Yesterday we were supposed to go out to Bat Cave and thence to Lake Lure to take pictures of fat tourists. And we (me and S and puppy Mojo) made it to Bat Cave to visit with our friend D but we didn't make it back down the mountain and into Lake Lure. It was just too nice up there sitting on D's porch drinking beer and talking and being continually buzzed by hummingbirds and watching the dogs play so instead of fat tourists I was forced to take pictures of, like, Nature and shit. Sheesh. It was very relaxing and great and there was even a nice afternoon thunderstorm. Then S & I came back into Asheville where we met C for dinner at the Westville and then went over to his house to admire his garden. I confess, after D's & C's gardens this weekend, I am feeling terrible garden envy and am almost, but not quite, tempted to dig up some of the back forty and see what I can get to grow in this mostly dry almost July. I feel lame only having a few containers of plants and like my Earth Mother cred is all getting ruined.
So everything was nice and mellow and I went to bed at a reasonable hour and all, only to be awakened by the forever damned smoke alarm outside my bedroom at 3:30 this morning. It was really going off, none of that low battery chirping, no, the full throttle wail siren "you are going to die!" mode. I leaped out of bed and got on a kitchen chair and disconnected it and then took the battery out and then spent the next two hours in a state of terrible heightened paranoia whereby I was sure that even though I could smell no smoke whatsoever no matter how hard I strained my nose and also poked it into places where it didn't want to go like the attic crawl space and behind the bookcases just in case, horrors, an electrical outlet had suddenly decided to go berserk and caught randomly on fire, the house was nonetheless on fire and about to kill me and the dogs. Around 5:00 am I decided that if the house had actually been on fire for over two hours I probably would have noticed some change in my environment so I drifted back off to sleep only to wake up again at 9:00 - I am theoretically supposed to be at work at 9:00. I hate Mondays. I hate possessed smoke alarms. The internet tells me that it may have been the humidity that set the damn thing off in which case I guess I am doomed for the rest of the summer.
This has happened to me once before - I had mercifully forgotten the last possessed smoke detector in my life. That was in the bat infested farmhouse in northern Baltimore county where we lived in the late 90s and it also happened in the small hours of the morning not long after we moved in. It was actually worse, though, in that the kids and my boyfriend were all there as well and I believe that M, who was quite small, was frightened and crying and A, who had just started high school, was yelling as she often did and the dog was barking and I'm sure, although I don't remember it, that the cats, of which we had many then, were underfoot. Meanwhile, my boyfriend was wobbling unsteadily on a chair at the top of the stairs trying to disconnect the smoke alarm. Which finally he did, which did not faze the smoke alarm one iota. No, it just kept right on wailing away even though we had pulled the battery out. Then we had to disconnect it from the wall by main force and even then, with no power source whatsoever, it continued to shriek. I remember a conversation between me and said boyfriend about whether we would actually set the house on fire or perhaps electrocute ourselves if we just cut the damn wires with a pair of scissors, goddamnit. I swear to you that this is true. Not only did it never shut up, but then we chucked it far, far out the window towards the woods and you could still hear it chirping distantly which is why I found myself, soon after the sun rose, burying a smoke alarm deep in the earth by the state forest. I felt like a murderer - a very tired murderer who had really pretty much had it up to here with the murdering business.
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Monday, June 25, 2007
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Dreams
So I slept 12 hours last night. I came home, ate a giant dinner (see yesterday's post on lack of will power, blown diet, et nauseating cetera) and lay down at about 7:00 to nap for an hour or so. Yes, an hour long nap that lasted until about 11:30, at which point my son woke me up to tell me he was going to bed. It seemed relatively futile to get up then, so I went back to sleep and dreamt like crazy for the rest of the night. I think my brain gets bored after about 6 hours of sleep and starts making dreams - the kind of dreams that are insanely real and vivid but just a little. . .off.
(Note: If you are not a mefite, the following will make no sense to you whatsoever. Feel free to proceed to the following paragraph. We apologize for any inconvenience and will return you to your regularly scheduled program shortly. This has been a public service announcement.) I also have clearly been spending WAY too much time online, because I had another anxiety producing shame filled Metafilter dream and it wasn't even a weirdly entertaining one - unlike the one I had where Mathowie yelled at me at a meetup for being stupid - but instead I dreamt that I made a bad post (a weird little graphic puzzle and I invited everyone to solve it; it was very chatty and took up half the page with ascii art) to Metatalk and it got deleted and then I couldn't post again for two weeks and I was all stricken with embarrassment and anxiety, particularly since I had a vitally important Askme question right then. When I woke up I thought it was real and I approached Meta nervously, but fortunately I had not in actual fact posted this puzzle.
Sometimes I do remember dreams as real and, probably, vice versa. It's not that I can't tell the difference (okay, maybe it is) between dreams and reality, because I can while I'm in them, or sort of, but it's the memory of dreams that gets mixed up with the memory of reality. Do you know how when you're dreaming you will have memories that are actually simply dream memories? They usually seem designed to give you a sort of dream logical explanation for something, as in, "Oh YES I do remember now, I planned to have the floor of this room in the castle turned to raspberry jello, of course." Then, months later, you may sort of stumble across this memory in your brain and for a second you're not sure if it's real or not. Once I told a friend of mine that the brakes on my old van were bad, because I had to pump them a lot to get them to work at all. A couple of days later I realized that that wasn't true - it was a dream memory or a memory of a dream and, to make it all even more unsettling, as I remember this conversation now, I'm not entirely sure that it ever took place: it may in fact be a dream memory of a dream memory of a dream memory.
The other part of my dream last night involved looking for a house with two brothers, one very good looking, the other not so much. We were somewhere in Pennsylvania where the houses were small and close to each other and I rescued a Vietnamese toddler from an oncoming tractor trailer, but her mother and all the other Vietnamese women who watched me do this were silent and watchful instead of thanking me. I went back over to my side of the street feeling oddly guilty and then the brothers and I went to eat Indian food on the second floor of a rowhouse. I had never heard of anything on the menu before but I didn't want to let anyone know that I was so unsophisticated so I kept reading it over and over, hoping vainly to come across something vaguely familiar. With a dream like that, it's unlikely that I'll remember rescuing a toddler as real - but I'm thoroughly capable of being in an Indian restaurant some time in the future, looking at the menu and feeling relieved that I know what to order, unlike that other restaurant, where was that place? It was located at the intersection, I guess - the corner of Dream and Reality.
(Note: If you are not a mefite, the following will make no sense to you whatsoever. Feel free to proceed to the following paragraph. We apologize for any inconvenience and will return you to your regularly scheduled program shortly. This has been a public service announcement.) I also have clearly been spending WAY too much time online, because I had another anxiety producing shame filled Metafilter dream and it wasn't even a weirdly entertaining one - unlike the one I had where Mathowie yelled at me at a meetup for being stupid - but instead I dreamt that I made a bad post (a weird little graphic puzzle and I invited everyone to solve it; it was very chatty and took up half the page with ascii art) to Metatalk and it got deleted and then I couldn't post again for two weeks and I was all stricken with embarrassment and anxiety, particularly since I had a vitally important Askme question right then. When I woke up I thought it was real and I approached Meta nervously, but fortunately I had not in actual fact posted this puzzle.
Sometimes I do remember dreams as real and, probably, vice versa. It's not that I can't tell the difference (okay, maybe it is) between dreams and reality, because I can while I'm in them, or sort of, but it's the memory of dreams that gets mixed up with the memory of reality. Do you know how when you're dreaming you will have memories that are actually simply dream memories? They usually seem designed to give you a sort of dream logical explanation for something, as in, "Oh YES I do remember now, I planned to have the floor of this room in the castle turned to raspberry jello, of course." Then, months later, you may sort of stumble across this memory in your brain and for a second you're not sure if it's real or not. Once I told a friend of mine that the brakes on my old van were bad, because I had to pump them a lot to get them to work at all. A couple of days later I realized that that wasn't true - it was a dream memory or a memory of a dream and, to make it all even more unsettling, as I remember this conversation now, I'm not entirely sure that it ever took place: it may in fact be a dream memory of a dream memory of a dream memory.
The other part of my dream last night involved looking for a house with two brothers, one very good looking, the other not so much. We were somewhere in Pennsylvania where the houses were small and close to each other and I rescued a Vietnamese toddler from an oncoming tractor trailer, but her mother and all the other Vietnamese women who watched me do this were silent and watchful instead of thanking me. I went back over to my side of the street feeling oddly guilty and then the brothers and I went to eat Indian food on the second floor of a rowhouse. I had never heard of anything on the menu before but I didn't want to let anyone know that I was so unsophisticated so I kept reading it over and over, hoping vainly to come across something vaguely familiar. With a dream like that, it's unlikely that I'll remember rescuing a toddler as real - but I'm thoroughly capable of being in an Indian restaurant some time in the future, looking at the menu and feeling relieved that I know what to order, unlike that other restaurant, where was that place? It was located at the intersection, I guess - the corner of Dream and Reality.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Communes
I went to a big party on Saturday night at a big house that is also a more or less communal living situation. It was fun; I drank too much and danced to a Dead cover band and gave out a lot of my newly printed non business cards. They had an awesome bonfire and all in all it was nice and it reminded me of my misspent youth, specifically the portion of it I spent living in vaguely communal living situations. Since I haven't got a damn other thing I can think of that's going on right now and is remotely interesting to blog about, I'm going to tell you a story about when I lived on the Tick Ranch.
The Tick Ranch was a big semi farmhouse out in northern Baltimore County and I lived there with my then five year old daughter, six or seven other artists and a vast, varying number of dogs and washing machines. The dogs had a tendency to produce other dogs, you see, and so, surprisingly enough, did the washing machines. They broke down a lot and shortly after one died, someone would get fed up and find another half broken washing machine cheap and haul it home. We put the old ones in the yard and occasionally considered making an art project, or something, out of them. We called it the Tick Ranch because, as in all of rural Maryland, the surrounding woods and fields were teeming with ticks, and all the dogs brought them home to us on a regular basis.
At the party the other night I noticed that the inhabitants of that commune had a nicely organized job board up on the kitchen wall. We never got that organized, which is one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart. Also, as I mentioned to one of the residents on Saturday night, we threw our parties in the middle of the summer, when it was warm and so we always lost all our sheets, since guests would wander off in pairs to the woods with a sheet or two and reappear an hour or so later, happy but sheetless. This is less likely to happen when it's 36 degrees outside. At any rate, the job board looked to me like a good idea since I have never forgotten the morning I came downstairs to find a really horrible doggie mess on the floor in the hallway.
There was no telling which end of a dog it came from, and certainly not which dog. It was large and odoriferous and truly terrible, and I was not the first person to encounter it. I could tell that, because the first person to encounter it had gone to the trouble to make small warning flags out of red paper and toothpicks and stick them in it and also to rope it off with a square of yellow police tape. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with communal living, and particularly the problem of communal living with artists. It was hilarious (if it had happened nowadays, we'd have put it up on Flickr) but, of course, it was still there. It remained there for some time. And that is today's instructive commune tale for you.
The Tick Ranch was a big semi farmhouse out in northern Baltimore County and I lived there with my then five year old daughter, six or seven other artists and a vast, varying number of dogs and washing machines. The dogs had a tendency to produce other dogs, you see, and so, surprisingly enough, did the washing machines. They broke down a lot and shortly after one died, someone would get fed up and find another half broken washing machine cheap and haul it home. We put the old ones in the yard and occasionally considered making an art project, or something, out of them. We called it the Tick Ranch because, as in all of rural Maryland, the surrounding woods and fields were teeming with ticks, and all the dogs brought them home to us on a regular basis.
At the party the other night I noticed that the inhabitants of that commune had a nicely organized job board up on the kitchen wall. We never got that organized, which is one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart. Also, as I mentioned to one of the residents on Saturday night, we threw our parties in the middle of the summer, when it was warm and so we always lost all our sheets, since guests would wander off in pairs to the woods with a sheet or two and reappear an hour or so later, happy but sheetless. This is less likely to happen when it's 36 degrees outside. At any rate, the job board looked to me like a good idea since I have never forgotten the morning I came downstairs to find a really horrible doggie mess on the floor in the hallway.
There was no telling which end of a dog it came from, and certainly not which dog. It was large and odoriferous and truly terrible, and I was not the first person to encounter it. I could tell that, because the first person to encounter it had gone to the trouble to make small warning flags out of red paper and toothpicks and stick them in it and also to rope it off with a square of yellow police tape. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with communal living, and particularly the problem of communal living with artists. It was hilarious (if it had happened nowadays, we'd have put it up on Flickr) but, of course, it was still there. It remained there for some time. And that is today's instructive commune tale for you.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Damn.
A long lost friend just emailed me this photo - holy opium den, batman, that's me on the side there, long hair, fabulous jacket clashing with striped skirt, reflected in the mirror. Me at age 17, when I think I looked quite different, but people keep walking into my office and telling me I look exactly the same. That's absolutely wonderful in one way - do they not see the 50 extra pounds? The wrinkles? The gray hairs? Dude, awesome! - but kind of weirdly disheartening in another. I mean, it's been, uh, more than 20 years. Perhaps I should have changed my hairstyle by now? Although it's good to see my natural haircolor again and to realize that damn, I've just been dying it back to the real thing all this time - before it got darkened by kids and age. It's such a strange feeling to see this, so amazing, so weird - a photo of me I had never seen, floating around all these years. Thanks J! I promise I will send an email soon! And a picture of YOU that I happen to have, bwah ha ha.
Anyway, though, what do you think? Do I look the same? Different? Is that skirt awful or what? Well, it was 1981. Fashion was different then. For comparison purposes, here is a recent (and good, thanks S!) picture of me - same, or different?
Anyway, though, what do you think? Do I look the same? Different? Is that skirt awful or what? Well, it was 1981. Fashion was different then. For comparison purposes, here is a recent (and good, thanks S!) picture of me - same, or different?
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Mirror Mysteries
I am, right now, at this very moment, engaged in that occasional ritual which we at Hangover Headquarters like to refer to as "Cleaning The Bathroom." Yes. Cleaning the bathroom, always an enjoyable treat, particularly this bathroom, where the "baseboards" are actually apparently made of thousands of layers of highly toxic lead paint which constantly chip and flake and drift lazily around, plgaslk;djrfurosmrod. . me think so. Me think hard now. Look, shiny!I'm tougher than lead paint, though: hell, I used to live in East Baltimore, where you die young and alone if you can't adapt to a constant high lead level. So I ignore it and mop it up and, you know, eat something with my unwashed hands later. However, forget the lead paint. The chips of lead paint are incidental to my story, which is this: Someone has been kissing the mirror!
Yes. There were grotty lip smudges all over the bathroom mirror. Now, who could be doing that? I assure you it's not me - my days of mirror kissing are long past. I'm more likely to burn a cross into the mirror than kiss it; some mornings it seems the only sane reaction to the horrible crone in the medicine cabinet. So it's either my son or my daughter who love themselves so, and I'm not sure which is more disturbing. The only question is when to bring it up? I think it would be keen to say brightly (preferably at a formal dinner with a lot of relatives around,) "Hey! Which of you two minions has been kissing the bathroom mirror?" That should go over well - because, GOD, MOM, it wasn't ME! I know it wasn't, darlings. I know that as you are earnestly explaining, the same stranger who snuck into the house, went into the bathroom and broke the trash can (and I loved that trash can. It was shiny, and the lid went up when you pushed the pedal, and now it is no more, because no one in this house has any mechanical ingenuity at all) apparently kissed the mirror while he was in there. Fiend! Heedless bathroom vandalizer! Is there no end to this madness? Oh well. These internet stalkers, what can you do?
No, the picture has nothing to do with the post. Blame it on the lead paint. It's a picture of my friend D's cat and a red ball, and it's up here because it's not getting enough love on Flickr. I think it's a work of goddamn photographic GENIUS, so appreciate it. Appreciate it hard, because it is ART. Yes, yes it is.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Turtle In the Park
The picture and the title kind of say it all, actually. I woke up in a bad mood, because it is kind of getting to be that time of the month when I want to kill, kill, kill and also because I'm feeling overwhelmed, swamped and too busy. I was thinking about all the ten bazillion things I have to do and instead of making me happy, it was making me miserable and tired, so I took hideous Theo to the park for an hour. I was trudging grumpily along trying to achieve pure Zen walking meditation mind and failing spectacularly when along came Turtle, and that's satori right there.
I love box turtles; I have loved them since I was a small child and we used to catch them and put them in elaborate cages made out of cardboard boxes and chickenwire from which they would inevitably have escaped the next morning. Last summer or the summer before, I found one up at Bent Creek who was patiently trying to get up a steep hill into the woods. He kept slipping back down, so I gave him a lift in the direction he was going and he thanked me: the next day there was a box turtle in my vegetable garden, where no turtle had ever been seen before or since. Once too I was scared shitless by a box turtle. I was out hiking on the bike trail in Maryland that runs along the Gunpowder Falls when I heard a tremendous crashing coming through the underbrush at me. I thought it was probably a rabid dog or raccoon or, god knows, some kind of horrible transdimensional creature of the vortex and I was terrified, I mean my heart was thumping and I thought it was probably all over for me. It was a box turtle making his way noisily through the tall weeds.
Yay box turtles and their ability to knock you out of the everyday!
I love box turtles; I have loved them since I was a small child and we used to catch them and put them in elaborate cages made out of cardboard boxes and chickenwire from which they would inevitably have escaped the next morning. Last summer or the summer before, I found one up at Bent Creek who was patiently trying to get up a steep hill into the woods. He kept slipping back down, so I gave him a lift in the direction he was going and he thanked me: the next day there was a box turtle in my vegetable garden, where no turtle had ever been seen before or since. Once too I was scared shitless by a box turtle. I was out hiking on the bike trail in Maryland that runs along the Gunpowder Falls when I heard a tremendous crashing coming through the underbrush at me. I thought it was probably a rabid dog or raccoon or, god knows, some kind of horrible transdimensional creature of the vortex and I was terrified, I mean my heart was thumping and I thought it was probably all over for me. It was a box turtle making his way noisily through the tall weeds.
Yay box turtles and their ability to knock you out of the everyday!
Thursday, July 06, 2006
The Unfairness of Games
I'm addicted again. It is sad but true: the slavering dope fiend side of my brain has yet again emerged triumphant and I'm spending hours and hours lining up those twee little animals and watching them go pop. And by hours, I mean HOURS. All this would be okay, however, since I love my addictive side and I love spending my life making things with a repetitive yet strangely endearing jangly soundtrack go *pop* while my brain slowly turns to goo, except for one problem. My daughter is better at it than I am. It's just so brutally unfair: my kids are always, always better at video games than me, and it makes me miserable. The only games I can beat them on are Tetris and Bookworm, and even I can't play Tetris anymore.
It's not like I'm the kind of parent who discouraged video games or anything. I love computer games. I was right there along with my son blowing away zombies in Doom and working my way through every single Tomb Raider. But my children easily, immediately surpassed me, and the other day, when my daughter tried my new game and got up to level 7 on her first try, I nearly wept. It took me days to get to level 7, and I still can hardly ever do it. It is a sign of my advanced age: we had to make our own video games out of mud and sticks when I was young. Hell, I never even saw Pong until I was about 9 years old and we were on one of those infamous family roadtrips and had stopped at a motel that had it in the lobby. My brother and I were fascinated; my father, not so much. "Goddamn," he said, "Stop putting quarters in that thing! Jesus Christ! That's real money, you know!"
So of course I let my kids play video games until their tongues turned blue and their eyeballs drooled down their faces. My son still does: he's enmeshed in World of Warcraft. I can't wrap my brain around WoW, although I tried: I created a limp green night elf named Celery, but by the time she had wiped out a few harmless boars and some sabertooth tigers (that's one thing I hate about Lara Croft, too: she's always blowing away snow leopards and mountain gorillas and other endangered species, sheesh) that weren't hurting anyone, I had lost interest. The last game I got into was Morrowind and while that was fun for a while, eventually I got tired of walking everywhere. Besides, M, who had already beaten the game, had decided to build himself a house on one island and settle down there with bags of loot, but he got lonely. Like the Sims, the fun is in building and furnishing your dream house, or, well, in Morrowind, your dream hut. Of course, games like Morrowind or WoW or the Sims or even Sim City, (which I used to adore - my best city ever was called Land of the Fat - the secret, by the way, to successful urban planning is plopping down a maximum security prison, a toxic waste dump and a casino just as soon as you possibly can, than sitting back and watching the accolades roll in,) are sort of winnable, unlike Tetris or Bejeweled or Alchemy, or even my youthful delight, Galaxian.
Those old style games are designed for failure: the computer always beats you and you will never, no never, ever actually win. Okay, I have heard that some people won Pac Man and in fact I think my old boyfriend used to win Asteroids a bunch, but all that you get are some lights, a few booping noises and the chance to put in another quarter and start over. There's a Bruce Sterling riff on that from one of his novels; what is it, exactly, in the human mind which would lead us to invent games which cannot be won by a human being? I mean, talk about defeatism: games that just go on and on until the computer finally conquers all. Tetris, for example, is unwinnable. It's like life, or the Bible, or something equally depressing: you just have to keep on going until you die. At least when you finally work your way through Tomb Raider you get to go back to the mansion and jump on the trampoline.
It's not like I'm the kind of parent who discouraged video games or anything. I love computer games. I was right there along with my son blowing away zombies in Doom and working my way through every single Tomb Raider. But my children easily, immediately surpassed me, and the other day, when my daughter tried my new game and got up to level 7 on her first try, I nearly wept. It took me days to get to level 7, and I still can hardly ever do it. It is a sign of my advanced age: we had to make our own video games out of mud and sticks when I was young. Hell, I never even saw Pong until I was about 9 years old and we were on one of those infamous family roadtrips and had stopped at a motel that had it in the lobby. My brother and I were fascinated; my father, not so much. "Goddamn," he said, "Stop putting quarters in that thing! Jesus Christ! That's real money, you know!"
So of course I let my kids play video games until their tongues turned blue and their eyeballs drooled down their faces. My son still does: he's enmeshed in World of Warcraft. I can't wrap my brain around WoW, although I tried: I created a limp green night elf named Celery, but by the time she had wiped out a few harmless boars and some sabertooth tigers (that's one thing I hate about Lara Croft, too: she's always blowing away snow leopards and mountain gorillas and other endangered species, sheesh) that weren't hurting anyone, I had lost interest. The last game I got into was Morrowind and while that was fun for a while, eventually I got tired of walking everywhere. Besides, M, who had already beaten the game, had decided to build himself a house on one island and settle down there with bags of loot, but he got lonely. Like the Sims, the fun is in building and furnishing your dream house, or, well, in Morrowind, your dream hut. Of course, games like Morrowind or WoW or the Sims or even Sim City, (which I used to adore - my best city ever was called Land of the Fat - the secret, by the way, to successful urban planning is plopping down a maximum security prison, a toxic waste dump and a casino just as soon as you possibly can, than sitting back and watching the accolades roll in,) are sort of winnable, unlike Tetris or Bejeweled or Alchemy, or even my youthful delight, Galaxian.
Those old style games are designed for failure: the computer always beats you and you will never, no never, ever actually win. Okay, I have heard that some people won Pac Man and in fact I think my old boyfriend used to win Asteroids a bunch, but all that you get are some lights, a few booping noises and the chance to put in another quarter and start over. There's a Bruce Sterling riff on that from one of his novels; what is it, exactly, in the human mind which would lead us to invent games which cannot be won by a human being? I mean, talk about defeatism: games that just go on and on until the computer finally conquers all. Tetris, for example, is unwinnable. It's like life, or the Bible, or something equally depressing: you just have to keep on going until you die. At least when you finally work your way through Tomb Raider you get to go back to the mansion and jump on the trampoline.
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