not particularly proud of Saturday night. Well. Sometimes I kind of miss the days when I felt it was okay to emote and freak out all over this blog but, alas or joy, those days are gone. He's a nice guy. I'm not so nice, or something, and I think perhaps I've just been single too long to change. Things fall apart and the center cannot, always, hold. I guess I'll go wash some more gourds now.

Thunder Dogs

2010-06-04T14:21:00.001-04:00

cilantro flowers from below
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

If, like me, you are of a philosophical turn of mind, you may have often wondered, why are dogs afraid of thunderstorms? You might even wonder this while your collie mix is making a determined attempt to dig a hole in the computer room closet floor and your springer spaniel is setting new records for most pants per minute, with accompanying drool. You might also think, irritatedly, that dogs might notice that it has fucking thundered every day for two weeks and, honestly, get over it. And then you might wonder why cats are totally unafraid of thunderstorms yet still take everything but perfect, 70 degree sunny weather as a direct slight against them, almost certainly perpetrated by you in some evil, fuddled attempt at a most uncatly joke. That one I cannot answer.

However, I believe I can shed some light on the dogs and storms question. Years ago when my parents lived in Jackson County (Warning! I may already have told this story on this blog! I'm not sure and I don't care enough to check! Old age is like that!) they had a handyman kind of guy who would come around and do landscaping, stuff like that. This guy also had bees, which was highly awesome, because it led to us always having lots of sourwood honey - sourwood honey, if you don't know, is the best honey and will totally spoil you for all regular honey forever - and he was also one of those characters who are all about the folksy, down home yet slightly off kilter stories. Central casting, yes. However.

For whatever reason, my mother's dogs were always terrified of thunderstorms. I don't know why this was; maybe it was something in the way she reacted - although she was totally unafraid of pretty much everything - but I do remember that she had, once, to disassemble her bed to rescue one of the springer spaniels who had gotten stuck underneath it in an effort to escape a Charleston summer thunderstorm. After that adventure that same dog got downers prescribed just for such storms, which is how, some years later, I got to say the immortal words, "No, Mom, please do not mail me the dog tranquilizers. I don't think that's a good idea no matter how afraid I am of flying." on the phone, meanwhile visualizing the slightly crazed and no doubt sitcom worthy high jinks that would ensue from a resultant drug bust. It's all fun and games until somebody ends up in maximum security women's prison!

Back in Jackson County, though, my parents had basset hounds, one of whom was, predictably, terrified of thunderstorms. The other one was not. So one summer day, one dog was having a thunder induced panic attack when the handy guy stopped by.
"I don't know why," said my mother, "only one of them is afraid."
"The other one hasn't been hit yet." said handy guy.
"Hit?" said my mother, confused.
"By lightning," he explained. "Dogs is natural lightning magnets; they all get hit sooner or later. And then they're scared."

You bet they are! Watch out for dogs, people, they attract lightning like trailer parks call to tornadoes! And this probably explains why Django, who never cared a bit about thunderstorms, has suddenly started in the last couple weeks, to freak out almost as much as Theo whenever the rumbling begins. He must have been hit by lightning out in the yard or maybe while asleep under my bed (it's stealthy, that dog drawn lightning) and now, alas, the fear is upon him. What can you do? Dogs is lightning magnets.

Stress Baking with Gnomes

2010-06-02T12:21:00.001-04:00

firework 5
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Last night I resorted yet again to stress baking. No wonder I am so fat these days: there must be healthier ways to work out one's angst than making chocolate pound cakes in the middle of the night but, on the other hand, it is true that there are few more delicious ones. Besides, my friends and family are not inclined, no matter how many pointed comments they make, to really stop me stress baking: the fruits of my relief from the evils of modern life are pleasing to them. Oddly enough, I have found that nobody ever complains about having too much cake in any real and serious way. At any rate, there is yet again a chocolate pound cake on my kitchen counter - this chocolate pound cake, to be specific - and while extremely tasty, it's a little dry and could use whipped cream, just in case, you know, some of the calories were trying to escape. Also, it used up 10 eggs and 3 sticks of butter, which is sort of alarming in one solitary cake.

While I was making this cake, Audrey was busy trying to clean up the kitchen from the last day or two of, respectively, chicken enchiladas and then steak and potatoes. "You have to stop cooking like this!" she said, "This is ridiculous!"
"Yes," I said sadly, "I know." And then we ate the leftover potatoes.

Meanwhile, the side of the dish drainer was crowded with mason jars. We used them for the tiedying and then washed them and then discovered that they had no real place to live. "Put them somewhere," instructed my daughter. "This kitchen is hopeless."
She is right. This kitchen is kind of hopeless but I like it anyway; still, there was nowhere to put the mason jars. "Wait!" cried Audrey in the tones of one who has had one of those cartoon lightbulbs light up over her head, "Do the gnomes fit in them?"
They did: perfectly. I started putting gnomes in jars.
"This is making me a little uneasy," I said, looking at three gnomes in sealed mason jars. "I feel like they need air holes or something."
Audrey came over to look as I put the jarred gnomes on the shelf next to the army of unjarred gnomes, who were, as usual, marching in formation on the kitchen shelf.
"Look!" she said, putting a gnome in a jar upside down. "We could make. . . snowglobes! Just, you know, glue them down and then fill it up with glitter and water!"
"Yes," I said, carried away with the beauty of this idea, "Gnome snowglobes! We'll never need to buy another Christmas gift!"
"On the other hand," said Audrey, "That's kind of an ugly snowglobe."
"Also," I said, "Large. Larger than your average snowglobe."
There was a little silence. The gnomes in the jars, imprisoned next to the free regiment, regarded us balefully.
"What are they," said Audrey, "POWs or something?"
"Yeah," I said, "They look like they're awaiting execution."
"They need airholes."
"I can't take this," I said, "I feel too guilty." I carefully decanted the gnomes and went out on the porch for a moment with my daughter.
"I think we're probably really weird," she said, "I can't help thinking about possible ways to appease the gnomes in case we've really pissed them off."
"This is wise," I said, "The last thing we want is to come in the kitchen tomorrow and find them all moved around."

And so, just to be on the safe side, we apologized to the army of gnomes. Hopefully they will not be too angry because, man, even with happy gnomes, things already disappear in this house on a regular basis - socks, phone chargers, plates, pint glasses, dog eardrops, that one wooden spoon and, of course, money, which manages to evaporate from my wallet and bank account at a rate that can only be caused by gnome infestation - so angry gnomes, clearly, are just not a risk we can take.

pistol packin' mama

2010-05-31T17:17:00.001-04:00

pistol packin' mama
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday, my friends and I threw a baby shower for our friend Jen at my house. This was more difficult than it sounds, because on Friday night I made the in retrospect terrible decision to drink a few Little Kings with Charlie at the DeSoto. Little Kings, if you don't know, are what they drink in hell. They're like evil alcoholic double agents - they look innocent and seem charming, but they're actually plotting against you. I thought, having encountered them before - Charlie is inexplicably addicted - that if I used Math and was careful with their 7 ounce bottles, I would be okay. I was not okay despite my calculations and neither was he and I highly disrecommend those oh so innocent little green bottles unless, that is, you really were planning to spend a day being completely miserable. So very little got done in preparation for the shower on Saturday and thus I had to get up early on Sunday and go berserk in the kitchen.

That worked out okay, though. Back when we were planning this shower about a month ago I suggested that we tiedye onesies as a party activity and, that being received well, I had duly gone and gotten all the materials we needed for this project as well as some extra baby stuff from the Goodwill. Yeah, I had a baby oriented week last week. First, I dug through baby clothes for 100% cotton stuff at the thrift store, which took me back about two decades to the days when I haunted Value Village for the rare, the elusive, the second hand Hanna Anderson striped baby suit of cuteness. Then I went to Babies R Us, a freaky place where I discovered that there are far cooler baby clothes available to the general public nowadays than there were back then and then I browsed around Amazon and Etsy and Thinkgeek for even more super cool baby stuff. All babies all the time and then, if that wasn't enough, as I was walking back to the car on Haywood Road after buying procion dyes at Earthguild for the shower, I nearly got run over by a giant red plastic bus thing full of infants and toddlers. Now I am terrified and doubling up on the old birth control lest I, like my friend Jen here, end up with more than just a pistol.

I hadn't done any tiedying in years and the directions were not what I was remembering at all, so I called my old tiedye friends in a panic right before the activity was supposed to start. Alas, they didn't really remember all the fiddly little details either, like do you soak the clothes in urea or washing soda or what, but fortunately, the internet never forgets, and here, if you should be interested in this fine old party activity or need to dye your dog* or something, is the recipe we used, which worked out beautifully. We used mason jars and spoons instead of squeeze bottles and everything, including the old Devo t-shirt I used up the dye with, looks great. Okay, yes, this poor child's first words will probably be "I don't want to be a hippie anymore!" but he will be stylin'. Asheville stylin', that is. They came out so well that this morning I briefly considered a career in tiedying baby clothes because nobody in Asheville has ever thought of that before.

Besides tiedying everything in sight, we also ate shrimp and grits and biscuits and mini quiches and egg and caviar dip and deviled eggs and cookies and cake and toasts from homemade bread and managed to drink an entire giant bottle of vodka, so a good time was had by all. All parties should start at 1 in the afternoon, I have decided, because I not only stayed up long after everyone else had departed or gone to bed, I cleaned up the entire house. This was stupid, because now here I am with absolutely no excuses for not getting things, like writing a book or finding a job or starting a party planning business - there's a future in catering tiedye parties! Right? - done.

However I do not intend to let that distract me too long from my life of sloth. Anyway, I've been reading bad murder mysteries from the Goodwill again and I have realized that a body should be showing up in my life any day now, since that seems to be the fate of middle aged women: we find a body, we have sassy back and forth conversations with our girlfriends and our adult children, we discover clues, we meet a handsome, brooding yet sexy homicide detective who is way better than our conveniently dead or divorced husband and then, whoa, we solve the crime. Probably it will turn out, as you can tell from the picture, that Jen did it.

* do not use procion dyes to dye your dog, you idiot. Use food coloring. This is how I made my brother's shih t'zlivingroom, Phineas, red, white and blue for the long departed and much lamented I Am An American Day Parade in east Baltimore, back in the days when I was still looking for 100% cotton maternity clothes in Value Village my own self.

Yes I Am Still Alive Despite Appearances

2010-05-28T13:33:00.001-04:00

night poppy
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

You may have noticed that I have not been updating this blog as often as previously. Acute! Clever! Yeah, well, these things happen. Basically, I have been extremely busy. "With what, unemployed slacker?" you might be thinking. Well, you never know!

Here's a short quiz: Has Felicity
a) been negotiating with top level brass at BP, the US State Department and a cadre of friendly aliens straight out of a 1970s animated save the environment kids show to end the oil spill in the gulf by putting on a show with an accompanying vaguely discoesque yet folksy soundtrack?
b) been writing the Great American Novel during breaks from painting the Great American Painting?
c) been on a short vacation to Biarritz, where she communed happily with the far more glamorous ghosts of the fabulous past?
d) been kidnapped by extremists who kept her in an ancient submarine buried deep within a small mountain cave with no wifi access (cruel!) while they plotted what, exactly, they could accomplish by kidnapping this highly influential, if broke, middle aged slightly overweight woman? I'd have been toast, there, if it wasn't for my intrepid gnome army!
or, e) been accomplishing practically nothing energetically but for the most point enjoying the fuck out of it?

It is a tough quiz! It's hard to get absolutely nothing much done and have it take up so much time, it is true. I have been busy though: I have a new phone, a Palm Pre to be specific and it is taking up all my time, what with the apps and the games and the fiddling around and the figuring out of the how to send the text messages and the reading of the email in the morning in bed yet being unable to answer and the endless, quiet, seething worry that perhaps, cool as it is, it is just not as cool as, say, an iPhone or a Droid? The son has a new Droid clone (do you realize that as recently as three years ago, that sentence would make no sense at all outside a sci fi RPG?) and it is most assuredly cool, plus, you can download a shotgun app that makes a nice realistic shotgun noise and, even better, aim it at your mother or your sister and have it take a neatly labeled picture of where you shot them. The Pre does not have this app. Really it is too responsible of a phone for me, leaning as it does towards apps for, god forbid, time management and bible verses. Boo. It does, however, have a real keyboard, which I require lest my text messages come out something like umsno! ;lkjsp? aslkjg asdmr;ajka ^^^6? and then I throw the phone across the room. It also had a couple of mindless games at which I have become a world class expert, particularly the one where you stab the bubbles with your finger and they make a pleasant popping noise and your score keeps going up, up, up and then you look around and realize that several hours have passed and your carpal tunnel is in high gear now, oh good.

So you can see I have been busy! I have kind of sucked at being on the computer but I'm going to change this beginning next week because, despite my cheerful predictions that my savings could take me through the summer, I'm heading rapidly towards financial disaster. Quelle surprise! So there should be more updates beginning soon, same bat place, same bat channel and all that same old bat crap. Guano! Valuable guano! One hopes.

Hella Weekend Roundup

2010-05-17T12:34:00.001-04:00

galaxy party kenny juggling fire smoke and soft focus
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Here it is Monday and I have a shit ton of things to do but LO, it is noon and I'm not doing any of them. I attribute this failure of energy partially to a rather over full weekend and mostly to my dreams: last night, while asleep, I snuck into a Modest Mouse concert that turned out to be a) not at the Orange Peel at all and b) not a concert but some kind of simulcast thing with a big screen, which made all my friends leave in disgust. This was smart of them, because shortly afterward the building was attacked by flying saucers full of terrorists with large black mustaches. Evading the terrorists involved a whole lot of stairs, so I woke up tired.

This was one hell of a weekend and by hell, I mean, well, hell. On Friday Charlie and I took Valentino back up to Hot Springs to rejoin the Appalachian Trail and while we were there, we got a tub for an hour, which was lovely. Then back to Asheville and somehow, although now it's all a blur, I think I was sort of crazy busy but at any rate we all ended up at the Admiral. All was as usual in my small PBR drinking world and then we came back home and went to sleep, only to be awakened at 1:15 with the news that young Miles had just been in a major car wreck.

Yeah.

This is not something anyone ever wants to hear although I tell you, as an alarm clock it works rather, um, alarmingly well. I levitated out of bed and into clothes and we jumped into Audrey's car and got down to the end of Haywood Road where my shaken but miraculously unhurt son was standing with a police officer observing the ruins that result from the mating of a 1998 Buick and your common or garden variety telephone pole. It was a one car accident - apparently a truck driver, who was very nice, as was the cop, had started pulling out of a side street onto Haywood and young M had seen him, freaked, swerved, over corrected and gone into the pole. I duly took my son home, gave him tea with lots of honey and an ice pack for his lip, woke him up every four hours to ask him who the president was (you can tell there is no concussion if their reaction to this question contains enough complaining about not being allowed to sleep for gods' sake Mom what is wrong with you content) and then, over the course of the next three days, proceeded to argue with him nonstop about how insurance stinks, life stinks and what the hell is he supposed to do now?

Be glad, I keep saying, that you are alive. I am glad you are alive (well, up until about hour 7 of argument 3a, I was) and that goddamn Buick saved your life and oh, god, my son, part of me still wants to wrap you in bubble wrap and pad your room and just keep you in there, safe, forever, because you terrify me so. Don't have kids. Sure, babies are cute but they grow up to be teenagers and it turns out you still love them helplessly but there is little, or nothing, at that point that you can do about what happens to them.

Anyway. I'm unclear on the details of what we need to do now myself. We need to go down, today, to the police station and get the accident report and then we need to deliver it duly to the insurance company and we need to go to the car and get whatever was inside of it out of it and, I suppose, arrange for it to be towed to a wrecker. Sigh.

So that was Friday. It would be enough for most people, who would then go into suspended animation or something like sensible beings. But no! We are not wimps! Instead, after an afternoon of home repairs and the like, we went on to a rather fabulous party at Restaurant Equipment Galaxy, which is owned by my friend Charles and where, by the way, you should totally go for all your obscure and important used restaurant equipment needs. At the end of the party we got a sudden impromptu - at least I think it was impromptu - performance from Kenny the clown, pictured here juggling fire. There was also a unicycle and more juggling and a balloon was swallowed, which was a little terrifying, and it was highly awesome, so I took too many photographs.

And that, minus a few details like my wonderful daughter who cleaned up the whole kitchen on Sunday thank you thank you thank you, was my weekend. Despite the interludes of great fun, I would prefer never to repeat it, thank you gods. But we are all still healthy and hale and, oh, there are baby wrens in the hanging fuchsia on the porch.

Burning Down the House

2010-05-13T20:35:00.001-04:00

hound in a car
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

My old friends' Carol and Schuyler''s son Valentino is visiting us. He's hiking the Appalachian Trail, the whole thing and having gotten to Hot Springs he decided to take a couple days off. This neatly coincided with a spate of less than perfect hiking weather and so I picked him up and brought him home. We have been showing him Asheville, more or less, or at least the part of it that is this West Asheville house full of dogs and also, Chai Pani and the hula hoopers at Pritchard Park. So we have had Indian food and home made pasta after an evening of familial wrangling over which restaurant to go to - daughter: All Miles will eat is Asian food! Me: Well, make him pick a restaurant. Daughter: He won't. Me: Fuck this, I'm coming home and making pasta - and an evening of hunting and gathering, which is what I call it when I go on strike and point out that my children are not, really, children anymore and for gods' sake somebody else should cook. Then we eat potato chips and cheese toast. Tonight, however, I decided to grill hamburgers.

There is a small hibachi in the garage; I knew this because I had seen it the other day while Charlie and I were in there, he setting mousetraps and me getting all worked up and freaked out over the necessity for said mousetraps. Charlie, when he tolerantly agreed to set the mousetraps, also said he would come over and check them every day. This is good, because I am deathly afraid of rodents of all sizes and Miles charges $2 a mouse for removal. $3 a rat and $5 for a snake or squirrel, but that's neither here nor there. Anyhow, today there was one mouse in a mousetrap which wonderful Charlie kindly disposed of and then, some hours later, it was time for me to go into the garage and find the grill and the charcoal and the lighter fluid, because I was sure that we had those things.

Well. I had to call Charlie and keep him on the phone while I wandered, or, more accurately, sidled - wandered is not exactly the right term for proceeding through my garage, which is more or less stacked to the ceiling with a fascinating variety of stuff ranging from my mother's paintings to Audrey's furniture to, somewhere, I swear, a trash bag full of clean pillowcases - and removed the grill. Then I went hunting for the charcoal but it was gone - the mice must have eaten it - and so I had to go down to the Citgo and buy more. I bought the kind that doesn't need lighter fluid,brought it home and put it in the hibachi up on the corner shelf on the deck. The covered deck, yes, the covered deck made of wood.

I burned my thumb trying to light the coals but then I got them all lit - way lit. As lit, really, as coals can be lit: to the point where there were flames shooting right up into the air and munching hungrily at the porch roof rafters.
"Gotta go!" I said brightly to Charlie, with whom I was talking on the phone, "Burning the house down! Catch you later!" and then I shouted for my daughter, who abandoned her video game to come outside and freak out with me.
"Water!" she said, and I duly filled a stock pot with water.
"But the water will make the flames all go whoosh!" I said,
"Oh god!" she said, "They will!"
"What if," I said, "We each take one handle of it and gently put it on the floor where it won't be so close to the roof?" I held out hot pads.
"No," said Audrey decidedly, eying the three foot flames exploding on every side of the hibachi, "I"m not even going to try to lift that. Get rid of the oxygen! Put the lid on!"
"I'm putting the lid on!" I shouted and did just that. Everything was calm for just about 15 seconds and we were beginning to relax when the flames exploded all around the lid, creeping through the vent holes and everywhere the lid connected to the body. "Baking soda!" I said and proceeded to sprinkle it all over the flaming hibachi. It didn't do much. "It's got to die down soon," I said hopefully and then, slowly, it did. Well, it did right up to the point where I cautiously took the lid off, at which point the accumulated, waiting fireball exploded right up towards the porch rafters again.
"Oh god!" shouted my daughter, "Just throw the water on it."
"Oh hey," said Valentino, wandering in, "What are you guys doing?"
"We're burning down the porch!" I said, "Wanna help?"

Then the flames receded, bit by bit. Miles came upstairs. "What the hell?" he said, "Why does it smell like lighter fluid in here?"
"You missed it!" said his sister, "Mom nearly burned the house down again!"
"And I missed it?" he said disappointedly, moving out onto the porch and feeling the roof. "Whoa," he said, "That's pretty damn hot."
"It'll be okay now," I said, in my role as reassuring parent. "I think I'll just have a beer."
"There vas a vhoosh," said Miles in a Russian accent, "Unt zen zere came ze fireball! Vhoosh!"

And it was okay, even though there was another bad moment when I went out to check on the burgers only to find that the hibachi was in the process of burning through the wooden shelf it was perched on. Miles and I slid a tile under it and stopped that particular disaster and I cooked stuffed burgers and my mother's potatoes of cholesterol deliciousness and then, once the burgers were off, carried the damn hibachi down to the yard to sit in the rain. Phew.The burgers were worth it, actually, they were worth it.

Stuffed Burgers
Like a pound and a half of real ground beef from Earthfare - you must get the real thing so you do not die of some horrible cheap beef disease or suffer a crisis of vegetarian conscience.
finely diced onions, about 1/4 cup or thereabouts. LIke a third of an onion.
2 jalapenos chopped not seeded, god, don't seed them.
some lime juice
worcestershire
Some grated mexican cheese, the kind that comes in the bag that says 4 Kinds of Mexican Cheese!
1/2 a box of Neufchatel, which is to say, slightly less fatty cream cheese. This is mostly to appease your inner dieter.

Mix the beef up with salt & pepper & worcestershire & onioins. Mix the cream cheese up with the jalapenos & lime juice & grated mexican cheese. Make 8 flat burgers. On top of four of the burgers, put a big heaping spoonful of cheese mixture. Put the other burgers on top and shape them all so no cheese is showing and you have a fattish burger with a delicious secret inside. Grill - good luck with that; you're obviously on your own here -- and then eat on Kaiser rolls with mayo and lettuce and ketchup and tomato and whatever else your heart desires. Yum, yum, yum.

Birthday Week Survived

2010-05-10T15:05:00.002-04:00

happy birthday tiramisu from nona mia
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I made it through the birthday week and all the required partying. It is kind of amazing, really, that I get to keep on having birthdays given the havoc I wreak on my liver and brain cells every May. It's just required, you know, to go out every single night and have way too much fun. Yes, yes, tough life, somebody's gotta do it, etc., etc., and so on. What, I'm supposed to settle down now that I've achieved this advanced age? Unlikely! Too late!

On Friday I went out for sushi and sake with my friend Charlie at Green Tea - that's the one by the Denny's. It's a great restaurant - I have always liked it but I started boycotting it there for a bit because I felt sorry for their turtles. It is, yes, a tad disingenuous to complain about the treatment of aquatic animals in a seafood restaurant - and I had the baby octopus, which is pure evil and purely delicious - but I really like turtles. Thus, I felt that having them in a tank in the atrium floor was not kind, somehow. However, they're still there and presumably okay with being walked on as if they were the older Bush's face on the floor of the Baghdad Hilton and, well, fuck it. I am not overwhelmed with sorrow enough for the turtles to escape my joy at the fact that Green Tea has a patio now so you can watch the scenic back of the Pizza Hut while you eat your baby octopus. When things are burning it is good to fiddle! It's Revelations time - what are a couple of turtles to oil spills and volcanoes and, um, the construction of the traffic circle on Clingman Avenue, a sure sign of the End Times? Besides, we had a long and important conversation to have, which, just in case you are interested, lead to this news update: recent reports of the death of my romantic life and/or short lived most recent relationship were, um, apparently premature. Yay!

That was Friday and a lovely and eventful Friday it was, which led into Saturday - my god, the calendar is just so cyclical in nature and repetitive. Wouldn't it be cooler if just every so often a whole new day got thrown into the mix, so you would think it was Friday but NO, it would be Smorgday or something? Yes, Yes, this would be good and I'm adding it to my Evil Overlord To Do list. On Smorgday, therefore, Susan had a party: our joint birthday party, in fact. We never get to celebrate our birthdays together - being born a month apart makes it tough, usually, even for dedicated women like us to keep up the party on spirit - but this year we managed it. It was a highly awesome party which featured not only heavy drinking but also firearms in the form of an Airsoft pellet pistol that Susan pulled out so we could shoot at her latest yard sculpture.

This was really fun. Guns and beer! I get all nostalgic and enthused! Sure, she later threatened to shoot me for stealing her blue lighter but hey, what's a party without one or two minor death - okay, not death exactly, more like a welt - threats? Besides, guns are educational. It turns out that if you shoot a CD that is dangling from a complex and funky yard assemblage thingie with a pellet gun, the CD does not break. No, it does not break exactly, but the reflective mylar covering on the other side of the CD from where you hit it peels off in an extremely cool bullet hole looking way. This is highly awesome and if you are a good shot, like Susan or Charlie or pretty much anybody but me, you not only get to hear the delightful plink of pellet hitting CD, you get a really funky thing to exclaim over. Science!

Sunday was pretty mellow - it sort of had to be. I finally got to see the real 2012 movie, and I am delighted to report that, as expected, it totally sucks. Watching lava eat LA and then the ocean take down the Himalayas, complete with enlightened lama in lamasery was, though, pretty cool and landing the aircraft carrier on top of the cruise ship in the trough of the tsunami wave was pure genius. End times! So aesthetically satisfying! Anyway, now it is Monday and a cold and gray Monday at that. I am a little worried, now, about my vegetable garden, given the forbidding temperatures lately, but I guess it's just all part of the end of the world as we know it or something. Another reason to drink heavily! Hurrah!

The Mysteries of Time

2010-05-07T16:59:00.001-04:00

carpenter bee rescued
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It is a complete mystery to me, now that I'm unemployed, how I ever managed to get anything done with my actual life and home while I was holding down a full time job. Since I've worked for the better part of 30 years or so, I must have gotten something done - I'm not really sitting around in a smoking ruin, I mean, not more than usual anyway. But as it stands now, it seems as if all I do is run around like crazy trying - with about a 50% success rate - to get things, vital things, utterly important things, done.

Last summer or fall my friend Adam put a new faucet hose bib mysterious plumbing thingie in where the old one leaked. Then in the middle of the winter, despite or perhaps because it was supposed to be patented freeze proof, it duly froze and split and leaked water all through Miles' closet and then was turned off. The other outside faucet is in the wall behind where the iBoiler now sits and somehow, while that was being installed, all access to that faucet was removed. So I have no outdoor spigot anymore and, since it is shaping up to be a hot dry summer, that's a problem. Carrying buckets of water out the front door to the vegetable garden gets old surprisingly fast and also it turns out that most of my buckets, dear Liza, dear Liza, *have a hole or six in them. Annoying as fuck when you're rushing them through the living room, let me tell you.

Therefore I went to Lowes last night to purchase what a friend told me existed: an adapter that will make a garden hose mate seamlessly with a kitchen faucet. The first Lowes guy I met had no idea what that might be so he took me to the Lowes Plumbing Gnome, a grizzled and friendly soul with a long white beard down practically to his hips. "You need to go and get the aerator from your faucet," he told me paternally, "And bring it back here to me."
"That's the little screen-y thing, right?" I said, wondering if that little screen still existed or perhaps had been removed for other uses at some point.
"Yes," he said, "The little screen-y thing."
This morning, therefore, I duly removed the little screen-y thing, which was still there, after I had finished hooking up and unhooking the dishwasher. For some reason my dishwasher must (if you wish to use it, and who doesn't?) be hooked up to the sink with a white plastic adapter thingie that you sort of jam on and squiggle and then the water must be turned on so it can leak sulkily a bit and also wash the dishes. You do not, I have found, want to run the dishwasher without water. Just FYI, in case, you know, you ever wondered.

Anyway, I took the end of the faucet to Lowes where I was saddened to find that the Plumbing Gnome was gone but another older and similarly grizzled plumbing expert guy hooked me right up with a nifty adapter which I brought home and put on the faucet. Then I threaded the hose through the living room and voila, watered the garden and lo, it is all modern conveniences around here again more or less.

This all took up an inordinate amount of time.

It is all in how you measure it, though. I have never entirely understood how people who don't have children measure time, because if you have kids you can kind of count back through the years and think, well, she was six or so that year, so it must have been 1989 when we were in New York. Shorter times than years can be measured by periods - I have been known to think to myself, well, I've had two periods since then, so that's two months - another way in which being male must be baffling and lead to a sort of constant temporal disorientation. But, male or female, you can always kind of count time backwards by the music you were listening to, which is how, on looking last night at a Kenny Scharf image, I ended up listening to Haircut 100 and the Specials for an hour or so, remembering ska. Now if I could just remember what I was listening to when I moved my phone charger, I could get all kinds of things accomplished.

Army of Gnomes

2010-05-05T14:44:00.002-04:00

a small portion of my army of gnomes
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I have survived another birthday. That always, for some reason, makes me feel relieved and happy, like, okay, another year can go by before I have to think about THAT again. Not only did I survive, I even managed, once the required day of birthday angst was over, to have fun, what with a lovely birthday dinner at Nona Mia, post dinner drinks at the DeSoto, post post drinks drinks at home and many fine gifts, including, from my thoughtful children, who know me well, the army of tiny gnomes pictured here. I hadn't realized that my entire life had up to this point been spent in hopeless yearning for an army of tiny gnomes but now that I have them, I know that it was. All is complete in my universe now and soon my gnomes and I will take over the world. Or something. Something - gnomey. Something that I haven't quite figured out yet but I am confident will be highly excellent when I have.

I have spent the last few days steeping myself in nostalgia. I went through my cookie tins of the past (tm) and even started cracking open the tin of letters, both love and otherwise, but that got to be too much quite quickly. In my Tins of the Past are such treasures as my children's baby teeth - one of these days I'm going to have them made into a grisly bracelet, oh yes I am - and small drawings by a variety of people dating back more than thirty years and notes from friends who had slept on the couch and then decamped and empty, lovingly preserved Yak Paks and, interestingly enough, a copy of one of the first Rolling Stone reviews of the Pogues. When I say a copy, I mean a copy: I typed it out like a slightly more technologically adept medieval scribe in 1985 or thereabouts while sitting at Hy's Charleston apartment with Ray McKee. We had decided that all three of us must have a copy so that we could remember forever that we were linked inextricably to each other and to Shane McGowan through the great chains of drunken Irish bastardry and so I typed us each up a copy, of which, I believe, mine is now the only extant. I am going to scan it at some point, probably when I start scanning all the photo albums - you know, when I've broken both my legs and am snowed in a small deserted cabin in the Yukon. I will be busy in that cabin what with the quilt making and bad novel finishing, but I'll make time for scanning too.

Nostalgia is a strange thing and spending a lot of time in your own past is, I believe, one of those sort of necessary Birthday Rituals that can, like a Ouija board, quickly turn dark and summon up
demons from the conveniently located portal to hell in the garage. This year's ritual was marked by the unsurprising knowledge that, hey, I have not really changed all that much since I was in my late teens or early twenties. I have more wrinkles and cursed gray hair and I am fat now (you know what? I am forgiving myself for being fat from now on. Fuck this, I'm 47 years old and I'm fucking allowed to be fat if I want to be.) but the basic person is still here. I'm a little saner, a little wiser (ha ha! Even I must spew coffee from my nose at that thought!), a little less naive and I definitely have acquired some Mad Skillz at Diverse Stuff like changing copier toner and never, ever buying horizontally striped articles of clothing except socks, but I am still, actually, me. I figured by this time in my life I would have Achieved Something and I haven't, really, except the most important things, which is to say, a sort of semi functional family of relatives and friends who I love unreservedly and who seem, for the most part, to love me back or at least tolerate my quirks. That is pretty goddamn awesome, that is, and it makes all this mid to late forties stuff okay.

Rereadings

2010-05-03T12:35:00.002-04:00

sketchbook with bone and tiny puppets
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday, Audrey and I made enormous strides towards transforming the downstairs room into an actual and functioning apartment. Well, it will be more functional when I find somebody who can take the damn door off the hinges and plane the bottom, because since the carpet went in of course it no longer opens. Never mind, there are four doors into that room, which is probably bad feng shui, or possibly it's very good feng shui, because as far as I can figure out, feng shui is all about getting chi into your house and then confusing it enough so it can't leave. More confused energy roaming around the basement! Wait, I have my doubts about that - there's already a teenager down there and more poltergeist activity in the form of vanishing towels, bowls and drinking glasses is maybe not what we need.

However! That is not what this blog post is about. While I was excavating the garage I came across my old novel, the one I wrote when I was about 30. So I reread it last night and this morning. My novel! It sucks! I now apologize to every single person who has ever written a book I have complained about, because it turns out that I wrote a book that can stand on its own as one of the worse things the English language has ever had to guiltily account for.

Still, it was interesting as hell - I laughed, I cried, I thought, my god, if this had ever been published my friends would have taken out an assassination contract on me and quite rightly. It turns out that I'm not a novelist - I'm a blogger who was only slightly hampered, in 1992, by the as yet non existence of blogs. This thing is a historical document of my early twenties and early thirties when, apparently, we were all stoned alcoholics who had sex with each other all the time. Ah, college. The more things change, yes: we're still all stoned alcoholics, for the most part, only slightly better organized ones who no longer, as far as I know, now that we have moved out of the small hothouse environment of downtown Charleston, SC, fuck each other continuously and revel in the resultant drama. Ah, college, or, more realistically, thank god we've outgrown that part. Every character is a thinly veiled real person or possibly, in one or two cases, an odd mishmash of two or three people, with the possible exception of the main love interest, who is clearly made up. Yeah, there were no perfect men around in my life in the eighties, either.

Since the chances of anyone else ever reading this masterpiece are slim, I will hereby give you a synopsis. The book is set in two times simultaneously - yes, this is a problem - and is told sort of in flashbacks. Part of it (the better written part) is set in a small rowhouse in East Baltimore in the early 90s, where a single mother of two children (ha ha! Who do you think that is?) is existing through a snowy winter while many mysteries - and men - from her past slowly begin to reappear. The flashback part takes place in Charleston while our heroine (it's told in first person singular, of course, and this heroine is tall and has long red hair and is an artist and feels awkward and guilty a lot, likes to paint and cook and drink and listens, embarrassingly enough, to Modern English. She is fond of dogs and the Psychedelic Furs and worries about her weight. No, a novelist I apparently am not.) is finishing up an arts degree and living in a group house with a bunch of other entertaining young people. Hello, my old friends! My god, it's. . Linda! And Hy! And Pletch! And Kathy! And Glenn! And both of the two Michaels! What a shock! There they all are, drinking beer at Group Therapy, eating the free buffet at Plato's and listening to the Uncalled Four. Hi, Nick! Paul!

This is all quite entertaining and there's a lot of partner swapping and high drama and drinking of beer and doing of various drugs and then this group goes out on a picnic and finds an alien. Yeah, an alien. Look, even I knew I had to work a plot in here somewhere. They call the alien Quisp because, well, they do, and there are many cultural references and more sex and lots more drinking - I like the way they stash the alien in Scott Finsel's old apartment behind the Pink Palace and then go out drinking - and there are some abortive musings on the nature of godhood and communication and evolution and a few jabs at Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, back, or, rather, future in Baltimore our heroine finds that sitting at home snowed in with two children is a drag. Yeah, I do remember that rather clearly as well. One of the main guys in the book has been arrested in Spain and there are hints of evil government plots and a shit ton of foreshadowing.

Back to Charleston and the eighties, where the entire group - there are way too many main characters in this thing, and their dialogue, while it all sounds the same, to be fair, is not badly done and pretty funny - decide to decamp for Asheville, since evil government agents are rapidly descending on them. In Asheville they learn to communicate with the alien by the use of, first, LSD and, second, a Sony Walkman, which was apparently rather groundbreaking technology to me at the time. All this goes swimmingly and they then develop mad psychic powerz and start floating shit around. Then, alas, the damn things stops, which is weird, because I distinctly remember writing about 100 more pages, including a deathless scene which my friend Ray, an early reader, has been mocking me for ever since - that's the deus ex machina part where, chased up and down a mountain, broke, freaked out and accompanied by an alien, this group of college students just happens to find a fully stocked van parked on the side of the road with keys in it. Handy!

Rereading this thing for the first time in maybe 10 years has been odd. I've been completely engrossed, which I didn't expect and the book itself is both worse and better than I thought it was. I haven't changed very much in the last 17 years, apparently: that is kind of alarming, truth be told. It's full of cultural references that made me crack up - everything from Ashley Gashley and the Creature Double Feature to Shonen Knife, REM, Iran-Contra and such distant cultural touchstones as Ma Bell, long distance bills and the difficulty in programming VCRS is in there. It's a history, is what it is, a history full of in-jokes, and it's kind of charming in its own peculiar way. Huh.

Beltane

2010-05-01T16:18:00.001-04:00

wildwood herbal stall
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Beltane is my favorite holiday: it's right near my birthday and it's all about sex. Yeah, well, so this year, as usual, that's not going to be something I need to think about ever again but it's nice to know, I guess, that it's out there at least for the plants and the robins and, I suppose, other people, happy people, people in love - okay, wait, stop. ANYWAY - it's when I feel it's safe to plant the vegetable garden, the danger of frost having gone by and me even starting to feel secure enough to remove the snow measuring sheet from the front door where it is reminding us all of what a swell winter it really was. People say you should wait until Mother's Day but the hell with that; even though it's good old pagan fertility we're celebrating either way, May 1 is a good round number day to get the garden going. Also, it's the day of the herb festival, to which I duly went after spending the morning digging up the vegetable beds and adding composted cow manure and all that lovely kind of thing.

The vegetable beds were full of horrifying white grubs - anywhere from half an inch to almost two inches long, white, shiny, with terrible small legs and, oh god, I think they're eyes. I don't have a clue what these things are but they look alarming and creepy, so I throw them onto the road, where they turn black and die. I killed hundreds of them. I am heartless, sometimes and these grub things skeeve me the hell out. They do kind of look like something a Bushman would eat with glee - they strongly bring to mind one of those films from Anthropology 101 in which the Bushman get all excited about big white horror grubs and start popping them like candy while the American camera guy makes slight urghing noises in the background. I thought of that film and I briefly considered battering and deep frying these suckers on the possibility that I was missing out on a taste sensation, here, but I decided I can live without that taste sensation. Urgh.

At any rate, the vegetable garden is now thoroughly planted and I am excited. I even planted the mystery Asian seeds I bought in Chinatown in San Francisco on the strength of the beauty of their packets and we will see what Little Shop of Horrors stuff they produce. I like not quite knowing exactly what I've planted or where everything is in the garden. This is one of the reasons I always plant random sunflowers all through everything - well, that and the fact that I love sunflowers. The flower garden is done too and as usual, I'm resolutely not telling the flowers that they don't actually get enough sun. They get some. They need to try harder is all, I say, and with a little luck, they will. Eventually there will be dahlias and cosmos and hollyhocks and more sunflowers and daisies of many kinds and echinacea and some odd herb thing that I bought at the festival because the little description on the popsicle stick said that it brings you magic and love and right now, honestly, I could use some of those two things rather badly. Beltane may be a favorite of mind but late April, over the last few years, has not been all that kind to me.

Oh well! In other news at Michael's the other day I bought these completely bizarre little puppet head shaped popsicle stick things. They cost like $2 for about 20 of them and I have already drawn a face on one and started carrying it around so I can hold it up in front of my face and say "Tiny puppet says hello!" to people in a suitably demented voice. I'm going to paint faces on all of them this weekend and then I will have a tiny puppet for all occasions, which should quickly cause my friends and relatives to shun me forever. I can hardly wait.

green and clouds and rain and road

2010-04-29T23:33:00.002-04:00

green and clouds and rain and road
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Forget all the happy happy joy joy love love spring spring flowers flowers birds birds shit, okay? Just forget all that and focus on, well, the other stuff, the stuff we like, the aesthetic of our formative years, which is to say, sleet, darkness, barbed wire, rats, crushed dreams and big hair. Yeah, the big hair is a problem. On the bright side, the latest haircut does mean I get to keep the unemployment longer. On the dark side, or, fuck, maybe it's the bright side too, because who the fuck knows except possibly Krishna in his unquiet dreams and he isn't telling, I'm single again.

Well, I'm goddamn good at it by now.

It Takes Skill

2010-04-29T13:51:00.002-04:00

carrot ginger cupcakes with apricot cream cheese frosting
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I have somehow achieved a perfect duet of feet: I have terrible, giant, itchy and possibly infected bug bites on my left foot and a nice big clump of poison ivy between the second and third toes of my right foot. What the hell are the odds? Most people would have settled for one or the other, but not me, no, driven by that relentless quest for perfection which has so characterized my life thus far, I have achieved two of the itchiest plagues known to humankind simultaneously. Thank you. It was difficult but I managed it.

The thing about itching, besides the undeniable yet so frustrating fact that if you scratch it gets worse not better (and I scratch; I always scratch; I have always scratched and I will always scratch, world without end) is that it takes up a corner of your mind. Yesterday I was busy as hell running errands around town - I believe I drove up and down Haywood Road at least six times - and while I was thinking efficiently about all the things I had done and was doing and would do, part of my brain was saying, over and over, my feet itch. Itch! My feet! They itch! It gets annoying, rather in the same way a small urinary tract infection will make you oh so annoyingly aware of the fact that you do possess a urinary tract, a thing you ordinarily are completely unaware of the 90% of the time you are not actively peeing.

In other news, I spent yesterday afternoon making these cupcakes and also a couple of sandwiches of magnificence - not one, not two, but three kinds of meat - for several of the men in my life. These cupcakes were fucking ambrosial, y'all, as in, they might be the best things ever and I don't even like cupcakes all that much ordinarily. Not only that, my house smelled amazing and still smells amazing, so I recommend them heartily. This is the recipe I used with these changes: I added fresh grated ginger to the grated carrots - like a scant handful or so; I used half light brown sugar and half white sugar and I tossed in a pinch of nutmeg, a teaspoon or so of vanilla and some lemon juice. Oh and I didn't add the nuts. I don't, for the most part, like nuts in baked goods; they're always kind of an unpleasant surprise. I didn't use his icing either - for the frosting I just mixed a block of cream cheese with 3/4 cup of powdered sugar and about 2 or 3 tablespoons of apricot preserves and a little lemon juice. Enjoy - and you will. You're welcome.

Buying Carpet

2010-04-27T18:05:00.001-04:00

at the drum circle
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I got an unexpected check in the mail today - whoo! Always the best thing ever! - and I promptly went out with Audrey and spent it on carpet. Yes, I am the most boring person ever: a few weeks ago I was at the Admiral with some of my friends and the talk turned to lottery dreams. "If I was really rich," I said with a faraway look in my eyes, "I'd carpet the basement!" My friend Kyle laughed at me. "That's probably the first time," he said, "that anyone has ever said that sentence." True. It's what middle age does to you - you go from the yacht and round the world trip (this particular lottery fantasy always ends up with me worrying about the dogs falling overboard as we round the horn anyway) to carpeting the basement and maybe a nice entertainment center in burled pine.

Yes, it's not a grandiose dream, but it's mine and as of Friday afternoon, it will be a reality: Enrique the carpet guy will have come and gone and dark green carpet will have replaced the blue concrete - decorated here and there with puddles and stains of uncertain origin, let's not think about those - that's there now. Then we can unload the garage into this room, move Audrey downstairs into the newly glamorous, newly carpeted basement room and I can turn the upstairs room into a studio/office again. That means I get the upstairs and the kids get the downstairs, which is going to help the hell out of everyone's sex life, let me tell you.

I never bought carpet before. I've torn up a fair amount of carpet in my life: I'm supposed to be the kind of person, i.e., vaguely hippie, vaguely liberal, vaguely anti industrial and artsy, who hates carpet and, sure, yeah, absolutely, I'm down with believing that carpet is bourgeois and tacky and also made of some kind of evil chemical slave labor strip mined fibers of ultimate darkness. However, look: not every house has 14" heart of pine boards lurking under the death star wall to wall. My house, for example, has concrete floors downstairs that someone painted bright blue and blue concrete is, well, blue concrete, which is to say, carpet is going to feel a whole lot nicer on the feet. Sure, hardwood would be excellent, but that mystery check wasn't that big and principles only go so far. I just wish I had the guts and the money to have gone for bright purple instead of dark green.

We went to two carpet places. We would have gone to more, but carpet places don't seem to be making it in this economy: two of the four we checked were out of business. We had this theory that Leicester Highway was sort of the epicenter of carpet in this universe but unfortunately, there was only one carpet place and the carpet they had in stock was, um, uninspiring. The carpet was uninspiring but the names for the carpet were amazing. There was one sort of purpley black mottled thing that was called Radical Punk Departure - I wanted to buy that one just for the name but Audrey nixed it because it made her hands go glurgh when she rubbed them across it. Yes, glurgh. The Glurgh Test, as it came to be called, was helpful. You don't want your feet glurghing along in the mornings; it's just too depressing. I was forced to walk away from Radical Punk Departure - in carpet, as in life. There was another brownish carpet called Rustic Barn Wood that was actually the much beloved Baby Shit Brown and one called Bales O' Straw or something like that which was simply inexplicable, bearing no resemblance to straw or bales or, really, anything much at all. We were forced to give up on the Leicester carpet epicenter and tried the other, Brevard Road carpet epicenter, where, as on Leicester Highway, there used to be two carpet places and now there is only one. Maybe there can be only one. I can totally see the salespeople battling it out by dead of night.

On Brevard Road, we met a woman named Tammy who was really nice and, after we had duly admired the demonstration heated floor tile on her desk - add that to my lottery fantasy if you're keeping track, also the sort of carnival glass looking iridescent funky wall tile in the background - she cheerfully and efficiently sold us carpet that was a normal color, called, I believe, Green and did not make our hands go glurgh. There was one bad moment where she asked us if our measurements - we drew the whole room out on graph paper and were proud as hell of our efficient selves - were accurate. We looked at each other. "Um, define accurate," I started to say while Audrey said, "Within 5 inches or so!" brightly and Tammy said that was no problem, she would make sure they measured before they cut. Phew. Carpet at last! All my bourgeois dreams are coming true.

At Least I Didn't Have to Take a Sick Day

2010-04-26T18:17:00.001-04:00

west asheville festival rain 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, something, either hormones or delayed onset hangover or a virus or, my personal top suspect, Dragon China takeout (damn you, Dragon! You may have won this time but I'll be back! No, wait, I won't. I really, really won't.) laid me utterly low today with the kind of miserable intestinal symptoms you don't want to read about and I don't want to be experiencing. Suffice it to say that I have spent the day in bed, sleeping and having weird as hell dreams and watching episode after episode of Robin Hood on Audrey's laptop. I don't even like this version of Robin Hood - the relatively new one from the BBC - all that much: the only guy in it who is passingly adorable is Guy of Gisbon and I can't have a crush on Guy of Gisbon, I just can't. I have therefore ordered discs of the early 80s British Robin Hood from Netflix, because as I recall, all those Merry Men were smoking hot and also had druids, Celtic gods, a vaguely new age soundtrack and a fog machine, all things sadly lacking from the new rendition.

Spent the weekend having entirely too much fun, which is why this malaise may just be a delayed hangover from hell. On Friday we went out to dinner at Sadie's Seafood Pub. I was kind of dubious about this place but lo, it turns out to be very good and totally affordable and everyone there was cute and nice and the oysters and mussels were out of this world. That was all good and then Charlie and I stayed up way too late drinking beer and talking so it wasn't until like 7:30 the next night that we ventured out into the rain and the new West Fest which isn't WestFest exactly but something else very similar to WestFest but in my neighborhood instead of over by Vermont Avenue. However, just as is the tradition with WestFest, it was totally rained on, so it is good something stays the same. It was actually a lot of fun hanging out in the rain drinking rum and taking pictures; eventually we ended up at the Admiral where we ran into Jodi and Dillon and the evening went on, as it does.

In other news, I'm still unemployed - hard to apply for jobs when you're lying around in bed moaning - and April is just ticking out its last few days. Oh and I have broken up with the Patton Avenue K-Mart for good. No, really, I mean it this time. Patton Avenue K-Mart, you are dead to me now! Nevermore shall I darken your door! Nevermore will your blue light specials inveigle me, no more shall I purchase from you socks and sundry other useful items, no, it cannot be, because K-Mart has broken up with Martha Stewart and when you break up with Martha, baby, you break up with me. I went over there to get Martha Stewart seeds, specifically, her purple green beans and white pumpkins, which are fabulous, as is her cosmos, and discovered from a taciturn individual in the garden department that K-Mart and Martha have had a falling out. I am saddened and this, K-Mart of the deadly insane parking lot, K-Mart that never has a goddamn thing, actually, that I want, is it for us.

No Internet

2010-04-21T23:05:00.003-04:00

desoto front
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Charter went down across all of Asheville today, which meant that there was no internet and no TV for anyone. It was awful. Rioting in the streets. Madness rampant. Annie asked a question about her favorite singer and, bereft in the hideous lack of Google, my brother and I had to search our actual brains for the answer (Sam Cooke. He came up with it. I just stared sadly at the screen and burst into tears.) And, worst of all, my teenage son cleaned his whole room and did all his laundry. Sure signs of the apocalypse, in other words, which made it the perfect evening for Audrey and I to finally watch 2012, which I have been trying to get someone to watch with me ever since it came out.

Well. It would have been the perfect evening for 2012 except that when I was at the Redbox machine on Monday - do you not love the Redbox machine? The Redbox machine is the most efficient way to part people from their money that has possibly ever been devised - I got the wrong 2012. Yes, as impossible as it sounds, as catering to a desire on the part of the moviegoing public that nobody knew existed, there's more than one movie about the forthcoming end of the world in 2012. There's the big one, the 2012 that hit the movie theatres last winter and was soundly ridiculed by every single movie critic on Earth, which means, of course, that it is almost certainly well worth watching (I have it on good authority that it features not just one but many a bus plunge into a ravine.) And then, apparently, there's a Christian version, called 2012: Doomsday - because I guess the original, based as it is on decidedly unChristian prophecies, was not at all Jesusy enough, or, hell, for all I know there are now Christian versions of every movie made, which is either a hilariously entertaining idea or terrifying or, as is usually the case, both.

Anyway, we figured out something was wrong pretty quickly, because 2012: Doomsday is made by an outfit called Faith Films which right there sounds pretty damn ominous. There were only two previews, too, and you know that's impossible for a major movie. One of them featured Tyrannosaurus Rexes on the loose in New York and the other was apparently about giant spiders, so they looked like excellent movies. Any movie with a T. Rex in Central Park, as in the first preview, is de facto good and the second one, which showed a giant spider waving a blonde around in the air with one of its legs, (this is probably arachnoidally incorrect yet is still, let's face it, highly excellent) looked great too, yet somehow these previews lacked conviction. They were narrated by the same guy with a deep spooky appropriate to previews featuring animatronic giant monsters voice but they were sadly lacking a release date. Still. They gave me high hopes for 2012: Doomsday.

The movie opened with a terrifically apocalyptic soundtrack that more or less made up for the fact that it was accompanied by a really boring film of what I think was the Amazon but could well have been the Potomac or possibly the French Broad shot from over head with a veering camera. "Five bucks," I said to Audrey, "says he works the Carmina Burana in here any minute."
Then the movie became highly confusing.

"Is this soft core porn?" said Audrey, as the army guy first snapped at the young female scientist.
"Why is she here?" he demanded, and I said, "So she can wear that wet T-shirt."
That must have been the reason, because after they left the rain to wander into the ancient tunnels really quickly to retrieve a glowing crucifix, they came back out into perfect weather - after passing a large lamp that wasn't there on the way in. I thought they were going to spin the glowing crucifix to open a gate into somewhere much more interesting, like the Lost World or the demon dimension but instead they just bore it reverently away. I have a feeling that Christians aren't supposed to spin Jesus like the pointer on a Twister game (left stigmata, yellow!) but one can always hope. After the tunnels, there were several more jump cuts leading to mysterious encounters between almost attractive people with the kind of stilted dialogue that usually ends up in the bedroom but disappointingly, in this case, did not. Finally a scientist kinda guy from Baltimore explained how there was a black hole at the center of the earth and then, alas, we had to turn the movie off.

Actually, the black hole did not finish the movie for us - it wasn't even the exciting "diagram" which the scientist was waving around, an orange circle with a black circle in the middle representing, one imagines, the black hole, that led to the lunge for the off button. Neither was it the part where everyone starts drawing crosses in front of three rocks a la Close Encounters, although that was pretty funny. No, it was the soft porn dialogue. See, this girl jogs sexily into the Mexican village - yeah, right after the black hole bit and yes, the movie was a bit disjointed, why do you ask? - and meets a cute guy who is creepily taking pictures of her with a telephoto lens. That big lens is always just so hard to resist and so subtle, too. Anyway, once he had achieved a series of bad pictures of her looking confused, he came vaulting in all, "Hey Baybeee." He wasn't really far enough away to need a lens that size. This, naturally, caused her to frown disapprovingly yet edge in closer. Then she said, gaspingly (she was jogging and all, that's why the shorts and camisole) that she was just looking for a doctor for the remote village where she was a missionary. A perfectly reasonable request, after all, and right in tune with the rest of the movie and we could probably have finished watching it if camera guy had not then said, "Well, I am a photojournalist but I have had many years of medical school."

And yet they still didn't fade into sex! Even a trained professional at watching bad movies such as myself cannot in all good conscience keep watching after a sentence like that.

So, Unemployment

2010-04-19T23:39:00.002-04:00

abner begging 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I am considering today my first actual day of being unemployed, because Thursday and Friday basically just felt like a long holiday weekend and Monday is traditionally the day when one, or, well, me, wakes up and says "OH FUCK." This Monday that particular exclamation was followed by the sad realization that that paycheck did come in pretty handy after all, didn't it? That was bad enough and then I paid a visit to the unemployment office, which I will be revisiting tomorrow morning for, god help me, a video. A training video, I think - I guess it's to train me to be unemployed, perhaps with two perky people saying useful things like, "Consider getting up in the morning! Pajamas are overrated while clothes are a good thing! Perhaps a brisk walk around the block before immediately going for the vodka would be helpful in your new life!"

This is my second bout with unemployment. When I did it five years ago, it was totally simple. I filled out a form online and then every so often went back to the same site to type in a response that went more or less like "Nope, no job yet. Send more money! Thanks!" and it was generally quite painless. I will always go for the website over actual human contact (note to potential employers: I am lying! I am cracking jokes! I love making phone calls! Now that was lying!) and my experience with unemployment was pretty much all positive except for the part where it came to an end. This time around, however, probably because just about everyone except the myriad people who work at the unemployment office are unemployed now, they have made getting unemployment money incrementally more difficult. There is no more registering online, free and easy. Oh no. You have to actually go down to the office now and be surrounded by other desperate people - and by that I mean the employees, not the clients. You have to answer questions and explain your checkered work history and say politely that you think, ha ha, driving to Greeneville, Tennessee for a $7.25 an hour job is just not what you really, really want to go for right now. Ha ha! Let's chortle nervously!

And, in a complete nonsequitur from the weekend update news team, we had a successful dinner party on Friday night. Flat out telling everyone you're poor and demanding food from them turns out to work really well; I recommend it. Parties are also a great way to hear about interesting community events, which is how the next morning, Charlie and I went to a UFO yard sale, where, alas, we failed to summon up the nerve to ask to see the UFO room. You see, we had been told that the people throwing the yard sale were flying saucer enthusiasts with a UFO room - this is, of course why we went. Well, that and the possibility that they were selling off their alien artifacts. It was a good yard sale, if disappointingly earthbound, and they probably would have shown us Area 51 if we'd asked. Somehow, though, just looking at strangers and saying "HEY! Can we see your freaky alien room? We heard you had one of them freaky alien rooms." wasn't in our repertoire, given not only the Saturday morning yard sale ambiance of it all but also the undeniable malign next day influence of the margaritas from the night before. We did, however, buy some random excellent shit including the worlds' most awesome orange ashtray, a Hawaiian shirt and a strange glass object that just might be an oil lamp - from Venus. It was a good yard sale Saturday.

Okay Look I'm Busy

2010-04-15T21:49:00.001-04:00

pack square and biltmore building
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

This has been an eventful week and actually, it's been pretty much all good except for that part where I got laid off. The last few days of that were rough. Still, that part isn't even bad at the moment because let me tell you, it is hard to feel bad about not having a job when the weather is all beautiful and warm and the birds are singing and flowers are blooming. On days like this, somehow - go figure! - the thought "Gee, I wish I was in a windowless basement office right now working on spreadsheets" just doesn't enter one's head. Or it doesn't enter mine, anyway, but then I claim exemption from the Protestant work ethic since I was sort of raised Catholic inasmuch as I was raised anything. We get guilt instead of a work ethic. It works just as well - guilt, like duct tape, is good for all kinds of repair jobs! - but I seem to have misplaced mine somewhere along the way and I'm not looking for it very hard.

Yes, okay, of course there is another reason for my sudden attention to bird songs and blue skies and also for the little cloud of circling animated tweety flying things that keep circling around my head and the way everyone in my path keeps breaking into one of those choreographed song and dance routines a la any number of overproduced 1950s and 60s musicals. The reason is this: I have changed my Facebook status.

I had never changed my Facebook status before and it was extremely exciting, which may go to show you that either my perceptions are on the altered side or my life is really damn boring. Anyway, I am finding this twenty first century Facebook status thing completely fascinating. Back in the day when you started dating somebody you thought, perhaps, of an eventual ivy covered cottage or maybe one of those commercials where two impossibly beautiful people in jeans go somewhere impossibly cool or a music video or, possibly, if your father and his were dedicated arch rivals in 15th century Venice, a romantic death by poison, but now you start contemplating the changing of the Facebook status. It is the equivalent of people in the middle ages having their first child or jumping over a Beltane fire or having the banns read or plucking three feathers from the sacred swan of some misty loch - if you read the kind of endless fantasy novels I do, you get to pick from a wide assortment of dubious traditions! - and yet it is accomplished with the click of a button and an email that asks you if you are, in fact, going to do this. Then you hover around Facebook all day to see what your friends have to say and all in all it's almost exactly, but not quite, the same as it was in 9th grade or so when you went out for a slice of pizza with a real, live, genuine Boy. Or, okay, not pizza but a joint behind the gym, whatever, but the eventual reunion with the friends after the Going Steady part was established is the same. Facebook has turned us all into perpetual adolescents, which I must say is totally okay with me.

So who am I dating? Well. He's my age. He's remarkably calm, stable and just about as sane as I am despite the affliction of being a poet. I could say more but in the interest of everyone's blood sugar level, I won't. Yeah, you're welcome, I know, it's the sickening googly eyed stage. Basically, he talks nerdy to me and this is a good thing all around.

In other good news, my taxes, which I have been dreading to the point of waiting to start them until 4 in the afternoon on April 15, turned out great after all. I do get to keep my son as a dependent for one more year - which is only fair, if you consider the astronomical numbers of chicken fingers he puts away - and all in all, my personal financial crisis has been temporarily relieved. Do you believe this? No, neither do I, but right now I'm all about taking in the gift horses and not even glancing at their mouths.

All this good news is making me nervous as hell but at the same time I can almost see just going right along with the flow, here. This reprieve from cursing the gods and struggling through the darkness has its points. Who knew?! I don't really know how to act but I tell you, I think I am willing to learn.

The Birds, the Bees and the Fish

2010-04-12T20:22:00.001-04:00

baby fish
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

My fish have spawned. Oooh, that sounds so much better, doesn't it, when you say it about fish than about humans? At any rate, the orange platys in my fish tank have produced an only child: a tiny replica of themselves. He - or she - is cute, or, well, since as mammals we are programmed to think babies are cute, even babies of other species (this doesn't stop us from eating them or doing other dire things, mind you, it's just that usually right before the first bite we say something like, oooh, so cute! And so delicious!) I'm calling it cute. Actually, it's not really all that cute in the way that puppies and kittens and many but not all human babies are cute. It just looks exactly like its parents, only smaller, but, let's face it, small is cute or Polly Pocket dolls wouldn't sell so damn well.

The pet shop lady told us that the fish would have babies but I didn't believe her, despite the way she went on about how this one fish was a girl and this other fish was not a girl. No doubt, she slyly intimated, these two fish would get together and do the horizontal bop, or, since they are fish, perhaps they have fishy positions of which we can only dream. Like fireflies, who not only glow but can fuck in mid air, thus making them officially probably the coolest living things on planet Earth, up to and including the naked mole rat. Anyhow, since I have never seen my fish getting down or even doing any of the necessary precursors to getting down, like drinking beer and giggling and admiring each other's taste in obscure late 80s punk vinyl, I figured that my fish were probably just asexual.

Besides, I have never had any animals other than dogs and cats - and of those only the ones who come unneutered from the hippies or the street, either/or - have babies. I tried to interest my parakeets in parenting but they were steadfastly uninspired. I've had dozens of tanks of fish over the years but never before have I had baby fish - I figured special equipment, like possibly small underwater stereos and mood lighting, was needed. But it turns out that no, fish do indeed create other fish! So clever! I am all excited. I want to knit him or her a tiny baby hat or possibly some booties - fish booties! - because, hey, that's what you do. Granted, if you're me it's sort of more like you think about knitting these things but don't actually get around to it until the kid is entering first grade or college or something but still, the kind thoughts are there.

Rock on with your breeder selves, fish! Congratulations! But all is not entirely well and full of fuzzy warm squooshy thoughts, here. We are all going to steadfastly not think about how unusual it seems that fish would produce an only child. Survival of the fittest and all that, not to mention a billion Jacques Cousteau films, would argue against fish children coming along one at a time. I am sure there is no cannibalism going on here - Anthony! Marc Antony! I've got my asps and I'm coming! - but there should probably be more than one. I'm damned if I'm looking that closely into the marbles at the bottom of the tank for tiny, lifeless, orange bodies or, worse, miniature orange zombies or, the nadir: minuscule vengeful fish ghosts. Vengeful fish ghosts are always a problem - they leave small splats of angry water around and whisper creepy fish stories where the shark is happily waiting just under the boat in your ears at night.

Changes and All That

2010-04-09T15:14:00.001-04:00

orchid
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Remember how on Monday I said that there were big changes afoot and all that good stuff? Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, yes, thank you, David. Well, they're more or less here: as of this coming Wednesday, I am joining the ranks of the great American unemployed. Hello recession blues! Hello, unemployment office! Hello, dusty black and white Dorothea Lange style photographs, men in fedoras and kids in dresses made from flour sacks! Yep, the recession was a little late in reaching Asheville (just like fashion) but it seems to be here and due to budget crises and crunches, my job has been eliminated. The museum has been really nice about it, though, and I still like the place and the people and the rocks and all that good stuff. It is, as they say, just one of those things. Who they are that say something so simultaneously banal and evil, I don't know, but there it is: just one of those things.

It's okay, though. I am somehow not entirely depressed about this but instead am seeing it as an opportunity. No, seriously. There are a whole lot of things that I want to accomplish in the next few years and I'm hoping that maybe this is the kick in the pants that I have been needing in order to get me to actually do those things. I've been here almost four years and they've been good years, but, well, all things come to an end.

However, yes, being unemployed would be highly excellent if I had won the lottery but as of today, I have not. Therefore there is gonna be a serious cash flow problem around Hangover Headquarters quite soon, so, HEY! Facebook people! I NEED YOU TO STOP READING THIS BLOG ON FACEBOOK AND ACTUALLY CLICK ON THE LINK AND LOOK AT IT HERE. I know, you'll get that scary little warning that says you're leaving Facebook and I understand that that makes you all edgy and afraid but you can do it. There's a whole other internet out here! And if you look at my blog on its own proper page, you will be counted as looking at the ads (if you wish to click them that is also awesome.) The paltry revenue I am expecting from my first blog foray into crass commercialism will only appear if people look at the actual blog, off Facebook, so I'm asking for your sacrifice here. I mean, look, this is now going to be my only source of beer money so you know it's desperate. And if you're not on Facebook, well, then thank you for visiting the blog! Come back like a million times and you will have bought me a PBR, a PBR which I really need. Will write sort of semi funny shit for beer! Cheap beer! More expensive beer gets you better jokes, I swear.

I am also looking for a job, or possibly more than one job, and if you know of any jobs or if you yourself have a job that needs filling, please consider me. I can type. I have access to the internet. I have mad Social Media Skillz. I can do all kinds of nifty things with Adobe creative suite which will result in you having totally cool ads and flyers and brochures and logos and shit and I can even update your website if it's not too complicated. I know MS Office - even access and excel - and I am really excellent with things like mail merge and databases and filing, not to mention I may just be the best writer of press releases in the discovered universe. I also know how to crack geodes, reboot servers and, almost always, fix copiers, so, hey, clearly I am an invaluable potential Team Member. Besides, I bring banana bread - good banana bread - at least once every couple of months and therefore you should hire me pronto.

Well, that was the uncool news. In other, cooler, news, I have a new friend and that is pretty cool. Perdita has a new collar, blue, which is pretty cool. The fish are all still alive and even thriving - highly cool. My son went to Florida and became tan, which was pretty cool and my daughter is always pretty cool. And spring has sprung, ish, which would be extremely cool except that now I have to attempt to dig the lawnmower out of the back of the garage and mow the lawn, which is, sadly, not really cool at all.

Slorpity Guilt

2010-04-08T16:57:00.001-04:00

slorp
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

See this dog? He has allergies. He has ear infections and allergies and possibly a thyroid condition and also, most definitely, he is fat. My dog is overweight! That part, actually, I had figured out without certified veterinary help. Django is what you could enthusiastically call solid, perhaps, or thick (ha ha! In more ways than one!) or sturdy, even, if you were feeling particularly tactful. A lot of the time we just say ooomph, because Django has not, despite his advanced age of four, himself twigged to the fact that he is no longer a tiny puppy who can sit on people's laps and thus, if you have a lap he will try to curl up on it.

I knew he had ear issues but I kept putting off doing anything about it until finally Audrey took him to a new vet yesterday and they told her he had more yeast in his ears than any dog they had ever seen. This, they said, is food allergies and I thought, oh jesus, I can't afford this. And I can't. It's annoying, anyway, because the dogs have some kind of crazy strange dog politics thing going on with their food and I've never been able to break them of it.

What happens is that I feed all three dogs every morning. Usually they get two and a third cups of kibble - relatively good kibble, here, I'm not feeding them Ol' Kreepy's Cheapass Floor Scrapin's for Kanines - and a third of a can of Alpo each. Sometimes they get something a little more gourmet which we like to call Le Leftovairs - on those mornings we don't have dog politics and they all eat up happily. My mother used to say that if you have a dog who won't eat, pretend to cook his food in a pot on the stove where he can see you do it. They're all waiting, she said, for the day when Mom gives up this dogfood nonsense and cooks them a nice steak. However, on a regular kibble and Alpo day, I put down three identical bowls of food and then for the rest of the day the dogs dance delicately around them like debutantes with eating disorders.

Django waits until the other dogs go out the door and then he snatches a few mouthfuls, a strategy that is more effective, apparently (the other two dogs are not fat) than you would think. Theo stakes out one bowl and guards it for a while without eating, then loses interest and wanders off. Perdita waits until there's a human around and then eats as much as she can as quickly as possible. At least I think this is what they do. Half the time they act as if food is a crass thing that they, pure spiritual beings, can do without as they navigate their way through the celestial plains and also bark at squirrels.

I have tried to separate them out and feed them each in their own room. This never has worked yet. They lie down by the bowl and refuse to eat and/or they cry and scratch at the closed door until I let them out, at which point the other dogs dart in to make sure nobody is getting anything good. They don't eat - they just sniff. So I take the food away and then I try it again the next day and they still don't eat and then by day five or six, I crack. I can't stand it. They start to get thinner in front of my eyes and I think they are starving. This makes me become all over emotional and angst ridden and then I start to think about how food is love and emotional sustenance and at that point usually I end up making them something incredibly extra special and apologize a lot. This accomplishes very little.

Now we will have to try it again, with special allergy diet food for Django and regular food for Theo and Perdita and I have already got that sinking feeling that tells me, oh god, in a week or two I will have to cook steak for the dogs.

Shakeups

2010-04-05T14:14:00.002-04:00

sunset 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Things are moving and changing in my life, which was somewhat unexpected. Eventually I will probably write more about these changes but at the moment they are all sort of amorphous and potential - kind of like Schrodinger's Cat - and so I will say only that hmmmm, I would appear to be living in interesting times. Just to dispel any rumours, though, let me say that things are not all bad although they are not, either, all good and address any guesses you may have about the nature of these changes, to wit: 1) alas, no, I have not won the lottery that I know of, although someone in Britain keeps emailing me to say I did; 2) no, I am not moving, thank all the gods and goddesses; 3) no, I am not pregnant and have not adopted another dog because while I may be stupid I 'm not actually THAT stupid and 4) I have not, inexplicably, been named supreme high commander of the universe just yet. Never can figure out why not.

In sad news, though, my friend Susan's father passed away unexpectedly on Saturday morning and I am thinking of her and, as the Quakers nicely say, surrounding her in the light and I would ask that you do the same. Losing a parent is just one of the hardest things in the world to get through, much love Susan.

Actually, it is Susan's birthday next week and so we were planning a party for her which has now been put on hold. Since it's on hold I am going to reveal the Secret Party Plans that she knew nothing about in hopes that it cracks her up. Planning her party was extremely fun, because let me tell you, nothing makes you feel younger than hearing yourself, at the ripe old age of forty something, uttering the sentence "Cool, we can afford both the keg and the stripper!"

Yes, we had hired a stripper, a nice guy named Howard who came recommended by a coworker of my friend Jen and actually Jodi and I were going to interview him on Tuesday at noon. I have never, actually, interviewed a stripper before and I was kind of interested in doing so, although completely unsure of what I was going to say. It seemed kind of inappropriate to ask him to demonstrate his skills, particularly since we were meeting in a coffee shop, so what else do you say? "Can you describe a challenge you've faced in your career and how you met it?" That would be awesome.

I guess the point of the interview is to look them over and decide whether they will, uh, do. It would take someone more heartless than me, though, to meet a stripper at a job interview, look them over and say "No, um, sorry, I don't after all want to see you naked." Ouch! It occurs to me that perhaps I could start up a reverse stripping business myself, just as long ago I wanted to start up a reverse band in which bar owners would pay us not to play. In the reverse stripping, I could threaten to reveal the full Monty (is it monty if you're a girl or is that one of those charming gender specific euphemisms?) and collect large sums of cash from the youth of today, who naturally do not want to see middle aged people naked. Entrepreneurism! I haz it!

Hilarity, Photography and Health Care

2010-04-02T14:21:00.002-04:00

spring sunset 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Before I talk about anything else, I wish to introduce you to this blog. I found it at work and it made me laugh until I cried and then I went home and showed it to Audrey and we both laughed until we cried and then we decided we wanted to find the author and become her best friend forever or something similar.

And now for something completely different. This is The Daily Shoot, a photo site I've been following for a couple of weeks now because I like getting daily assignments. That is to say, I mostly like them, or I liked them right up until yesterday, when the assignment was to take a picture that showed how I felt about health care. I thought about this one for a while and I considered a) something subtle, like drawing a picture of people bleeding to death on the floor while uncaring politicians stepped over them and insurance company executives stuffed dollars into their pockets with one hand while twirling their enormous moustaches of evil with the other and then photographing that (I could just have photographed it, yes, but I'm not in DC) and b) something more pointed, like a picture of a long tunnel with kind of a foggy sort of light at the end. That would be all allegorical and nifty and impart the sense that hey there might be light at the end of the tunnel and yet there might not. As it stands, I didn't do either.

It doesn't really matter anyway since that end is four entire years away, leaving plenty of time for not only the forthcoming zombie apocalypse but also the 2012 end of the world and the pandemic bird/swine/velociraptor flu, not to mention teabaggers, and, well, I'm not holding my breath. Yes, I'm glad that some attempt was made to change health care or, more correctly, the complete lack thereof in this country, but it didn't go anywhere near far enough. I am not a big fan of profit based health care and insurance companies and I still don't understand why we can't have nice things like socialized medicine since every other damn industrialized or post industrialized nation in the world seems to manage it quite well. But then they don't have the glory and joy of living in the corporatocracy we call home, so, well, there's that.

But let's not get bitter! Today's assignment is to do a fashion shoot and I might just go right on ahead and do that, particularly since I am wearing rather a nifty new stripey shirt from the Goodwill. Spring, you see, has sprung, and everyone is wearing t-shirts and shorts that expose the blinding glare of their white, white legs (this is Appalachia, peopled mostly by descendants of peat farmers and the kind of guys who spent the 17th century leaping around the Scottish highlands in the mist - neither group notable for tanning genes.) If I can just figure out how to use the self timer properly perhaps you can all see this orangey stripey thing that is breaking up my usual determined all black. Or maybe I can put the camera in a paper bag and take some street fashion shots. Or maybe I'll just give up altogether - one never knows and that option is pretty tempting on a day like today.

Days of Yore

2010-03-30T17:01:00.001-04:00

asheville city hall
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I took advantage of my sick day yesterday to delve into the cheap literature of a prior age: namely, I read or reread a Rex Stout Nero Wolfe murder mystery called Fer de Lance, which actually turns out to be the very first Rex Stout Nero Wolfe murder mystery, published in 1934 and a nifty original hardcover 1920 book I picked up at the Goodwill: The Eye of Zeitoon by one Talbot Mundy. I had never before heard of Talbot Mundy but it turns out he is/was quite famous (as you too can find out by googling him) and has his own wikipedia article even. He was apparently big with the Theosophists, who are another group I know very little about, except that I am familiar with the name Madame Blavatsky, know they dabbled with the occult and thus in many later books of speculative fiction they are referred to as pretty sinister. They have, or used to have, a decidedly unsinister office in downtown Baltimore on Charles Street and I used to try to look in the windows to see if anyone in dark robes was using exotic poisons and a crystal ball, but alas, there was never anything going on in there at all.

The Eye of Zeitoon, however, is chock full of sinister behavior on the part of men in dark robes. It's also chock full of the kind of casual racism that makes a modern reader cringe - Talbot Mundy really hated, I mean he really hated, the Turks, and just dropping the phrase the Color Line into an otherwise ripping paragraph full of smoke and fire and exotically beautiful dancing girls kind of grates on the 21st century ear. This is bad, of course, but I have long justified my fondness for Kipling by saying that well, there is no point in chronocentrism and people just didn't think like us back then.

Or did they? The difference between Talbot Mundy and Rex Stout is kind of striking: those 14 years between 1920 and 1934 were apparently influential ones on cheap literature. Rex Stout comes across as a fairly sexist and classist bastard, as do many private eye authors from the 30s, but compared to Talbot Mundy he reads like a contemporary. For one thing he blessedly does not begin every chapter with bad epic poetry. More pointedly, though, his sentences are crisp and sharp and could have hopped right off a blog if you ignore the constant references to milk, which nobody has drunk by choice since 1957, and hats, which, as we all know, disappeared off the planet some time in the mid 60s. (This is too bad, by the way.)

Anyway, reading the two last night I got fascinated by the differences between them and then I got fascinated by the twenties in general and started wondering just when, really, a century begins. I started thinking about the book I was holding and wondering who had held it in 1920, what the room they were in looked like and what they were thinking about as they read it. Objects have that weight, sometimes, and I thought that, given a time machine, while Rex Stout's New York might not throw me into culture shock, Talbot Mundy's world most certainly would.

Day Off For the Blahs

2010-03-29T16:45:00.001-04:00

dogs on the porch
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I have the blahs. I feel like shit, yet I don't have any real symptoms except being exhausted and mildly dizzy with a headache, small sore throat, ringing in my ears and general malaise. You know, kind of like a hangover except without the part where I had anything to drink last night or, for that matter, the night before. I woke up cranky, took the dogs for a walk, felt dizzy, came home, took a shower, got ready for work and was standing there all dressed up when I decided fuck this, I'm calling in. And since then I have mostly slept except for waking up occasionally to wander around the house wondering if I'm really sick, faking it or just insane. I actually hate days like this and my inner mother won't let me go to Quizzo now, because as we all know, if you're not well enough to go to work, you're certainly not well enough to go to the bar.

In other news, as you may have noticed, I have completely changed the look of this blog. It was high time and yes, okay, I just used a template and haven't done one single tiny bit of editing it beyond clicking EZ buttons. You can tell this by the fact that it looks all clean and doesn't have strange gaps here and there. You may have also noticed that ADVERTISING on the sidebar. Yeah. That is called I am trying like hell to sell out, here, so please give me a hand in my quest to become one of the idle, useless, evil rich by clicking on that ad. I am not super clear on the concept but I believe that every time somebody clicks I get, like, .37 of a cent. Therefore you only have to click 90 times or 945 times - the calculator, due to a certain lack of knowledge of decimals on my part, is unclear - or so for me to have enough for a PBR at the Admiral, a small and worthy sacrifice on your part.

I am anxiously awaiting my first check, the more so since I thought perhaps I would do my taxes this afternoon (health not being a prerequisite for doing taxes) except that I have lost a vital tax document. This is a major drag which will probably end in tears, so I think I'm going back to bed to read old Nero Wolfe novels until the cows, or the google ad dollars, come home.

Buying a Mattress

2010-03-28T15:02:00.001-04:00

sunrise river 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

When I went to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago to visit my brother, I got to sleep in a real bed. It was, well, not eye opening exactly: kind of more eye closing. Years ago - around 12 or 13 years ago, I think - tired of Salvation Army mattresses (this was before bedbugs and also before my gross out meter got activated; I was young and did not give a shit) and dime store futons, I bought a real futon. It was expensive and I think it was handmade by medieval Japanese nuns in a convent deep in the Himalayas using organic yak foam, or possibly it was made by hippies in Baltimore, either or, but at any rate it was a big thick fancy futon and I loved it. I was in those days fairly convinced that most of Western culture, aesthetics and design were a consumerist commercialized crock of shit while the Asians knew what they were doing and that therefore, futons were just vastly superior to decadent American mattresses in every way. I'm still fairly convinced of this, by the way, and any comparison of a raku bowl to a precious moments figurine will bear me out, like, immediately, but I have also ceded the point that decadent Western mattress companies might just know what they're doing in terms of sleep.

My futon traveled with me from Baltimore to the northern edges of Baltimore county and then to Arden and at last to this, the third of three West Asheville houses that I've landed in over the last ten years, and at some point it just gave up and died. I was used to it though and partly because sleep has never been much of a problem for me - waking up is the problem - I thought it was fine. Besides, I'm Irish American and have not only a few Puritan tendencies but also a deep seated tiny voice that thinks mortification of the flesh in the pursuit of cleanliness or godliness or something is just dandy. That was all groovy and actually I never even though of any of this until I came home from my four nights in a real bed in San Francisco and lay down in my very own bed. Of rocks.

So I decided that that was it and I was going to buy a new bed and yesterday I did just that. First I read a whole lot of informative stuff about how to buy a mattress on the internet so that I would have information to ignore and then I went to Sam's Club. At Sam's Club they have 2 kinds of mattresses and you can pull peculiar half sized versions of both out of the wall on wheels like deranged hide a beds for the Sam's Club slaves who live there. Then you can lie down on them - the internet says that if you are buying a mattress you must lie down on it for about ten minutes at the least and wiggle around as if you are sleeping when loaded to the gills on cold medicine and possibly meth - among all the Sam's Club shoppers in their glory with their giant carts loaded with giant things.

It turns out that I have not after all managed to banish the demon of self consciousness from my psyche and lying down on a mattress and proceeding to toss and turn in front of hundreds of vaguely interested shoppers is not something I can do alone. If I had brought a few friends along I might have been better at it - I can count on my friends in these situations to double over with laughter and make bad jokes, which would have helped - but I was by myself and by the third toss and turn and fascinated stare from a giant toddler and his giant parent, I had to leave Sam's Club, possibly forever and praying that this didn't lead to a really seriously creepy Craigslist missed connection.

Onward, therefore, to the mattress store on Patton Avenue by the Kerr Drug. This mattress store is dingy and has seen better days but also, in case you were ever wondering, has a truly amazing selection of cheap hideous rugs for all your frighteningly ugly rug needs. The salesguy was nice and as I had been warned by the internet everything was on "sale" and I might have bought a mattress there except for the fact that there were actually two sales guys and one of them was pretending to be a customer. No, I'm sorry, nobody stands around for 30 minutes in a store saying things like, "WOW! How do you get your prices SO LOW?" and "Gee, I wish I'd win the lottery so I could just buy everything in the store!" (that one was the best, because immediately I thought, hmm, all they sell are beds and ugly rugs, what, do you own a 40 bedroom house with concrete floors?) and "I hope you don't mind me hanging out here but I'm so excited by what you're selling!" That one was excellent too, because I also began to wonder just what the hell else they were selling and if it was cheap and any good. Perhaps I am overly cynical but it is my experience that nobody on this planet says things like that just out of the blue and particularly not if the person in question is a mid twenties American male from, probably, Leicester NC.

This freaky little two man sales pitch skeeved me out completely. I mean, here I was, the only customer in the store, lying down on a bunch of beds in the middle of the afternoon (which lying down allowed me to notice that the ceiling tiles in this place were all water stained and corroding) while a performance art piece from the 1954 Sales America Bible was going on around me. I had to leave and I was rattled.

Rattled enough to go on to the next mattress place on Patton Avenue, which is next to the Sprint store and a tattoo parlor and just buy a big honking thick goddamn pillow topped American mattress for too much money, load it on top of my car and get it on home. And last night I slept like that proverbial baby who has very little in common with real babies who don't, actually, sleep much. I also discovered that among the other things (it's soft! it's comfortable! I slept for almost 12 hours!) that make it so incredible is the wonderful fact that it is so thick the dog farts and snores wafting up from under the bed, a constant reminder of my status as pack leader and congenital unable to resist stray puppies idiot, have lost a lot of pungency by the time they float to my level. That alone is worth more or less any sum of money, oh yes, it is. And now my poor old futon is out on the curb in the rain and I feel sad for it - but I think I'll recover.

Random Friday

2010-03-26T16:48:00.002-04:00

west asheville guys with goats 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Audrey and I went to Goodwill last night. First, though, we saw these guys taking their goats and baby for a walk, just another west Asheville evening and then we went to Burgermeisters to eat giant cheeseburgers. That is why we needed Goodwill - to work off the burgers laughing at clothes.
"This dress has been here for two years!" exclaimed my daughter.
"Can't imagine why," I said, eying the rectangular and ribbed velour creation, fashionably and tastefully done in two colors: the top a charming beigeish baby shit brown and the bottom that particular maroon that screams there's dried blood in the old basement carpet and you're about to wear it, Scarlett O'Hara.

There was also a bright yellow power dress with navy polka dots that would be excellent for attacking things - any prey animal or subordinate office worker would be blinded and dazzled enough not to notice how you were clutching the sharpened letter opener - and a log. Yes, a log. Like, you know, a log. Such as one finds in the woods or the woodpile. This log, however, had a quarter section sawed out of it so I guess it was a special log. I didn't see how much they wanted for it but you could buy a strange, vaguely gun shaped wooden object with shiny pencils and a reel full of pink string for a mere $2. They also had a bunch of tables with remaindered and terrible kitchen objects like pointy plastic things theoretically for scooping pasta and any number of novelty egg timers shaped like eggs (of course) and timers (how boring) and hamburgers (inexplicable) which kept going off randomly. I got some novelty party toothpicks - they look like little flip flops and palm trees! - and a pile of paperbacks, although I put one back after Audrey pointed out that I had just sent it to Goodwill from her house a few months ago.

In other news, there is no other news. This is a Good Thing.

Weekend Book Reviews

2010-03-22T18:09:00.003-04:00

perdita and django at bent creek
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I had a very exciting and busy weekend in which I managed to read no less than five paperback novels. Yes! Five! Well, actually, it doesn't really count as five because I started one on Thursday and finished one today. Still, I am rather proud of my inert self and besides I also managed to work on Saturday and take the dogs hiking on Sunday morning and clean half the house. But I grant you I spent a lot of time burning brain cells with the kind of literature that has a lot in common with crack cocaine: it's widely available, addictive as hell and destroys your brain and finer instincts. Oh well! Here are some synopses and reviews for anyone who might want to emulate this kind of weekend trick.

Last Scene Alive by Charlaine Harris. This is the Sookie Stackhouse lady of True Blood fame and can I just say, ick. She should stick with vampires. This one, instead of the undead, has an uptight independently wealthy librarian protagonist in a small town around Atlanta somewhere and a dumb murder - really dumb - and of course there are all kinds of men who are madly in love with her and there's one steamy-ish sex scene. I have pretty much completely forgotten this one already and that's okay. As I said on mecha today, I eat them like candy and forget them like dreams.

Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison. Yeah, this one pretty much sucks too. I read another one in this series by mistake (this is the problem with the grab 'em and go Goodwill approach to picking books) a few months back and it was confusing and not very good. But I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently, and this is I think the first one in the series; it's even more confusing. Anyway, the important part is that get this, after most people die off of some kind of tomato plague (I am not making this up) then the vampires and pixies and stuff all come out of hiding wherever it was they were hiding for all of however long it's been since anybody has seen one. Also, while this is going on, somehow, it totally becomes normal to murder employees who quit their jobs. It's like a Republican dream come true, basically, with pixies. Did I mention the pixies?

A Cold Day in Paradise by Steve Hamilton. A hardboiled murder mystery set in hardboiled and cold Michigan where everybody is pretty much hard boiled and, um, I don't believe in any of them. I was sure throughout the book that the protagonist was going to turn out to be psycho and the murderer but he wasn't and it was somebody else and, la, whatever. No to the weird small ugly millionaire and no to his horny wife and no to the incredibly wonderful bartender and his wonderful nonexistent bar that might as well be written by Spider Robinson except then it would be more realistic. This book won a bunch of awards although I could not tell you why.

The Summer of the Danes by Ellis Peters. This is an old old book and I have read it before because I love Ellis Peters and I love Brother Cadfael and I love their perfect beautiful medieval world where murder barely disturbs the peace and the birds singing and the faith and the pastoral analogies. Ah, you can just sink into these things and not only feel better when you come out but actually learn a little something about 13th century Britain and Wales. Which, you know, is a subject that comes up all the time.

Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke. I also love James Lee Burke and Dave Robicheaux but for completely different reasons than I love Brother Cadfael. His books have a deeply loopy inner core that I can never quite figure out and I'm never sure if it's that the plots don't actually make much sense or just that I'm not all thtat good at plots. Or possibly it is because I do not live in either New Orleans or Montana and I'm not convinced that everyone is all that venal. I don't care though because once he goes into one of those four page mystical rants I'm completely sold. This is an early one and some day I'm going to read them all in order to try to make some sense out of Dave Robicheaux although I have a feeling it's going to bug me because, like a child in a sitcom, he's either not aging at all or aging too fast: I can't tell which. Sometimes that unnerves me, because people who never leave their forties and yet are not undead unnerve me, but, whatever, as long as he goes on writing paragraphs about the color of the water in the marshes, I'll go on reading.

ADDENDUM: I forgot one! There was another book and this one was the best if by best you mean most action packed and highly ridiculous yet containing a local angle. It was the inimitable Bloodstone, by Gwen Hunter, which I thought originally was called Gwen Bloodstone Hunter, due to a tragic failure of cover design. It's set in WNC and the protagonist is a jewelry designer who hangs out at gem and mineral shows and lives in a fabulous loft in, I think, Highlands, because it's the only town outside Asheville that could conceivably support not just one but three high end jewelry designers with fabulous lofts, although, hey, verisimilitude is just not what this book is about. The protagonist doesn't like to swear so she says stupid shit like Spit and Decay! instead, which little rhetorical trick gets old by about, oh, page 2. She's from a psychic family from the lowcountry, which is to say, she's probably related to me except for the actually being usefully psychic instead of just neurotic part. Her fabulously wealthy fabulous brother (everyone and everything is fabulous in this book) gets kidnapped and there are firefights and gold up on the mountain and an Eeeeevil Guvvermint Plot and a Wise Old Auntie and a Perfect Gay Best Friend and the whole thing is totally unbelievable but at least it is fun and not so horrifically written (except for the swearing part, I mean, fuck that shit) that you want to throw it across the room.

Okay, Okay Google Asheville Fiber Initiative

2010-03-19T16:58:00.002-04:00

biltmore avenue thursday night
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

#googleavl. Googleavl. Google google google, my fair city, great googly moogly and so on and so forth. If you live here, you probably know what I'm talking about unless you are one of my under rock dwelling readers in which case I say, hello, kinfolks! Can't wait for that Mole People family reunion! For you, my mud loving friends, I will explain the whole dealio. Dealio! I have been saying this a lot lately because it is so fucking annoying as to be golden and beautiful. The dealio! Anyway, Google - the company, not the verb - is looking for a test market for something called The Google Fiber Initiative, which sounds like a particularly unlovely breakfast cereal but actually will be some kind of blazingly fast (everything says blazingly fast so I'm assuming that's some kind of scientific measurement adverb there) internet service that will go to everybody in Asheville and will be, um, fast. This would be a Good Thing for Asheville, as I have heard from many people including my old friends Gordon Smith and Clarke Mackey who have impassioned and highly comprehensible pleas up all over the place (including blogasheville and here) explaining the whole thing. I went to a meetup/meeting last night that went into it all in some detail and now I can say in an educated manner that, okay, I am For It. Rock on with your Google Fiber Initiative for Asheville bad self! Google on with your flugelhorn on!

In order to make this happen, certain other cities who shall not be named (one is in NC and they are big on chairs and rhyme with Dickory while the other is in KS and I know nothing about it other than that it rhymes with Dopeka) have changed their names to Google. This tactic is, frankly, pathetic. I mean, I'm sorry, but if you are wooing someone and you change your name before the first date, well, that's the kind of behavior that restraining orders were invented for. It is creepy, is what it is, and it smacks of desperation, whereas we, here in Asheville, are so totally not desperate that we are not begging at all. We are pointing out that we are Awesome and therefore they should come here. This is a dating tactic that is supposed to work, actually, but I have never had much luck with it, primarily because I can never really keep a straight face during the I Am Awesome speech. Anyway, we're not begging. Mostly. Oh please please it might bring more living wage jobs here please please we will rub your feet every single night for the rest of our lives honestly and do all the dishes too, we swear.

Anyway, if you would like to nominate Asheville then you can do that here and there is a handy guide here and another one
>here. I confess that the guides exist partially because I am intellectually challenged: last night at the meeting I said out loud that the application was too hard for my sad little brain and lo, people leapt into action and fixed stuff up for the Moron Americans among us, which is to say, me. Actually it's not all that hard - I did it today while wearing my Professional Hat and I plan to do it again this weekend without any hats on - but if you wish talking points other than Bring Me Fast Porn Oh Yeah Google Baby, well, they have them. Although let's face it: it will. Bring fast porn, I mean. No more staring hopefully at the pixels as they oh so slowly resolve!

However! All is not cool with this because, honestly, the name sucks. I'm sorry, but when I see fiber initiative, blazing fast internet is not what comes to mind. No, what comes to mind is Metamucil and bran flakes. Take the fiber initiative and things will move faster! Yeah, see, the jokes: they write themselves. And also, please, blazingly is not an adverb that you want applied to fiber, because, okay, chili cookoff? Jalapeno morning afters? Not so good, Google. You need a better name. You know who could come up with one for you? Somebody in Asheville, that's who.

The Wearin' O The Green

2010-03-17T14:55:00.001-04:00

bolinas beach scene happy dogs
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Today is St. Patrick's day. I forgot to wear green - well, I am wearing a green stone necklace - and I feel vaguely ashamed and unclean. I think, although I could be wrong, that this is the very first time in my entire life that I've screwed up the green thing. Oddly enough, I was thinking about the whole wearing green bit the other day and I was reminded of kindergarten. In kindergarten, we all had to sit in a circle on St. Patrick's day (actually, we all had to sit in a circle a lot, not just on holidays. Kindergarten, it seems, is all about learning the ability to sit in a circle, which is a skill that comes in extremely handy in later life on hippie camping trips when you need to sit in a circle to most efficiently pass a joint.) and say what green thing we were wearing. One boy was clearly not wearing any green and I think I can say for the whole class that we were all wondering just what the hell was going to happen to him. Stoning? Public shaming? Execution, perhaps? Forgetting green is serious business. Well, we got around to him, finally, after the rest of the class had pointed to their green shirts or green pants or green tights or whatever - this seems odd, in retrospect. What the hell, was it a remedial class for the colorblind or something? - and he said, and I bet you can see this coming, "I'm wearing green underwear!"

Of course, the entire class broke down into complete hysterics because, if you, like me, were in kindergarten in 1969 or 1970, this was not only the funniest thing you had ever heard but also possibly the most risque. The world was different then, okay? Anyway, I thought it was incredibly daring and also hilarious and I was extremely impressed with this boy from then on in. I'm still kind of impressed, truth be told and so, if anybody cares to enquire today, well, I'm wearing green underwear! Or, um, I might be, because frankly I have no clue what color underwear I'm wearing today - that decision is made before the coffee kicks in - and I'm not pathetic enough to check. No, no, I'm not.

Blue.

So I Offended the Cold Goddess

2010-03-15T12:05:00.001-04:00

sunset
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

On Friday night I laughed about how quickly my cold had gone away. That was stupid. What was even more stupid was bragging - bragging! - about how I had done everything you're not supposed to do with a cold and gotten away with it. I said out loud, reveling, that I had waded in the ocean, gone out with wet hair, smoked, drank, walked around, flown in a plane and not stayed in bed with plenty of tea and several boxes of kleenex. Ha ha, I said, and look at me now! I beat that cold! I'm fine.

Yeah, well, what would you expect after that kind of hubris? My old belief that there are minor deities lurking around everywhere waiting to make humans miserable for shits and giggles is yet again empirically proved to be true. Of course I've spent the rest of the weekend being miserably sick with some kind of super cold that makes my head feel like cement, my stomach queasy, my bones ache and the rest of me unable to do much but lie in bed and doze with (of course) hot tea and several boxes of kleenex. That is what happens when you dis the gods. Fear the minor deities! Propitiate them! And perhaps you won't get whatever the hell this is.

Some Thoughts on San Francisco & Travel In General

2010-03-11T11:03:00.001-05:00

little girl with umbrella
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, now I'm well and truly home and everything looks weird. That seems to be one of those travel hazards: I'm homesick for the entire trip until the minute I start heading for home, at which point I immediately start missing my destination. I couldn't wait to get back to Asheville and now I want to go back to San Francisco immediately. Figures.

Anyway, San Francisco is cool. It is also warm, as in when I got there at 3 in the morning my time or a little after midnight Thursday their time, the shuttle driver said, "Cold, cold, is so cold tonight!" and I laughed disbelievingly at him, because it was easily 50 degrees and, as we know, I was coming from the Winter From Hell in Asheville. I nearly froze walking from my car in the Asheville airport parking lot (through several inches of snow) because I left my heavy winter coat in the car with a feeling of worry and disbelief. I didn't need to worry because it is not only warm in San Francisco, it is green. I mean there is green grass on the ground and flowers everywhere and green leaves on the trees and on Thursday morning I nearly wept with joy at this green world. It was more or less exactly like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy's house lands except for the fortunate absence of the squashed witch. I wasn't expecting it to be so green and I surely wasn't expecting palm trees. Palm trees! Right up and down the center of the streets as if you're in New Orleans! (It has occurred to me that I, who never travel, have now traveled twice in the last eight months, once to New Orleans and once to San Francisco - clearly, I'm on the Anne Rice tour of the world.)

The other thing that was wildly notable to me about SF was how calm it was. My main experience with large cities has been New York and Baltimore, neither of which are noted for their peaceful aura. So I was expecting the usual madness of people shoving and snarling and that sort of vaguely palpable feeling of menace and urban decay that keeps us east coasters on our toes. It was lacking. I mean completely lacking. My brother said, "The great thing about this place is that it has everything New York has but without the agita." And that is the best possible description. People are friendly and polite.

Even the street people (for the most part, although there were a couple who would have fit in okay in Tompkins Square Park back before gentrification days) are cheerful: two punk kids sitting on the sidewalk in the Haight Ashbury asked me to take their picture - they smiled while I took it, shot peace signs and didn't ask me for money. I nearly fell over in sheer astonishment. It was unreal: a lady gave us a two day MUNI pass because, she said, her daughter had left and didn't need it and, I heard from one SF friend that people routinely hand her their bus transfers. That just doesn't happen in New York. I mean, first off, if you had tried to give me a bus pass in NYC while I was living there I would have thought you were crazy and I would have thrown it away immediately, if I even took it. And, of course, that would never have happened in the first place. Ha ha! I laugh at the thought! Yeah, San Francisco is just nicer.

I went out drinking with a group of genial and delightful San Franciscans, a couple of whom were transplants from places like DC and Baltimore and they knew exactly what I was talking about. I asked if it was okay for me to walk home alone and slightly intoxicated through the Mission after midnight and they said yeah, sure. "I've never seen anything here, even in the Tenderloin on a Saturday night," said one, "that even compares to the kind of shit you see in DC on, like, a Tuesday night at 9."

The question is, does that make San Franciscans weak and pointless? Could shock troops from Baltimore totally take them out and colonize their palm tree laden city? I kind of doubt it. I am beginning to believe that there is something to be said for peaceful energy - that just possibly you don't need constant chaos and strife to thrive. I know, heresy, but I'm beginning to think it might be possible. Clearly I have been infected by the California virus. I'm sure it will wear off - probably as I trudge through the sleet to take my dogs to run illegally in the park.

I'm Back

2010-03-09T20:31:00.002-05:00

view of san francisco from delores park
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I went to San Francisco. Now I am back and I have much to say and even more pictures to show - they're all here, with more to be added. I'm running out of energy tonight to go through them and then I must somehow trick the camera into coughing up the 100 or so Friday pictures that somehow got corrupted or disappeared, which is a bummer, because those are the pictures of the DeYoung Museum and the Japanese tea house and the Botanical Gardens and the ever inimitable it's a little too much like Asheville Haight Ashbury. I'm exhausted and still a bit sick - naturally, after not having a cold all fucking winter, I managed to contract a doozy by last Thursday, so that you could follow me around SF by the sneezing noises and trail of kleenex (I'm sorry San Francisco! I hope I did not infect the entire city with the plague! I might be typhoid Mary but I mean well!) - but I will copy down a few bits from my journal for your amusement tonight anyway. San Francisco, by the way, is amazing. It is even more amazing, I think, for dogs than it is for people and if my dogs ever find out how great it is there then they will never let me rest until we move. Therefore I am whispering when I say things like no leash laws! and the beach is full of happy dogs! and the dog parks have no fences!

Let's see, journal stuff. First off, I hate flying. Klonopin is a wonder drug, as is vodka, but it is not enough. The only thing that would be enough is full anesthesia. I kept saying "This is a bus. I am on a bus" to myself but since planes are smaller than buses, not to mention less comfortable, this didn't work very well. But I made it! I got in late Wednesday night and the next day my brother launched us onto what I am fondly referring to as the Death March to Bataan Tour of San Francisco, which involved so much walking that I have blisters on parts of my body you don't even want to know about. It is kind of remarkable what you can fit into a day when you're dedicated.

Thursday:
Delores park with coffee & a croissant.
J train to Powell and Market.
Cable car up the hill to Sacramento Street
Chinatown - I bought stuff! Cool stuff! I should have bought way more stuff!
Walked into North Beach and had coffee at Cafe Trieste
Walked back to Chinatown
Walked back to North Beach
Walked up the Lombard Street steps, which are steep.
Took the cable car down to Fisherman's wharf.
Had a delicious seafood lunch and a bottle of wine at Alietos
Took a cab up to the Coit tower (thank GOD we did not walk)
Went up the elevator at the Coit tower - there was an incomprehensible and charming deadpan guide in the elevator.
Walked down all the steps from the Coit tower - saw the Telegraph Hill parrots! That was cool! - to the waterfront.
Had a shot of espresso with Tcho chocolate in it. Yum.
Walked through the ferry terminal market.
Walked through what I guess is sort of the financial district.
Met my old and wonderful friend Mimi at a microbrewery / yuppie bar called the Thirsty Bear.
Went to SFMoMA
Walked over to Powell St. and caught the BART train back to the Mission.
Walked up to Valeria and had dinner at Taqueria La Cumbria.
and finished the evening by having beers at the 500 Club and then walking another four blocks or so back.
AND THAT WAS JUST ONE DAY.

In the next couple days - this was also when the cold decided to really kick in - we walked through most of the Mission and went to Golden Gate Park and the DeYoung Museum (which is fantastic. I mean wonderful. I mean amazing. I mean I want to work there or live there or something. Perfectly great.) and the beautiful Japanese garden there and through Haight Ashbury - on the bus my brother said that it was worth seeing because it was full of old hippies and I remarked that everywhere was full of old hippies, which cracked up a lady on the bus. Actually, the Haight Ashbury was nice and all but honestly it was just like Asheville only slightly larger and with better grafitti. However! That night I went to a Metafilter meetup at the Mission Bar and then on Saturday went to the Asian Art Museum where my friend Angie used to work and went to Ocean Beach and back to Chinatown to buy more stuff and have dinner - my first ever bowl of Pho! I love Pho! We need Pho here in Asheville! - and to a couple of bars. Sunday I took the ferry across the bay to visit my friend Mimi and we drove over the mountains to Bolinas and that was all insanely wonderful as well. Yeah, San Francisco is just as great as everyone says it is and that is good to know but it is also good to be home.

It Snowed Again

2010-03-02T21:39:00.001-05:00

snow falling on my car
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

We rocked out at Quizzo last night and came in fourth or possibly fifth for the tournament. This is not too shabby, I think and even though making it to a bar once a week is kind of a dubious achievement in time management, I'm still proud of it. Also, I got to take the moral high ground for a while because I had three correct answers which got booed down by my teammates. Alas, I squandered that high ground on the last round by not knowing the number of tarot cards in a deck. Audrey had a deck in her purse but we felt that checking would be wrong. We are crazy.

So, more wintry weather! What a shock and surprise! I wish to cry. Perhaps this will be the last snowstorm of this crazy winter. One can only hope, although Audrey, who is fond of doom and gloom, says that the Farmer's Almanack is predicting another big storm at the end of March. Gods I hope not; enough is enough. As it is it snowed five inches or so in my yard and we all stayed home all day and ate fishsticks, which was not quite as awful as it sounds.

I'm packed for tomorrow; I'm terrified of course and I have emails and lists of people to call and places to go in San Francisco, where apparently burritos, among other things, are different than they are in Asheville. There's a metafilter meetup in the works; those are always awesome and I am, once I get past the flight terror, completely psyched and excited. However, remember that I do not have a laptop. Therefore, unless I borrow one, which I might, there will be no blogging until I return. But there's always Twitter from the phone, so never fear, I will still be one of those annoying 21st century overwired people. Westward ho! Or something like that.

Wowza

2010-02-26T16:59:00.001-05:00

negative space
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

This is going to be just a short announcement, here, to point out that the Woman Who Does Not Travel, the Woman Who Thinks A Trip to the Greenville/Spartanburg Airport is a Pretty Goddamn Big Deal, in other words, me, is flying to San Francisco next week for a couple of days. Jet set! Whoooeee! Holy shit! And assorted other euphemisms, exclamations and general hooting!

Yeah. I don't quite believe it either but I tell you what, sometimes you just gotta get the hell outta Dodge (and by Dodge, I mean Asheville - clever!) and also sometimes, occasionally you (and by you, I mean me) have an awesome relative who has recently moved to said mythical city of San Francisco who will give you a plane ticket. So I am going to San Francisco. I am currently attempting to decide the necessity of the putting of the flowers in the hair, because, like, if it's totally customary and stuff I guess you have to, otherwise, you know, forget it.

I haven't been on a plane since before 9/11 and I wasn't exactly what you'd call a frequent flyer then. This is because I am unearthly deathly terrified of flying but, well, my desire to get out of here for a while has successfully trumped that fear. Also, I'm not giving myself time to think about it, work myself into a frenzy and refuse to go: I'm just going to leave on either Wednesday night or Thursday morning and fly. This is why, after all, god invented drugs and honey, I got a prescription and I know how to use it. Also, they have bloody marys on planes. I can do this. I will do this. And I am going to do this.

I know nothing whatsoever about San Francisco except that everyone seems to like it. I have been to California exactly once before and I was seven, then, so it is possible that both California and I have changed a bit over the intervening years. When I think of San Francisco, first that damn song comes on in the back of my brain and then I get a montage of Rice-A-Roni TV commercials from the 60s playing in the foreground. Oh wait, and those Armistead Maupin novels! I read those! How are the discos doing?

Anyway. We will return you to your regularly scheduled blog sometime this weekend but in the meantime, let me just say, I AM GOING TO FUCKING SAN FRANCISCO, Y'ALL, NEXT WEEK!

Addiction Therapy

2010-02-24T16:03:00.001-05:00

perdita mid bound
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

We all know that I have one of them there addictive personalities. I seem to be able to get addicted to almost anything with the exception of gambling, which strikes me as boring. I tried it - I went to Atlantic City and dutifully lost $100 on the slot machines but the gambling still bored me. Now, the decor, the free drinks and the buffets completely got my attention and were not boring at all, but that's another story. I tried Keno, too, when I lived in Maryland, but it was less interesting than lighting five dollar bills on fire and I know this because I did just that at the same bar on the same night I tried Keno. Alas, nobody except me thought it was funny.

However! Let's talk about my two current addictions! One is new and it is this stupid game. Yes. I have gotten addicted - for about the fortieth time in the last ten years - to a variant of Tetris. There has to be a support group out there. Tetris is old. It is antique. In internet years, which are sort of like dog years only faster, it is positively antediluvian and yet I cannot disconnect the Tetris addiction synapse link in my brain that was forged back in the early 90s when I discovered it for the first time. Not only am I playing that Retris game every time I sit down at my computer (which is also kicking my carpal tunnel back into high gear) but I'm playing a realish Tetris game on a handheld thingie in the bathroom. It's evil. It's sick. On the other hand, believe me when I tell you that I can pack a car or a box like nobody else on earth - Tetris is not all bad.

My other newly rediscovered addiction - and, sicko that I am, I have inextricably involved my daughter in this disease - are Janet Evanovitch's Stephanie Plum novels. If you don't know them, these are totally formulaic somewhat funny semi mystery novels about a bail bondsperson in New Jersey named Stephanie Plum, who, with the help of her varied cast of amusing one dimensional supporting characters, has lots o' misadventures. Also, sex and tons of it. I am cringing in shame as I write this, okay, but at the same time I cannot WAIT to get home, because thanks to Mr. K's Used Books, I still have one more Stephanie Plum book to ~~read~~ devour. I bought three on Sunday. Yeah, no, they don't take long to digest. I could not possibly tell you what is so great about these damn books but I was addicted years ago, beat the addiction, forgot about it and then, lo and damnation, discovered that while I wasn't looking, a whole bunch of new books had come out! So I'm reading them and so is Audrey and our conversations now sound like this:
Me: I don't think it's fair that Stephanie gets both Morelli and Ranger.
Audrey: I KNOW! I was just thinking about that. She should totally give one up. You know (dreamily) Ranger is the perfect man.
Me: Do you really think so? I think I might like Morelli better. But I would totally have sex with Ranger.
Audrey: Absolutely. I don't see how she hasn't done it yet! I think he likes her better because she just keeps him dangling.
Me: I KNOW! It's totally infuriating! She should just fuck him and get it over with! What is wrong with her?
Audrey: It's not even like she's all that.
Slight pause.
Me: Um, we do both realize that these are fictional characters, right?
Audrey, unconvincingly: Oh yes, yes, of course.

Giving Yourself Permission

2010-02-22T16:03:00.001-05:00

stone wall 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I gave myself permission to get nothing done this weekend. That was surprisingly helpful: I mean, there are lots and lots of weekends where I get absolutely nothing done unless you count sort of noticing how the light moves across the bedroom ceiling in between naps as getting something done, but usually I feel guilty about it. This is much better, since I have no guilt whatsoever at the moment despite the constant humming presence of all the shit I generally feel guilty about: deep, deep levels of house grunge and ballooning waistline and unwalked dogs and troubled children and the death of fish and the general, you know, messy and utterly lacking in perfection state of my life. I addressed nothing this weekend, instead, I drank a lot of coffee, sat around a lot, went to the fish store with my auntie, went out for pizza and beer with my friend Jay and went for a long walk - without the dogs! - at the Arboretum and I feel fine. Well, fineish. It would be finer if I had gnomes or brownies or something to clean the house and walk the dogs and go to the grocery store and, while they're at it, improve the status of my bank account but the damn things refuse to show up no matter how many saucers of milk I leave out.

I hadn't been to the arboretum for a long time. The guy at the gate was really sweet and let me in at a discount because I didn't have enough cash with me - 8 bucks to go the arboretum these days, goddamn, you young whippersnappers with your 8 bucks, I remember when it was free - and I had a great wander through the woods, which were damp and surprisingly still snowy. I took pictures but most of them sucked: the woods are great but they are not photogenic. It's like, there you are with all the trees and the air smells great and there's a creek burbling away and all is good and you take a picture and it is. . . trees. Lot o' trees, there! Wow, sure are some trees! Yeah, well, some of my best friends are trees and I love them but en masse, they don't photograph so good.

After the arboretum I went over to the used bookstore where I had $42.50 worth of credit and I bought, by some miracle, $42.80 worth of cheap paperbacks to devour, including a book about a flock of sheep who solve a murder mystery, which I had to buy, obviously, because, well, how could I not? With numismatic luck like that, perhaps my lottery chances are not nonexistent after all. Right?

More Random Shit

2010-02-19T19:54:00.001-05:00

asheville mardi gras parade red umbrella
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Somebody just told me to keep my box of rocks and I believe they are correct. See, I have a box of rocks and shells in the garage that I haven't unpacked in the last three moves and it has occurred to me that perhaps I could part with it. But as we all know, I'm a pack rat and the thought of losing my box of rocks makes me breathe funny. That is okay, because I have thought of a use for it. I will carry it around with me and when it is necessary to chide someone for their stupidity I will point at it and say, "Do you know what you are as dumb as? This. This is what you are as dumb as." I see no flaws in this immaculate plan.

I think my fish oil got old and stopped working; either that, or the sheer overwhelming weight of crazy horrible shit that has landed on my head over the course of the last ten days has just overwhelmed it. Tangentially related, another fish in the aquarium has died. My son inquired why we should keep on buying fish, since they just die. I responded by singing - well, mangling, since I don't know any of the words - that horrible song from the Lion King about the Cycle of Life, which would have been way more apropos if I was a) eating my fish and b) king of them. Perhaps I should be melting them into oil rather than throwing them away. Anyway, I need more fish now. You can mail them to me.

I am not watching the Olympics because I don't really have a TV set. That is to say, there are actually two TV sets, old ones, in the house but they're both downstairs in Teenage Wasteland so the teenagers can play video games on them and watch informercials in the wee hours of the morning. I would kind of like to watch the figure skating - all the other sports bore and confuse me and then I start shouting at the TV because I feel they pay too much attention to the Americans, when I would really prefer to use the Olympics as a sort of National Geographic thing and focus on small, strange countries that have one athlete competing in one obscure unheard of sport. This is probably bad for me, and I don't want to see figure skating enough to venture into teenage wasteland, so I am just not watching. It's okay, though, because the internet is gleefully dissecting the figure skating costumes for me and that is pretty damn awesome.

4 Paragraphs WIth No Common Thread

2010-02-18T16:25:00.001-05:00

curvy snowy path
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

1. I make it a rule to not blog about my job (that would be because, uh, I want to keep it) but I must say that in other places where I have worked, if we had had a day like today the entire staff would be leaving at 4:30 for the nearest bar. Which might be the sensible solution.

2. The weather is supposed to improve this weekend. I'm not sure I believe it. I am so cranky and miserable it's difficult to describe - you would think that it was hormonal but I swear to you that it's not. It's fairly simple, actually: I just want to kill everyone and everything I see and then I would like to cry for a week solid and then, to wash down the tears, I could conceivably get behind eating an entire cake or some girl scout cookies, or, hell, some suitably barbecued girl scouts, because I hate puppies, kittens, unicorns and the universe. Sunlight may help. It may not, too.

3. We sucked at Quizzo last week and it's your fault. Yeah, you. You should have shown up and helped out - I don't care if you live in Kuala Lumpur and had a fever of 107 degrees on Monday. It was just me and Audrey and Jay and his son Dustin, which would be awesome except that Jay and I have essentially the same knowledge base, which means we are almost useless as teammates. Dustin shows promise but he is too young and Audrey did her best but what we really needed was a sports person. Also, I was already tired and cranky (and I flubbed the one art question, which made me more tired and homicidally cranky) and the bar was full of weird kids in their early twenties with giant backpacks and facial piercings. That is unusual for Jack of the Wood, which I stopped going to a few years back because, get this, I began to feel that it was a Gerry bar. As in Geriatric, yes, and since I myself seem to qualify as Gerry in some people's minds, let me tell you that Jack had gotten really really Gerry, as in its customer base was being siphoned off the cafeteria at the Givens Estates. I am pleased to see that it has bounced back and there are now people of all ages there, which is the way bars should be, but the backpack people got on my last nerve. I grant you that last Monday Hugh Jackman naked carrying roses and a six pack of Fat Tire would have gotten on my nerves - unless, conceivably, he had an epic grasp on sports minutiae - but still.

4. Speaking of Hugh Jackman! I watched Wolverine: Origin of Species or whatever it was called; an X-Men spinoff movie purporting to explain where Wolverine came from. Hint: he's older than he looks. Extra spoiler: he has a brother (evil, duh) who is probably going to show up again! More unsurprising spoilers: This was not the absolute best movie I have ever seen. Shocking, I know, but it was just not the creme de la creme of cinema, even in the X-men subgroup. Y'all may not know that I am fond of the X-Men, but, actually, I kind of am. I used to read the comic books whenever I came across one, which was more frequently than you might think. Thus I identified with Rogue, because, let's face it, most of the other female X-Men - the X-Women! - are kind of boring in that they're either All Evil All the Time or annoyingly goody two shoes boring, although none of them with the possible exception of the pointless Jean are as incredibly goody two shoes boring as stupid Cyclops Scott with the laser eyes. Anyway, back in the comic books, Rogue's boyfriend was Gambit and, since I am Rogue, more or less (okay kissing me hardly ever leads to an immediate coma - it usually takes another hour or so) I am happy to report that movie Gambit is frickin' gorgeous. Therefore I have told my daughter that she can have Wolverine as long as I get Gambit and we are both happy with this trade.

The Weather and More

2010-02-16T15:26:00.001-05:00

asheville mardi gras parade purple hair performer
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

On Sunday I got to take pictures of something other than snow and dogs in snow and ice and bleak picnic tables in snow. This was kind of amazing, because frankly I had sort of forgotten what a world that's not completely drawn in shades of black and white looked like, particularly after Friday's unscheduled yet extremely annoying small snowstorm. That was the storm (every Friday like clockwork! Aaaargh!) in which we only got 3.5 inches which somehow rendered all the roads unnavigable. I had to leave my car on Haywood Road and I will never tease my brother about having an SUV again - Audrey nearly had to spend the night at work and she never could make it back to West Asheville, taking shelter finally with a Subaru owning friend.

Anyway, that is normal now that we all live in a snowglobe in the Yukon! Onward to the less normal, also known as Sunday. Audrey and I ventured out of the house and checked out the Mardi Gras parade. I have never actually lived anywhere that had a a Mardi Gras parade before - note that I have lived in Asheville for a decade now - and so it was doubly awesome. It was pretty much what I thought a Mardi Gras parade would be like, only with less nudity, which is understandable given that it was a balmy 27 degrees or so and I could hardly look at the dancers in their skimpy outfits, poor things. It was a short parade with the aforementioned dancers, who were great, and drummers and people in wild, colorful costumes that I have no idea what they represent if they do in fact represent anything other than "Hey! Costumes!" I even got some beads. Then we went and drank some beer at the LAB and I talked to a couple of people I haven't seen in some time, so, all good.

Then it snowed again, or, to be precise, it's sort of still snowing a little bit. I know, this is not the kind of snow they have had in Baltimore, which frankly I am a little - not much, but a little - jealous of because it is Real Snow like we had in December. I remember Baltimore in the great snows of 96 and 93 -my house was on TV because I used young Miles' playpen to hold my parking space! That same young Miles stepped off the stoop in his yellow Winnie the Pooh snowsuit and promptly disappeared in a drift! I had to reach over and pick him up by the peak of his yellow Winnie the Pooh head, thwoop! - and it was kind of exciting, as opposed to this endless snow that never amounts to enough to be exciting but is more than anyone can really cope with. It's always cold and the streets are always just icy enough where you don't really feel that going anywhere is justifiable. Ick, in other words, and I am going stir crazy, in other other words and god almighty, I have never before been so ready for some decent weather.

Let Them Eat Bad Cake

2010-02-12T14:18:00.002-05:00

thursday night snow haywood road
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Things are getting kind of stressful and bad again around Hangover Headquarters and no, I am not going to blog about it, because it's all just too fucking depressing for words. So I am stressed again! Whoo! That's cool though: it could be worse. Face it, unless you are actively lying face down in a ditch while zombies gnaw off your fingers and your children get eviscerated while your house burns down and your car insurance gets cancelled, plus you have a telemarketer on the phone, it can always be worse. And we are fortunately not in that situation - yet. We do all have a roof over our heads and health and all that good shit and, if we're not super picky, enough to eat. Or, we would have enough to eat if, driven by despair and madness, I hadn't decided to bake this cake last night.

A couple of years ago I decided to make a cake because it sounded weird and I became intrigued with the pure-D bizarre factors of the recipe. That was a Guinness cake and it was truly horrible - turns out that there's a damn good reason people don't generally mix Guinness into chocolate cake batter. Who knew? This cake is similar: it also sounds weird and has pure-D bizarro world ingredients. Rather than Guinness, it has olive oil in it. Olive oil! What's not to like? And fresh rosemary and pepper and, whoa, cheese, plus, naturally, a cup of sugar and a shit ton of lemon zest. Nifty, I thought, this is unique! This is a new thing! So I made it.

And it did make the kitchen smell heavenly for all the hour and forty minutes that I had it cooking because it turns out that the inside of this cake never cooks. No, never. Never cooks. But that's okay because you can eat off the ends and it actually tastes a lot like lemon pound cake. That is awesome and great right up to the point where you come to a disconcerting chunk of fresh rosemary or an even more disconcerting hunk of black pepper or, get this, the creme de la creme of disconcerting: a piece of rubbery burnt parmigiana cheese! That is not what you want to find lurking in your oily, uncooked lemon pound cake! So it was a total cake disaster. Actually, I am kind of glad, because not only did the house smell wonderful and I saved myself a lot of calories but I laughed hysterically for the first time in some days at the cake and, even funnier, the reactions of my children as they tried to eat it. Twisted, probably, but what the hell, I felt better.

I am down enough where I caught myself trying to come up with a mantra as I was running out for lunch today. Audrey told me how during the last but one snow emergency (hey! There's another one on for tonight! Just fucking shoot me now!) as she was driving home she kept thinking "I am a good, careful, competent driver who knows what she is doing and I can do this." I thought this was very clever of her and decided I should try it myself. Therefore, I started thinking to myself, "I can handle this, because I am a smart, competent, talented, attractive woman who . . . is obsessively fondling a dog biscuit in her coat pocket. Yeah, me!"

So the mantra didn't work. It doesn't matter, though, because in an attempt to lighten up the atmosphere a bit, I then read this uplifting and heart warming short story and then this light, delightful article on why things are the way they are. That is how I know that things can always get worse and, hey, probably will! I don't know about you, but as the snow falls again and a lawyer friend of mine says calmly that the local court system is completely and utterly broken beyond repair and real unemployment rises and grocery prices keep right on going up to the sky and the stock market falls and aging takes its inevitable toll, plus, adding insult to injury, it's fucking Valentines Day again, or, as I like to call it, National Make Single People Feel Even More Like Shit Than Usual Day - my least favorite holiday - I find this thought strangely calming.

Note: Those are not really cheerful articles, okay? But they are very good indeed.

Yet Again I Fail to Win the Lottery

2010-02-09T15:44:00.001-05:00

descant
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I am in a lottery pool. Why yes, I am bad at math, why do you ask? It's my very own tax! Yay! I know, but, look, being in a lottery pool makes my chances of winning go from infinitesimal to infinitesimally less infinitesimal, in that we're playing more numbers each week for the same investment. So far, Susan and Jodi and Audrey and Linda and I are the only players, but we are anticipating more buy in soon. Of course, when we eventually win we'll have to split the proceeds, at which point we will all probably go from being the best of friends to bitter enemies overnight, but we'll save that drama to be relished later, when the shouting starts - "No! One yacht is no longer enough! I must have TWO yachts and you? You deserve only half a yacht! Half a yacht for you, you ignorant slut!"

Anyway, we have been in this pool for a month or two now, ever since we were sitting around at Broadways feeling broke and bitter and cold, those three little adjectives that sum up so much of my life. That was when I insisted that Susan begin this lottery pool she had been talking about ever since her third cousin won big with a pool in West Virginia. Frankly, that part worries me, because I feel that if you even know anyone vaguely, like, say, your third cousin's best friend's hairdresser's mother in law, who won the lottery, than, on the lightening never strikes twice theorem, your own chances to win immediately go to nil. I recognize that there may be a flaw in this logic somewhere, but part of me believes it strongly. Whatever, though, I put superstition aside, because I dearly want to win the fucking thing and I'm never going to get around to actually buying the tickets and doing it by myself. No, what happens with me is I buy lottery tickets and forget that I have them, but Susan is organized and she goes off to Gas Up or BJs (terms of the pool dictate spreading our lottery buy out a bit, just as part of the terms of the Great West Asheville BJs vs. Gas Up Peace Treaty of 2006) and gets them twice a week and then even checks the winning numbers and everything. So far we have not matched one number, not one, which seems to me to be a statistical feat in itself that probably deserves a pity prize from the Lottery Commission, but I doubt they share my views.

Therefore, when I saw on Twitter that the Powerball winning ticket was sold in Asheville, I was sure it had to be us. Alack and alas, though, the news soon escaped that that ticket was sold at the Wilco that's practically in Candler and I know that Susan rarely ventures out that way. Neither do I, for that matter, although I think I have been to that Wilco once, but it was several years ago before we even had a lottery. And so it was: yet again we didn't match a single number and somebody in Candler won, making our chances go down even further. But, well, lightening can strike twice and what the hell, the pool continues. I need that lottery win: it's my retirement plan.

In other news, Audrey's cat can apparently dematerialize and rematerialize at will, which is cool; we came in second - by ONE POINT - at Quizzo last night, which is cooler; and over the weekend I cleaned up Teenage Wasteland and hooked up my ancient stereo to giant 1970s speakers, thus making the entire house shake to old, old Genesis, which is coolest.

Snowpocalypse III: Return of the Yeti

2010-02-05T15:00:00.002-05:00

scandinavian landscape
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Another day, another snow day, another lifetime's worth of staring blankly out the window at gray rain and white snow, wondering just why you even bother, thinking about whiskey or possibly laudanum, feeling your soul just seep - SEEP! SEEP! - slowly down into a morass of mud and broken dreams. Ha ha! It's funny because it's true! Also, you're out of staples. Or rather I am - not, like, the potatoes and bread and beer kind; those I waited in line at Ingles for an HOUR last night to obtain, but the actual stapley metal kind - and since it takes staples to hold up the garbage bag that is acting in lieu of the more traditional bucket to contain the leak from the porch roof, that is serious and I might have to take off my gnome pajamas and go get some.

However. This is not just another snowed in cabin fever oh my god do you have to chew so loud post! No, it's a Review. I actually got sent something to review. This, I understand, apparently happens to more successful bloggers constantly but being as how they are more, like, successful, they get stuff like diamond necklaces and ferraris and vacations in Bali and then they go off to Bali draped in diamonds to drive ferraris and then they write blog entries that say stuff like "Hey! Ferraris and diamonds and Bali are most excellent! You should try them!" I have long been awaiting my chance at this largesse and finally, because the world is kind and I am wildly successful, what I got sent to review was two tubes of hangover medicine. Go figure! What a crazy stretch!

So. The stuff came in a black plastic tube, about 2 and a half inches long, that says THC on it in large friendly yet urban red letters. As you can imagine, this got my hopes up. Alas, they mean something completely different. It is you see, what is known as a double entendre. How sophisticated! How annoying! Yet I figured that nobody was going to send me actual THC to review - damn it. Anyway, next to the promising letters THC is the standard lurching martini glass and underneath it all it says the hangover cure (notice how they don't use caps, there. That means they're cool and edgy.) and then it says www.drinkTHC.com. The URL, you will note, is to make sure you don't smoke it by mistake. The directions tell you to drink - not smoke! - the contents of one tube in a glass of water after a night of debauchery.

I was waiting for some true debauchery to arrive but there wasn't much around for a while there and then the dogs, naturally, ate one of the tubes. They seem to be okay - nothing much fazes my dogs, after all - but I figured I had better get right on the debauching so I drank several - 5, to be specific, which is really pretty debauched - beers last night. The sacrifices I make! Anything for the review! Then I drank my THC. No, wait, I smoked - wait. Never. Not me. Anyway, I drank the contents of the tube. It smelled suspiciously like Emergen-C, the tropical variety. It tasted exactly like tropical Emergen-C, although possibly sweeter. Our suspicions (Audrey was part of this experiment but since she is not currently debauching due to a middle ear infection and resultant massive antibiotics and painkillers, she was strictly observing only.) were thus suspiciously aroused and we compared the label to a packet of Emergen-C (note to THC people: next time you should probably choose a blogger who is not, like me, an Emergen-C junkie. I drink it every day, sometimes twice a day. I mean, I knows me some Emergen-C.) and lo, what we had here was basically Emergen-C in less eco-friendly packaging.

Well, to be fair, it isn't exactly Emergen-C, it has 3 extra things in it: milk thistle, L-cysteine and L-glucamine. Oh, and slightly more sugar. Milk thistle is supposed to be good for your liver and I'm going on the scientific premise that anything that begins with L- has got to be good for you, so presumably the THC is extra excellent. I had high hopes. However, this morning I had a headache, which, oddly enough, is exactly what would have happened on any given night that I had 5 beers and drank an Emergen-C. I usually do that every night anyway - I don't know if it helps at all, but, like eating hopping john and collards on New Years Day, it is better to be safe about these things than sorry.

Therefore, here is my review of THC - not, you know, the fun kind, which I have previously reviewed, probably. Dude, if the packaging was a little more friendly - black plastic tube with red and white letters is not doing it for me; it's a lot of tube to throw away for a tiny bit of powder - then it might be slightly, oh slightly, better than Emergen-C, but not much. Still, it's not actively bad for you and it is fairly delicious particularly if you mix it with seltzer, so, hey, whatever! I'm sure I could be feeling worse right now if I hadn't drunk it at all. In summation, six thumbs up, four thumbs down and bring on the ferraris, diamonds and trips to Bali or, actually, pretty much anywhere that isn't Asheville and isn't fucking snowing, sleeting or just plain gruesomely winter miserable.

Ah Cabin Fever

2010-02-01T15:43:00.003-05:00

coming down beverly to haywood sunday am
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday I woke up full of energy - that's always alarming. I suited up in many layers and walked with the camera to Izzys, a coffeeshop on Haywood Road about a mile from my house. It was pretty awesome - I forget how delightful walks without the dogs can be. I had a cup of coffee and sat on the porch and smoked a cigarette and decided to bring Annie over some coffee and a bagel, so I did that. Walking down an icy, deserted road balancing a tray of coffees on one hand is fun. No, really, it is, I swear. You sort of feel like the Uber Waitress - the Server God - and Annie, when she came to the door, was properly astonished and delighted when I said, "Did you order some coffee?"

So that was all good and then I walked all the way home, happily jazzed from the coffees and the snow and the exercise and the fact that I didn't hurt myself or the camera when I slipped on Annie's street, which had everything in common with an Olympic skating rink except the Zamboni. I had two more cups of coffee when I got home because by this time I was sort of more coffee than person, a highly entertaining situation and I felt, why stop? Thus I did all the laundry and vacuumed the house and watered and cut back - really cut back. Perhaps cut back too much. - all the houseplants and cleaned up the porch and went to Sam's Club to buy junk food and then I fixed the leak on the porch roof by stapling a couple of gallon sized plastic bags to it (they were full of ice this morning, which was kind of cool in a creepy wow that's a lot of ice man I need a roofer kind of way. Then I vibrated around for a while complaining about how bored I was. Drugs are great, aren't they?

Today has been nowhere near as productive. I only get one day like that a month at the most, so, hey, I feel that getting the computer/guest/Audrey's room into shape, which it is now, after much cursing and heaving of furniture and vacuuming, is enough. I also replaced the gallon zip lock bags with a large stapled trash bag, which is filling up with roof water even now. It strikes me that perhaps this is not an ideal long term solution but that goddamn leak has resisted all Adam's best efforts for over a year now and, short of replacing the whole porch roof which would cost money I do not have, I can't come up with a better solution. Anyway, it looks kind of cool in a fairly terrible way.

All this snow sponsored activity has been great, but, jesus, enough already. Somebody on Twitter said that they didn't realize I lived in Duluth and actually neither did I, assuming that the twitterite meant by this that I should not live in a cold and snowy place, with which sentiment I heartily agree. Of course, it could have just been some kind of random twitter comment that made no sense. One never knows. What is Duluth, anyway? Is it cold there? I'm not really interested enough to google it. I usually say the Yukon, myself, a lovely word that not only summons up images of Yukon Cornelius and Mr. Neutron, but just sounds cold and snowy. Although given our new, improved weather here, perhaps we can all just use Asheville as shorthand for too much snow now.

Another Day Another Snowstorm

2010-01-30T17:08:00.001-05:00

celeste and audrey at the start of the hike
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday we had a slightly smaller but arguably more intense version of December's Snowpocalypse. I'm calling it Snowpocalypse II: The Snowening because, well, I can. It started with a literal whoosh - I mean there was an audible whooshing noise around 3:00, the heavens opened and the snow started coming down fast and hard. It was hard enough that by 4:30 there was an inch and a half on the ground and the roads were terrible, which gave me some Mom-ish pacing time as I worried about both my children being out in it but then Audrey got home and Miles called to say he was safely at his friends' house and then I felt it was okay to start drinking. Then Audrey's friend Celeste called, unable to make it all the way home from downtown, so she came over to be snowed in with us, and we all started merrily downing the beer. By 6 it was apparent that we were either going to have to be responsible adults and accept that we were going to be out of beer soon or put on eight layers of clothes and walk over to BJs for more.

Responsible adulthood has never really been my forte.

It was fun hiking through the wildly falling snow but it was hard work. Audrey's boots have no traction and the three pairs of socks I was wearing inside my thin rubber boots weren't really keeping my toes all that warm, plus it was hard to keep the camera dry. And it's a long hike to BJs when you're slogging through four or five inches of snow. However, we got there, detouring first to the Admiral where there was a small but jolly crowd gathered. I love the Admiral, but lately I do feel as if I'm kind of 20 years too young for the dinner crowd and 20 years too old for the bar crowd, but then I kind of think that may be my central problem with life in general, particularly in Asheville. Last night's crowd definitely skewed to the 20somethings, which makes sense, since most people my age don't bother walking through blizzards to get beer. They should, though.

We got a suitcase full of PBR cans from BJs and went on over to Susan's house, another exciting walk, this time in five or six inches of snow. She made us dinner, which was delicious and there was much hilarity and drinking of beer and then we realized that we must slog on home.
"This is it," I said, "I'm finding a shortcut."
"But it's dark," said my daughter,
"It has to exist," I said firmly, because this has long been a bugaboo of mine. Susan's house is probably about 1/8 of a mile from mine at most as the crow flies but by road it is a long and wearisome uphill hike of 7/10 of a mile. There used to be a road between my house and her house, too, and according to Google maps there still is.

Google maps is wrong.

We tried part of the old road, but it ended up becoming a driveway, blocked by two brand new houses with stockade fences. Audrey fell down, which didn't make her happy but by this time I was determined. We went back to the road, went a few feet and I said, "Look, we can cut through right here." This is a place I have noted before, where just two houses back to back stand between my road and Susan's road.
"No we can't," said Audrey,
"Yes we can, " I said and did just that. The first house was empty, so that was a cakewalk. I sneaked through the snow along the side of the second house. I started to sneak around the front, too, but I looked up and saw a guy sitting right by the front window. So I sneaked up the steep, steep hill to the side of the house, just as quietly as an intoxicated forty something woman in four layers of clothes - it's hard to sneak when you're roughly twice your normal size and you didn't start out small to begin with - and eight inches of snow can sneak while she and her daughter are sort of whisper yelling at each other.
Me: "Come on, it's not hard."
Audrey: "I can not do this. This is illegal and my knee is going to go out and I already fell down."
Celeste: "That guy is going to hear us, shhh."
Me: "Just walk sideways. Here, grab my arm."
Audrey: "I don't want your stupid arm! I'm going to have to crawl through the snow and it's all your fault!"
Me: "Don't be such a wimp."
Audrey: "This is insane."

We made it though and hopefully we didn't destroy anything while we crawled up through somebody's landscaping. Audrey didn't talk to me for a while but eventually she got over it and we were home in no time. Today I feel a bit foolish about my spy escapade but, well, fuck it. All rules are suspended in the snow.

Random Thoughts Friday

2010-01-29T11:09:00.002-05:00

dawn clouds and power lines
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

1. Why are cab companies always primary colors? Here in Asheville we have Blue Cab and Red Cab and of course in NY they have Yellow Cab, but you never, ever see Purple Cab or Orange Cab or Mauvish Taupe Cab with a Hint of Fuchsia, do you?

2. The coffee was excellent this morning. It's enough to make you believe in the concept of the supernatural: every single morning I make coffee in the dented and dinged Trailmor camping French press my brother gave me for Christmas about eight years ago. I rinse out yesterday's coffee, boil the water, add two Chinese soup spoons worth of my patented coffee mix (half Cafe Bustelo and half whatever fancy French roast is on sale, yeah, it is delicious and Slightly Cheaper, whoo) pour in the water just as it boils to the same level, leave it alone for five or ten minutes and then settle down with my coffee. The routine never changes. Yet, sometimes it tastes like dirt and leaves - and not, like, really good dirt and leaves either - and sometimes, like this morning, it tastes like the ambrosial caffeinated nectar of the coffee gods. It is baffling and the only possible explanation is that there is a small mysterious creature in the coffee pot who occasionally wakes up and decides to grant me good coffee.

3. As you doubtless know by now, the second Snowpocalypse of the winter is almost upon us. It would have been way better if it had started last night, because then I would be at home right now, but, well, as long as it's apocalyptic enough to keep me home on Monday, okay, I'll deal. I guess. Having been through one Snowpocalypse already, I have mixed feelings about this one. Part of me has the usual excited I-am-nine-years-old-and-it-is-going-to-snow-whooooeeee! feeling and part of me has the newly discovered, post Snowpocalypse 09 I-am-over-forty-years-old-and-snow-is-a-royal-fucking-pain-in-the-ass feeling. However, I am prepared. I went to the Mart of Evil last night and got beer, frozen jalapeno poppers and several other useful items and then I went to Mr. K's used books and stocked up on stuff to read. I have at least seven projects in mind to do - realistically, I need a Snowpocalypse that lasts about two weeks to get them all done - and therefore I say, I'm ready, bring it on.

I cannot, however, get my son to believe in it. I remember when storms would threaten when I was a teenager and my parents would get all excited. My dad would turn on the special weather radio - his pride and joy, that thing - and start taping up the windows and filling the bathtubs with water and drinking vodka tonics and bellowing at his children about impending weather related doom and the importance of Being Prepared while my mother started inventorying the freezer and making shopping lists. Meanwhile, me, the teenage daughter, would roll her eyes and get the hell out as soon as possible because, like, they were so annoying, god, and made no sense, god, as if, it's just a stupid storm and it probably wasn't even going to happen anyway and, god, fuck this, I am so going over to my friend's because she has pot and a copy of Houses of the Holy. Oddly enough - can you imagine? - my teenager seems to react in a similar way when I start telling him to stay where he is, it's going to snow, don't drive that car, be careful and make sure you have bottled water, perhaps you should fill the bathtub. Kids. Go figure.

Quizzicalo

2010-01-26T16:59:00.002-05:00

eerie light on the water
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Last night Audrey and I went to Jack of the Wood for Quizzo. I did this last week too, with my friend Jodi who unfortunately was sick this week. Last week Jodi and I came in tied for seventh place, which we felt was quite respectable for a two person team among many, many teams composed of lots of extremely intelligent people who all knew more about Haiti and Switzerland than we did. Last night, our team of, um, nine or eleven I think - Heather and Aric and Zen, briefly, and Kyle and three people who I had never met before but who were all really cool and extremely smart - tied for third place yet somehow I do not feel brilliant. As Audrey and Kyle and I were driving away in the snow I said, "You know, coming in to this we thought we were pretty smart. But now we know that we is dumb as fuck."

And alas, so it is. We know nothing, it turns out, about popular music or sci fi TV shows from the 1950s or the Golden Globes or, well, much of anything. Basically, we were the comic relief, able to contribute answers only to questions about beer festivals in Asheville (and that's just because I was there, okay, proving that alcoholism has its points) and otherwise stumped. Except we is not all that damn dumb: Kyle totally got the shoutout question about who killed Darth Maul and Audrey got the abolitionist senator from Georgia, even though nobody believed her. Me, I got negative space.

The beer was excellent though and we, or at least me, will be doing it every single week for the next six because, goddamnit, I want to win that vacation to Fort Lauderdale, where I have never been. Granted, a team of eleven or thirty six or whatever people winning is going to make the hotel room a bit cramped - although the collective IQ will be breathtaking - but whatever; I want to go where it is warm. Wonderful as the photography has been around Asheville lately, what with the floods giving way to blizzards giving way to ice floes giving way to more floods, I could really see strolling on a beach in bare feet as a creatively interesting opportunity.

In other news, Django has proven yet again that he can get as wet and muddy as any three other dogs, a talent which you would think could be monetized somehow; Audrey is back from Charleston and I am tired. The fish are all still alive although I have not yet replaced the ones who died a while back. I can't remember if I mentioned this, but the fishtank, we thought for a while, was cursed. It seems to be kind of less cursed at the minute but that does not mean that it is not, actually. It could still be The FishTank of Doom, the Haunted FishTank of Lore, in which fish mysteriously die from no apparent causes, secretly murdered by a vengeful and finny ghost, but without a few more gory deaths, the probability seems to be lessening. I didn't, after all, buy the damn thing from one of those funny small fish shops that appear and disappear in the alleys of fog shrouded major cities.

Nostalgia Fest 2010

2010-01-24T18:30:00.001-05:00

dawn river with monster
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I've spent this entire dark rainy day organizing 2007 and 2008, a strange and possibly pointless task. You see, I launched a giant project about a week or so ago when I decided that it kind of sucked not having actual photo albums. For many years I was completely obsessive about my photo albums - I would get film developed and immediately put it in meticulously ordered albums. I have one for every year from about 1990 (I was too busy having fun in the 80s to give a shit about photography) on, right up to the advent of my first digital camera in 2005. That was when I decided it would be okay just to look at pictures on Flickr because, hey, times had changed and who needs hard copies?

Well. It is not okay, really, and I turn out to need hard copies and so I went ahead and made a photo book of 2009, using Snapfish, who I am happy to recommend. I picked pretty much only images with people in them and ignored art (art can take care of itself - people look at photo albums to see themselves, not some dumbass landscape full of mist.) I was planning to do the same for 06, 07 and 08, or, that is, I was planning it until I got to the checkout, where I was greeted with a crash course in fiscal responsibility and so I decided to do it the old fashioned way.

Yes, of course it is really hardly any less expensive to order prints of all the album worthy photos from three whole years, running at around 230 photos per year, and then go buy old fashioned albums from Target, but, well, it was slightly cheaper. Slightly Cheaper! That's my mantra! I had this idea that when the prints came they would be all neatly organized in the same order in which they were uploaded. Ha ha! I am naive! No, what I got was a box of roughly 600 photos all mixed together and so I have had to sort them by year and by month, using a page of thumbnails as a guide and I am here to tell you that that whole process took about 16 straight hours. My eyes are bleary but everything is done except 2008. 2006 is in a pretty album with a cheesy quote on the front; 2007 is in a nice green album, 2009 was all done online and arrived with a classy purple linen cover and 2008 is going to be black.

It's been interesting, going through each year like this. 2006 was not, it turns out, such a bad year. 2007 was completely insane; a roller coaster year of extremes and craziness and loss and passion and madness and at the time, of course, I thought it was terrible. That was before I realized that the worst 2007 had to offer was equivalent to the best days of 2008. I cannot say much kind about 2008 except that it is thankfully well over and it made me appreciate 2009, a year in which not much happened and, most importantly, nobody I love died. 2009 was okay. It was just fine. Nobody died and it turns out that that is really fucking important, possibly the only ultra important metric, when you go to measuring up years.

In other news, Susan and I went to the Riverlink fundraiser Brews Cruise Winter Warmer yesterday afternoon/evening and it was really fun. We had some great beer and some not so great beer and met some cool new people and I braved the food line and got oysters, yay, and lowcountry boil, even more yay in a way, for my trouble. Then we went to LAB, the incredibly trendy cool new place on Lexington which was, yes, trendy and cool, with exciting curvilinear walls and changing colored lights and a betta in a big jar on the bar and, yeah, it was nifty and the beer is good and perhaps I will return someday in the future when I'm more trendalicious. One can always hope.

yet another photo of sunrise over the french broad river

2010-01-22T18:09:00.002-05:00

yet another photo of sunrise over the french broad river
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, here it is Friday evening and I'm at work, where I'm tallying up people who are wandering into the museum in between listening to jazz. It's kind of restful, actually. Tomorrow I'm going to the winter warmer brew fest, which is thoroughly awesome, because I won tickets and so it means free beer, which is one of my very, very favorite things. Also, oysters, another favorite thing.

How did I win tickets? Well. This is mildly embarrassing, but the truth is that I entered by signing up for a profile at the Mountain Express' personals site, which is still in its infancy, so the odds on me being the one to win the tickets were good - I mean, like one out of eight good. Odds I can get behind! And, so, for the price of free beer and oysters, here I am on another dating site. Nobody so far has contacted me - well, to be fair they've only got about eight people on the site - but I have high hopes.

I don't know why the hell I have these hopes, high or low as the case may be, since I've never had any luck at all on dating sites and in the last few years it's only gotten worse. It used to be that I would at least go out on some awkward and unhappy dates or once in a great while meet somebody who was kind of interesting a couple of times, but as my age advances so do my contacts diminish, until finally nobody wants to meet me except a polygamous bisexual transvestite truck driver from Atlanta, who, to be fair, was thoroughly charming and it's probably too bad that I am so narrow minded and square. See, I don't do long distance anymore. I also no longer date people who are more than 15 years older than me - the other demographic who occasionally makes a halfhearted flirtatious gesture my way - because I'm just getting too old for that nonsense.

We'll see. I have this New Years Resolution - I'll give you a hint: I've already done resolutions in other years that had to do with drugs (do more) and rock n' roll (go to more shows) - and there's only eleven months left, here. You see, my involuntary sanctity has grown wearisome: the poverty, chastity and obedience (to the dogs, I think, I can't quite figure that one out otherwise) thing is getting on my nerves. Ergo, dating sites.

While I'm bitching about that, let me add that poverty too is overrated: I'm looking for some freelance work if you know of any. I can write, more or less, and I also know my way around a spreadsheet. I need a bit more income - in the new century, one job is not enough - as well as the occasional date.

Big Doin's on Riverview Drive Last Night

2010-01-20T11:15:00.002-05:00

patton avenue sunset
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Last night started out to be a quiet and ordinary night. My demon son was supposed to meet me at home at 6:00 - I got home just in time after acquiring a carton of cigarettes, a case of cheap beer and a giant bag of dog food at Sam's Club, which made me wonder, as I packed it all into the car, just when I had turned completely into a redneck - and of course he did not. Audrey got home around 8:00 and was about to eat dinner while I, in my cozy I-am-not-leaving-the-house uniform of ghastly yoga pants and thermal shirt and one of my dad's old giant flannel shirts, was curled up in the big chair with a bottle of seltzer and a copy of The Borribles. Suddenly there was a huge thump thump BOOM and the power went out.

"What the fuck?" we said and then I said, "Maybe a transformer exploded," but Audrey, quicker to the draw, said,
"That was a car accident. Oh god what if it's Miles?"

This is not something anyone as a parent wants to contemplate. So we grabbed flashlights and took off running up the street, passing downed power lines and other neighbors emitting cries of alarm and found a pickup on its side in a neighbor's front yard, wheels still spinning and, incongruously, a banjo lying nearby, apparently flung from the wreck. One car looks much like another from underneath in the dark and I could not bear to check too closely to see if it was anyone I knew but Audrey is more intrepid and she investigated further. Turns out the pickup had smashed into two cars on its fast and lurching way down the hill (note that there was no screech of brakes before the thump thump BOOM) and then taken out a whole electric pole before flipping into the neighbor's yard, where it handily removed all their landscaping, garden fence and satellite dish before coming to rest on its side.

The neighbors said that two people who had been in the truck apparently kicked out the windshield and disappeared. They were reasoning, I suppose, that they didn't want to be found lying there on the ground with all the liquor bottles that had also spilled out of the cab. Not to mention the banjo. I can't believe they were hale enough to make it out of the truck; it seemed as if they must be badly hurt. All night there were cops with flashlights going through the woods around my house - these are thick and brushy woods, by the way: if the driver got away, he or she definitely has the world's worst case of poison ivy by now - but I don't know if they ever caught them.

It is a fucking miracle that they or someone else - a dogwalker, another driver, a child - was not killed.

Meanwhile, people kept trying to drive up the street, so I went with my flashlight and directed traffic for a while, turning cars around and telling them what had happened. You'd be surprised at how many people don't get that driving right over downed live power lines is not at all a good idea. Then the emergency people showed up: police and firefighters and eventually the power company. The firefighters blocked the road off right at my house with cones and a flashing truck so that for the next two hours being in my house was like being in some strange and terrible disco. It's a good thing we don't have epilepsy; standing outside was strobe city.

Eventually they moved on up the road to block it a little closer to the actual scene. Then the wreckers came and four big power company trucks and Audrey and I and two of our neighbors stood outside and drank beer and talked and continued directing traffic, since people kept right on speeding up the road. I should have known, but I was surprised at just how fast many people were going as they came up my street. I knew in an abstract way that people speed like crazy but getting up close and personal with it last night was quite eye opening. Lady in the old Subaru wagon, I saw you and if I ever see you again I will kick your ass and I am not kidding at all, not one little bit. If I'd gotten your license plate number I would have turned you in already. You nearly killed me and three other people. Do not drive 55 fucking miles an hour on a narrow windy residential street with a speed limit of 25 mph and if you do, for Christ's sake pay attention to the fact that there are people in the middle of the road shouting and waving flashlights at you, not to mention cop cars and ambulances and fire engines and power company trucks, all flashing more lights than a space shuttle launch, about 200 yards ahead.

That was all exciting but then we went inside and played yahtzee and gin rummy by candlelight (I am going to dump every stupid vanilla candle directly in the trash, yes, and get some unscented ones) and it got dull so we went to bed in the dark, dark, quiet, quiet house. Naturally the power came back on around 2 in the morning and with it all the lights and the music and everything so I staggered up and turned everything off and went back to bed, as a consequence of which I am a bit bleary eyed this morning. Bleary eyed or not, though, I have already fired off an email to my city council member friend pleading for speed bumps. Actually, if you are from Asheville, I am going to ask you to do the same. I was against them myself until last night but I have changed my mind in a major way. Seriously, my road is very unsafe and something needs to be done and done fast before somebody does get killed and comic relief notes like the banjo and the liquor bottles are just not funny anymore.

Weekend Update News Team

2010-01-18T10:08:00.001-05:00

composition in water ice and sticks
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Let us all now give thanks to St. Martin Luther King Jr. for this day off. Here it is 9:45 in the morning and I am not at work, hurrah, no, I am wandering around my house thinking about repotting plants and trying to keep myself from sinking down into the big comfy chair and reading all day, which is what I've been doing all weekend between baking cakes, battling hangovers and coddling my right foot, which, it turns out, has something awful yet common called acute planar fasciitis. You can google that yourself - every time I start looking at the diagrams of feet on the results my foot seizes up and I start to twitch and moan. It's painful as hell and if that wasn't enough, take my word for this: you never, ever, ever want to allow a strange, skinny old foot doctor to shoot steroids directly into the sole of your foot. No. You don't. But it's slowly getting better and today I'm going to clean up the whole house and take the dogs hiking, or at least that's the plan until one of my children thinks up something else that I must do immediately.

Probably that will be giving my son driving practice, a terrifying procedure. He is not actually a bad driver for a beginner but still there is nothing quite like the pure fear experienced by the parents of beginning drivers to get the old adrenaline racing and the heart attack looming ominously. "It doesn't help when you scream!" he says indignantly and of course he's right, it doesn't help, but hey, it's hardwired into the primitive brain: ancient cave mother must scream equally when a sabertooth lands in front of her and when ancient cave son, driving around narrow streets in ancient cave Buick, accelerates over 20 miles per hour.

The weekend was great: Friday evening I went to the Admiral to sit outside and drink beer with Susan, Zen, Helen and Kyle. Let us all now praise St. Martin again for the clement weather in which you can actually sit outside the Admiral and drink beer at least until the sun goes down and the frost tigers come out. Once that happened we went on over to Susan's house to drink more beer with Jodi and Jay. It was probably too much beer, but, whatever, I kept thinking: all I have to do tomorrow is bake a cake. That's it.

And that was all I did on Saturday: bake a cake. A two layer chocolate devil's food cake with mocha whiskey cream cheese icing, so there. Then it was time for the Capricorn birthday party at Annie's, where there was much merriment and we celebrated Annie's and Bill's and Audrey's and Dianna's birthday party with a giant spread of Chinese food, more beer and the aforementioned cake. Capricorns are all about cake. It says so in the astrology books.

Yesterday I did nothing but read and eat cake. I did make it over to the fabric store because I have these plans to make a skirt and, then, gods help me, I went into that big new used book store by River Ridge, where I bought a bunch of books and am immersing myself happily in them. I'm reading a Peter S. Beagle book called Avicenna which I'm not sure whether I've read before - I would have sworn that at some point I had read every single thing he has ever written, probably twice - but if I did I don't remember it and so it is amazing. And I read a book called Thraxas which was hilarious and terrific as well and I read a Megan Lindholm book called The Windsingers as well as finishing up Cecilia Dart-Thornton's book Weatherwitch, which, I'm sorry to say, Cecilia, was not so terrific because, among other things, it's annoying to have struggled through three whole books full of forsooths and lists and ballads only to stumble upon a plot in the last 100 pages of the third book.

However, I do have one piece of real news: I have heat! Heat! Yes! The iBoiler is cranking away and it's a little disconcerting, actually. All winter walking around my house has been like swimming across a lake: there are pockets of warm and pockets of cold. Now, though, it's just all warm everywhere and I don't even really need fuzzy socks. I fear I will grow soft and weak. I probably will grow soft and weak - in fact, I am already soft and weak if we get right down to it - and that should be a fairly awesome and warm process.

birthday

2010-01-14T22:56:00.001-05:00

audrey pensive
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It is this child's birthday today and she is whoa very old - 27 - which makes me very old as well. We - the daughter, the son and me - went to Zambras and had tapas and a bottle of wine and it was lovely. And Audrey got carded on her 27th birthday and she is flying high on that one as would we all be.

I cannot believe it has been 27 years since I carried that baby with a shock of thick black hair home from the hospital. I wasn't sure why they were letting teenage me leave the hospital with a baby when I knew nothing about babies - my ex husband whispered, "They haven't asked us for any money yet. Do you think we can do this for free? Birth and boogie?" - and yet we made it: here she is and she is wonderful. I am proud and amazed and now that all these years have passed she's my best friend and that too is amazing. And not much has changed: she woke up this morning and complained that Django was between the mattress and the wall and it was more or less the same as when she woke up around age 7 and complained that Andy the cat was on her face: "I opened my eyes and all I could see was fur!"

Well. This parenthood thing. I am the richer for it and, I believe, so is the world. This is my daughter, who works with the kids that most of us never see or know about, who spends her life making sure that children with all kinds of disabilities get a little better every day. I am so proud of her I could burst and today she is 27.

Ice is Beautiful But Really I'm Over It

2010-01-12T14:56:00.002-05:00

dramatic extension
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I managed to take the dogs out for a run at Hominy Creek this morning - the first time since we were all transported to the Arctic. I took a whole bunch of pictures which you can see on Flickr and they are terrific, wonderful, great pictures - of ice. I was sort of squatting on the ice (this was okay, because I was wearing two pairs of overalls and two pairs of socks and a peruvian ski sweater and a coat and a muffler and two hats and a pair of gloves and a pair of mittens, so although it was somewhat difficult to actually, you know, move, I was nonetheless warm) taking these pictures and thinking, as one does at these times, about how great the pictures were going to be and what a compositional goddamn genius I am and stuff like that when suddenly it occurred to me, "What if I become famous for ice pictures? And my ice pictures are world renowned and National Geographic hires me to go around taking more pictures of ice? And they send me to Antarctica and Greenland and Siberia and, I don't know, maybe Maggie Valley? That would SUCK." I considered ditching all the pictures at this point just to keep the fame at bay but I didn't. You have to suffer for your art so here they are, ice pictures, with the first 16 or so on that page from this morning. I'm not going to Greenland, National Geographic. You can beg but forget it, I want to go to Hawaii instead.

Chances are I'm not going to Hawaii any time soon, but I do get out: we are supposed to go to Hendersonville this evening to pick up my son's new car. Yes, we finally agreed on a car. It is super fancy and green and I probably am paying too much money for it but fuck it, it felt safe and easy to drive and I couldn't take another day of car hunting. I didn't even blog about the car that stalled out on me five times in ten minutes and now hopefully I can consign that particular gruesome memory to oblivion. It's a shame you can't specify which memories to keep and which to lose but drugs just never work that way, or at least the ones I take.

However! This is about Hendersonville, not drugs! What a pity! Still. I don't know if we're going to make it because a) it's snowing again, of course, see point 1, above, "We All Live In the Arctic Now" and b) my right foot has decided to be broken. I didn't do anything, I swear, to prompt this decision on the part of my foot; it made the choice all by itself without me even getting the fun of falling down or jumping around but, whatever, it's been getting worse all day and now I'm not even sure I can hobble the three blocks to the bank or my car. I have made an appointment with a doctor for the morning, which is terrifying, since I usually wait until I'm about better to give up and go to the doctor. I did go to the dermatologist week before last for some bumps on my forehead that had gone away; he confirmed that they were, indeed, gone and told me I had very fair skin. "No!" I said, looking shocked. (I didn't, actually, say this but I wanted to.)

I don't go to doctors much and the last (and only) time I went to a podiatrist was in Baltimore about 15 years ago. That podiatrist was located inside a funeral home, which I thought then and think now was a handy location in case something during the course of the removal of my plantar wart went terribly, horribly wrong. This one is apparently located next to the permanent makeup cosmetic surgery clinic, so if the foot prognosis is bad I'll just hop over and get some permanent eyeliner and maybe a face lift to cheer me up.

Quick News Bites!

2010-01-11T17:04:00.002-05:00

meet my fish 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

1. Look, the fish are still alive! But the dogs ate the fish food - dogs love fish food; I know this, but I still left it where they could get it. I wonder if I can feed the fish tiny bits of Italian sausage or something until I make it back to the pet store? The fish food, by the way, was excitingly multi colored and all in tiny perfect circles as if somebody had cut it out of huge sheets of fish food with a hand held hole punch, sort of the way I think political prisoners make confetti in dank extraplanetary dungeons. That's why you shouldn't buy confetti, by the way, it's all just too ironic: all those prisoners, the dungeon, the sheets of happy colored paper, the hole punch and the dismal thought of all the parties with confetti that those prisoners just won't be attending, because they never use confetti in extraplanetary prisons, even on the guards' birthdays. Maybe they throw fish food sometimes.

2. Audrey is almost totally all moved out of her house. Yesterday we went over and packed the last stuff (including many of my books) into boxes. There is no heat at her old house and it's difficult to pack boxes while wearing giant fuzzy yeti paw mittens, but all tasks are manageable if you do them with a bloody mary in a Sigg bottle.

3. Annie is 81! I made a chocolate cake on Saturday and took it over there on Sunday for her.

4. The furnace guy came! Hurrah! I wasn't here but fortunately Adam, who is turning the downstairs room into a really snazzy little apartment, first for Audrey and eventually for rent, was, which was handy, since he let them in. The new boiler is here and it is tiny, tiny, tiny. If it was pink, it would look like a Barbie furnace. Barbie dream house needs an expensive Barbie dream condensing boiler! It is literally about 1/3 the size of the old boiler and I'm not sure if that's good or not. I suppose it is good, but when you are spending that much money on something, you kind of want it to be hulking and gigantic. I suppose instead I must settle for it being dauntingly high tech and I guess it is - furnace by Apple. iBoiler! Holds MP3s, annoying ringtones and warms up the house.

5. I also made a really strange coffee cake. It turns out that if you have a recipe for coffee cake that asks for one type of seasonal fresh fruit and it's January when nothing is fresh except possibly raisins so you decide to go ahead and dump a year old bag of frozen mixed fruit into the batter, you may have made a culinary error. What you get is a kind of Martian coffee cake: it's not bad, exactly, it's just very, very strange. It also turns out that there's a reason people hardly ever cook whole grapes and chunks of honeydew melon and that reason is that they become quite unsettling when cooked. Quite.

Fish

2010-01-06T17:01:00.001-05:00

bleak
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Last night I got home in the freezing cold - yeah, did I mention that I, along with the rest of Asheville and indeed WNC, have magically been transported to the Land of Eternal Icy Fucking Cold Where It's Too Goddamn Cold to Do Anything Except Whine? - and after I had thought up that evenings entree and popped it into the oven to become not particularly good, I decided that my fish were lonely. My fish. Yeah, I have fish now. Three dogs, one cat, two theoretically grown up kids, thirteen fish and me, the partridge in the pear tree or some similarly Seussian character, if there is a Seussian character in a red fleece bathrobe - it's too cold even for my usual winter wardrobe of various layers of mismatched plaid flannel - with a bottle of beer in one hand and an epic fantasy novel in the other.

I only had two fish before last night. Annie had had eight fish, as recounted elsewhere in this blog, but when the aquarium got to me, there were only two fish in a tin bowl. I have figured out where the other six fish went and I hereby offer a heartfelt apology to their ghosts, their families and the god of small fish: I am very sorry, fish, and I promise I will never, ever again attempt to assemble an aquarium pump and filter after drinking the better part of two bottles of wine at Christmas dinner. Those fish went up into the filter with the sort of results you see in video games where the hero has to make it through one of those large industrial sized fans. Yeah. Well. Let's gloss over that bit - I fixed it; it's not a fish killer anymore - and hope that the resultant chum at the bottom of the tank is actually making the aquarium all, um, bio and stuff. Healthy.

So yesterday I went off to the fish store with Audrey. Not the good fish store - they might remember me from the purchase of the dearly departed and I didn't want to be greeted with shouts of Murderer! Fish killer! - but the big giant chain fish store that ends with Z and affects signage that uses Z to pluralize, as in, Dog Foodz! Accessoriez! Eee. However, the lady there was extremely knowledgeable and helped us find the kind of fish who will hopefully live in fishy peace and harmony. Did you know they have invented new fish recently? Egads, yes, they have and they glow in black light, as all artificial beings must, by law. They're called Glo Fish and they are extremely cool in a freaky, Spencer Gifts, black velvet kind of way. I would have gotten them, so that I could enjoy the spectacle of tiny swimming chips of day glo paint but since they cost like $6.50 each and you really need about ten to get the full effect, I opted for old fashioned glowing fish: neon tetras. I like neon tetras, who have nifty stripes. And orange platys, both male and female in the hope or fear that they will lead to more fish and, to top it off, a couple of some kind of sword tailed dalmatian something or other, because they are so elegant.

Then we had to get decor. There is a lot of decor available for fish, let me tell you, more, in fact, than in your average home decor store for humans and far more interesting. I want my living room as well as my aquarium done in faux castles with holes in them and tacky pirate chests and big plastic broken faux amphorae, actually, but alas, I ended up opting for a rock with holes in it. It's a tasteful rock with holes in it - holes are key for fish; they have to swim through them so you can exclaim "Look! He swam through the hole!" - but I'm having a little buyer's remorse, in that I actually just spent $10 on a rock with holes in it. Oh well. Anything to appease the fish ghosts! The living fish are living in fish paradise so that I won't be haunted by swimming ghosts, which is all well and good, and the sound of the bubbling water is restful and calming, or it would be if I didn't keep waking up, sitting up bolt upright and thinking that I'm actually hearing the restful bubbling of broken pipes.

Furnaces and Bedazzlers

2010-01-04T16:08:00.001-05:00

snow trees river
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I STILL HAVE NO HEAT. And I'm extremely goddamn pissed off about it, actually, and tonight I'm going to find the contract I have with the boiler guy and if it is not ironclad I am opting the fuck OUT of it. He had the nerve to tell me this morning, right after the radio intoned that it was -3 degrees with the windchill, that he couldn't possibly make it to my house this week, since this was an emergency situation and he had a lot of people without heat. OF WHOM I AM ONE, I shouted, and then he said he would loan me a space heater. Fine, asshole. It will replace the one that got ruined last night WHEN THE PIPES FROZE AND BURST AND FLOODED DOWNSTAIRS.

However I cannot talk about that anymore since I start to clench up and shake and then I need to go outside and smoke a cigarette and either drink a shot of whiskey or walk around in circles telling myself to be calm, be calm. Preferably both and since it's too cold to go outside, I will instead change the subject. To bedazzlers, of course.

Audrey and I went to Ross Dress for Less for some retail therapy last week and it was very fun, as it always is. Part of the fun of Ross Dress for Less is going through the racks picking up the most unbelievably hideous thing you can and suggesting it to your shopping companion as something they might like with the straightest face you can muster, which is often not all that straight. This game is improved by the fact that you will find something even more hideous in less than two minutes and then hold that up, etc. However, last week we were forced to admit defeat. There was just too much hideousity for it all to be properly admired.
"What the hell is going on in fashion school nowadays?" asked my daughter as we pondered a green blouse that would have been okay without the Giant Mystic Stones of Power glued haphazardly around the neckline.
"I don't know," I said, admiring the rhinestone Ring of Shininess on the collar of yet another formerly inoffensive top, "But I think they must only be admitting coke addicted twelve year olds with Bedazzlers."

That is probably the sin that led to me having a dream a couple of nights later that I was an incredibly cool art student with a bunch of other incredibly cool art students who were - wait for it - in line for a really cool Asian restaurant! Yes! Even in my dreams I can't get in for good food right away. I was nicely dressed though and in the morning I felt all happy about my beautifully dressed dreamworld self until I started thinking in an awake way about what my subconscious evidently considers the ne plus ultra in high fashion: a handmade black denim vest (and by handmade I mean somebody tore the sleeves off a black denim jacket) with a handpainted picture of John Lennon on it. A big picture of John Lennon weeping red fingernail polish tears of blood, all surrounded by enough glitter and rhinestones to put all of Ross Dress for Less to shame.

Go dream me, go! Time might have taken me out of the worst parts of the 80s (I want my pink Fiorucci skirt back someday, I really do, and my elf boots) but apparently my heart is still right back there with a bedazzler and a jar of fingernail polish.

Cold

2010-01-03T15:02:00.001-05:00

no loiterin
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It's cold outside. It's so fucking cold here, actually, that it is colder than it is in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the town which has been my personal touchstone for over the top coldness since my friend Alia, who used to live there, called in early October to report that it was 13 degrees and snowing. Hah! 13 degrees! It is as nothing! It was below 0 this morning here - and it is not supposed to improve. Hell, it was around 50 in my house - remember that I have no real heat, only electric space heaters and weep with me now while I reveal that my December electric bill was for $200 - and I couldn't even drag myself out of bed to start baking for several hours. Tomorrow I have to go back to work after my delightful stresscation and I'm not sure if I can face 7:00 am and below freezing. This is ridiculous.

On the other hand, the furnace guy is supposed to show up tomorrow morning! Wheee! I'll believe it when I see it. I also hope the furnace doesn't take a week to install. Last night the pipes going to the washer froze and so I have had to sacrifice one space heater to the stupid insane outside plumbing closet (genius idea of the previous owners of my house, aka the Krazy Karpenters) in order to safeguard the rest of the pipes. That means it will be even colder in here come Monday. I can hardly wait,.

In other,scattered and disjointed, news, Susan had a lovely New Years Eve party which was tons of fun from which I am only slowly recovering even still; to combat the cold I have been baking again - healthy cookies, among other things, much to the disappointment of my children and actually they are far too healthy, it is true - and so what with that, all the beer and the party food, I am well on my way to storing up enough fat to make it through the three months of hibernation I believe I need right around now. The fish are still alive and the aquarium looks nice; I would like to get more fish but I am afraid that they would freeze on their way across the parking lot from the store to my car. Audrey should be all moved out of her house by the end of next week thanks to Adam and, last but not at all least, my friend Ray has invited me to Charleston to see Flogging Molly in February and I think I will go. Happy New Year again! One great thing about this weather is that I can't leave the house to spend any money!