Thanksgiving, a Post Post

I forgot the most important moment in the earlier post - the moment when I came home from Earthfare, put my bags on the kitchen table. One bag contained two bottles of Pellegrino fizzy mineral water. That would be the bag that inexplicably exploded about five minutes after I put it down. Yes, the bottle just exploded for no apparent reason, and thank the gods it was in a bag that caught all the broken glass and most of the water. At the time I chalked it up to just one of those weird ass things. But it was a portent! A sign! An omen!

And fuck thanksgiving. I'm done with this particular nightmare.

My two favorite Thanksgiving dishes are creamed onions and rutabagas. I didn't do the rutabagas because I totally ran out of time and the creamed onions? I pellegrino'ed the creamed onions. I have no room in this kitchen and so I pulled them out of the oven and set them on the stove top. On a burner. In a glass bowl. The burner that I then turned on to High, because I twisted the wrong dial.

Exploding creamed onions in a glass bowl are not fun.

I fucked up the gravy.

I burned the rolls.

Dinner was cold.

But the living room looks fantastic. The party never really happening does at least leave the house a bit cleaner (I have so many dishes to wash, I'm developing pre-emptive wrinkled hands) and there's lots of leftover beer (most of the wine was undrinkable.)

Ah. It's over! It's over!

Thanksgiving, Live from the Trenches

So far today:
8:30 woke up hungover. Naturally.
9:30 fielded phone call from mother. Yesterday morning fought with mother over her desire to participate in turkey, lost battle, mother brined turkey overnight. Now mother freaking out over amount of time necessary to cook turkey. Told mother time fine.
10:00 read Joy of Cooking, called mother back, demanded turkey immediately. Made stuffing. Made frozen biscuits for kids.
10:30 brother showed up with turkey in roasting pan. Went with brother to Earthfare, wandered hungover in daze around store, bought a ton of stuff, forgot cheesecloth, nearly lost vitally important list but recovered.
11:30 stuffed turkey, put turkey in oven.
12:00 realized there were no giblets with turkey, called mother again, fought again over giblets, discovered that mother cooked giblets yesterday, got upset, smoked cigarette, called daughter, complained about mother, daughter fighting with boyfriend and upset, thus completing traditional trigenerational female thanksgiving stress trifecta.
12:30 cleaned bathroom. Scrubbed living and dining room floors on hands and knees. Vacuumed hallway. Semi tidied up bedroom. Yelled at son for doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft.
1:30 started cooking again. Peeled & cut up mountain of potatos, got on stove.
And now it's 2:00 here at Hangover Headquarters, and Thanksgiving is imminent. Whooo eee! Back to the turkey mines!
2:14 son uses guest towels for shower, destroys bathroom. Scream at son.

A Hidden Post

This will soon get swallowed by Thanksgiving
Which is good.

It's 1:00 am and I'm cleaning my house and in the process I'm learning some things:

1. I know all the words to Freebird and I sing them completely unironically.

2. It's hard to scrub a concrete Buddha with a toothbrush and not feel a) disrespectful and b) idiotic when you apologize politely.

3. When you sprinkle a rug with white powder, the result is going to be more or less the same as sprinkling a human with white powder: they'll look the same, but blurry. You can vacuum up all the powder, but the underlying thing is still going to be blurry. Possibly forever.

4. Not emailing my cousins was stupid and a failure of nerve. There's a long and sorry story here, but it's really just dumb: I should have invited them for Thanksgiving and fuck the stupid ancient family politics and my own feelings of dumb loserdom for being poor.

5. Your chances of getting washed depend entirely on your random placement within the living room.

Dude. Thanksgiving!

Oh, and before I forget it, these two things:

My son, last night: "Dude Mom, our mice are actually kind of cute." Long pause. "Of course, that doesn't stop us having to bathe in their blood."

My friend who is also incidentally a shrink, tonight: "You are the weirdest mixture - you're very logical, but you have all this strange knowledge and bits of information in your head, which takes you off on these tangents that make sense at the time but then, they just go. . . I don't know where. And over all of it is a heavy cloak of romanticism."

5.

Dog Walking Fashionista

The good people at Project Runway have been bugging me to reveal my dog walking fashion secrets. It's not surprising, really - I look so amazing at 7:00 am when I set out into the cold with the dogs. So here, for the first time ever, I will dissect my dogwalking wardrobe for the good of humanity.

The key ingredient is a pair of. . overalls. And not just any overalls. In the summer, I wear denim overalls that are not only a little too short but with (this is vital) a couple of missing buttons on the side, so that I achieve that really, seriously Appalachian local look. Usually, these overalls are combined with a giant plaid flannel shirt. Or two.

In the winter, I wear an outfit that some might say is a little too young for me. To them I say, phooey! If it's good enough for all the best dressed 6 month olds then it's good enough for me. In short, black fleece overalls. Baggy black fleece overalls. Baggy black fleece overalls that lack only a TV screen over the tummy to make the wearer look exactly like a goth teletubby. Or possibly Mindy. The first time I ever wore them (the only time I ever wore them to do anything besides walk dogs) my brother fell into hysterics. "Mindy!" he cried, "Mindy, where's Mork?" The overalls get even baggier around the middle if you wear them, as I did this morning, over gnome pajamas. The combination of the pajamas, the overalls and the many plastic bags in my pockets all work to give me that special diaper butt toddler look that is so hard to achieve for most adults. But who can tell? Because over all this must go a giant black sweater and, given weather like this morning, a 30 year old Army coat that has never been washed, a fur hat and mismatched mittens. And, oh yes, mismatched socks and white sneakers with shiny stripes.

I look special. Proud. As special and proud as anyone can be who is holding a bag of shit and being dragged down the street by two dogs. That's pretty damn special. And yes, I know, this post is useless without pictures. But there are no pictures, and if the gods are kind, there will never be pictures. Never, ever, ever.

The Marathon Begins

Thanksgiving is in three days. Am I ready? No. Oh, no, I am so far from ready that it might as well be July around here. I always think of Thanksgiving dinner as running a marathon: it's rewarding and kind of fun, but a helluva lot of work for all that. It's worse nowadays because my mother - yeah, that's my mother, as in Mrs. Clean. The Dowager Empress. The woman who makes Martha Stewart look like the sorry slacker trash she really is - has Thanksgiving at my house these days. We have forced this issue despite her well known distaste for my house since the year she decided to be killingly efficient and make Thanksgiving dinner ahead of time. Like, a week ahead of time and possibly more: I still can't believe we lived through that one. She gets a bit obsessive, you see, and wants to get things done. Efficiently. And granted it's a pain to make sausage stuffing and turkey on Thanksgiving day, but doing it 10 days ahead and reheating is, uh, not the ideal solution.

The other problem with my mother's house is that she has far, far too much stemware and she believes that everyone should have an appropriate glass (let's not even mention the silver, god) at all times. So, for each person that's a cocktail glass, a water goblet, a red wine glass, a white wine glass and a coffee cup and saucer. Possibly more - remember that we are, after all, Irish. None of these things go into the dishwasher, and neither does the thrice benighted silver - shrimp fork, salad fork, dinner fork, dessert fork, teaspoon, tablespoon, butter knife and assorted serving pieces, all with attractive curlicues and my grandmother's initials. After the year I was there until 2:30 washing and drying crystal, I put my foot down.

So I do it now. And mostly, I like it, but this year for whatever reason I'm kind of behind the eight ball. To put it mildly, since, given the assorted characters who live here plus one puppy who is into everything (everything includes the trash, goddamn it,) my house looks like it should be condemned by the health department and burned to the ground for the good of the community. And it all has to be spotless by Thursday. Even though I have to work every day.

Keep your fingers crossed. It will happen. It always does, through some miracle or other. And you're still invited and I guarantee the food will be delicious and, you never know, I may even live blog the preparation proceedings - good times, good times! Dinner's at 4-ish. The heavy drinking, leftover & pie eating begins around 6-ish. It's an open house - see you here!

Red Sonja!

In a moment of total madness this afternoon, I actually rented Red Sonja. M said, horrified, "You actually went in the store and rented that? You'll never be able to go in there again." It is true; I had forgotten the true awfulness of Red Sonja, although one must give it credit for being a fairly awesome metal hat movie. The characters pretty much all have way over the top metal hats, except for the Asian kung fu super master ninja guy, who has what appears to be a large hookah and small dog assembly on his head. And then Red Sonja herself sports hardly any headgear, but with that mullet, who needs a hat? It was hilarious. I laughed until I cried, several times: the utterly, utterly diabolical acting, the dismal effects, the ruthlessly atrocious script and the endless clanging sword battles (I don't think you're supposed to aim for the other guy's sword just to make a better clanking noise, really) make for a good time, I swear. The kids were fairly good sports about it, although when they found out that yes, I actually went to see it at the movie theatre when it came out (it is true. Of course I went with a bunch of people and we were all heavily medicated.) they started speaking softly to me in words of one syllable.

The end of it got me thinking, though. A friend of mine on a forum recently said that she has always wanted to walk away from an explosion in slow motion, putting on her sunglasses and I thought that was brilliant. I'll go one better - I want to run out through a collapsing castle of doom, leaping over lava pits and dodging boulders. I wonder if, when my arch nemesis finally appears and all my evil plans are thwarted, this house will slowly collapse in large yet surprisingly light hunks of masonry? It is obligatory, after all. Meanwhile, I had better get around to stopping up that totally obvious secret passage into the throne room that my nemesis can get through in about 3 and a half minutes.

And if it actually does snow tonight? I am SO going back over to the video store and getting BOTH Conan movies.

Utterly Pathetic

Okay, I've spent waaaaaaaaaay too much time today doing my part for the internet: clicking away brainlessly, voting on the funniest picture, the cutest picture and on the prettiest picture. Somebody, after all, has to make the tough choices and it might as well be me. The prettiest is the hardest one: both choices are usually pretty goddamn horrific - having looked at the actual top winners, I'm just clicking on anything that a) doesn't have a waterfall and b) was not created by an AdobeTM product. The cutest picture contest currently only seems to have about six images to choose from, approximately three of which are actually cute, so it's fairly simple. And the funniest? Well, that's your source for seriously dumb shit; it's entertaining. If you like dumb shit, that is, and hell, who doesn't?

I have done absolutely nothing today; it's just wrong and evil but somehow I feel so relaxed. Some days you just have to surf the web, halfheartedly rake a few leaves, go back to the web, eat too much and stare into space and today I have done all those things superlatively well. It's good to be good at something and I am really good at doing nothing. Yay me.

Printer Vigil

I'm at work. Why am I at work after 6:00 pm on a Friday night when I've been here since 8:30 this morning? Because I am sitting here with the printer like it's my sick friend, except maybe I mean my sick arch enemy, for I am not feeling particularly sympathetic or kind towards the printer. It's true that I'm asking it to do a lot - some 125 sheets of card stock - but it's done that before without freaking out like this. And this has to be done before tomorrow, and it shouldn't have taken this long, and, well, you can guess the rest.

Argh. It strikes me though, that sitting late with the printer, keeping vigil, has become some kind of weird rite of passage in our culture, kind of like a knight kneeling on the cold, cold stone all night (usually authors say "cold, HARD, stone" but this has always bothered me because, come on, obviously the stone is hard. I work at a rock museum and you can take it from me: 99% of the time stone is hard, and even when it's kind of soft, like gypsum or talc, it's still hard if you're kneeling on it. You should say cold, HARD mud, or cold, HARD feathers, but not stone.) Or maybe not. It's almost done! OMG! I think I might be able to leave this place tonight after all! Bye!

Goddamnit, Get Off My Lawn 'Cause I Can't See You Anyway

It's utterly hopeless for me to pretend to be a young hipster anymore. No, it's all over, I am that pathetic thing: an aging, graying hipster with youth pretensions. Tonight I went after work to meet a friend at a nearby (had to be nearby; it's horrible out) dimly lit hipster bar and, since she was late (it's horrible out, which is the international signal for Hey, Assholes! Drive Around In Circles! Day) I tried to read the paper whilst nonchalantly sipping my beer and smoking. It's tough to look hip when you're holding a newspaper as far away from you as humanly possible and angling it in a sort of hopeless, doomed attempt to catch some ray of nonexistent light. I mean, I will never know what my horoscope said, people.

Fortunately, the good people at the daily Asheville paper have addressed this issue with their recent redesign of Take Five, their weekend section. They've designed it either for the very old or the very young: it's unclear which, but the shrieking 16 point type, lots of (bad) pictures, multiple exclamation points, words of one syllable and random locals spouting paragraphs about subjects they know nothing about will clearly be a big draw to both the preschool and the senile demographics. I kid because I love, y'all - but really, what were you thinking? I grant you that the old Take Five was not going to win any prizes, but, uh, baby? Bathwater? This new thing is heinous. Actually, while I have the soapbox: please, please stop trying to be hip, oh Citizen-Times. It becomes you not. You are a daily newspaper, the very definition of an eminence grise; a paper of record, a (okay, I'm exaggerating here) journalistic source. Attempting to become a really horrible free weekly is beneath you. And if you must be a free weekly, could you at least include some comics and some Ann Landers? I miss me some Mary Worth.

It even uses outdated slang terms, and you know it's outdated when I think it's outdated, because I am the Woman Who is Officially Too Old To Keep It Gangsta, as conveyed by my children. Hell, I'm forbidden under pain of death or at least long drawn out sighs to even utter the words "True Dat" or, god forbid, "What up, mah peeps?" which has, you know, put a serious crimp in my conversational style. You've never seen anything in this world until you've seen 14 year olds in a carpool react to a mother saying "YO! Whuzzup, ma peeps? The shizznit iz in the hizzouse now, true dat!" I recommend it highly.

Thanksgiving, Anyone?

Okay, it's that time again, time once again for Felicity's Thanksgiving Dinner for Waifs, Orphans and Strays and I am now posing this as an open question, an open thread, if you will:

Does anyone want to come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner this year?

Because if you do, comment below or email me and you're invited. I'm beginning to get an uneasy feeling that I have crossed a threshold where none of my friends are waifs, orphans or strays anymore (I suppose it had to happen) and Thanksgiving is starting to look like it's just going to be my family. That would be okay, of course but REALLY I want YOU PEOPLE to come over for dinner! YES! YES I DO! We will have an incredible traditional Thanksgiving meal: I come over all conservative when the holidays roll around and insist on having exactly the same meal year after year - with vegetarian & vegan options, of course. And we will drink lots of red wine. And sit by the fireplace.

So seriously, let me know.

Me and Andy Goldsworthy

We watched an amazing documentary tonight: Rivers and Tides, a film about the British artist Andy Goldsworthy. His work is so beautiful, I can’t stand it. I sat there and watched this incredible film about this intense artist who creates this astonishing, tremendous work that’s almost all completely ephemeral in nature and I thought well, hell, what does Andy Goldsworthy have that I don’t? Besides, you know, talent. But am I not also an Artist? By god I am, and I even have a diploma from the College of Charleston somewhere in the back of the coat closet (unless the cat peed on it, which is eminently possible) saying that I am. So I have come up with a list comparing me to Andy Goldsworthy (also, due to poor HTML or blogger or something, I have come up with a lot of weird white space, but them's the breaks and actually, you know, kind of indicative of my art, which relies heavily on it's, uh, spontaneous, childlike and whimsical qualities):

Andy Goldsworth	Me
Has many books both by and about him	Has read many books
Creates heart stoppingly beautiful objects	Creates heart stoppingly peculiar objects, such as my hats, also just plain heart stopping objects like my patented and amazing post gallery opening macaroni & cheese, which uses all the cheese cubes left over from any average opening and can stop up most healthy arteries in record time.
Creates objects from natural materials that become more beautiful as they fall apart	Creates objects from mostly fake materials that fall apart, period.
Creates objects that are held together with amazing craftsmanship	Creates objects that fall apart without ever exhibiting one whole hell of a lot of craftsmanship
Uses natural materials, such as thorns, to hold sculptures together	Uses hot glue and lots of it to hold things together, mostly unsuccessfully.
Has commissions from major international art centers.	Has sold a couple of paintings out of bars.
Lives in beautiful home in Scotland.	Lives in messy home in North Carolina.
Has German film makers following him about.	Has springer spaniel puppy with printer ink cartridge in mouth following her about.

So you see, we are very similar, Andy Goldsworthy and I. And when the dog is done making the beautiful documentary film, the world will see the truth.

Seriously though, it’s an amazing, amazing film and well worth seeking out. They have it at Orbits; that’s where I got it. Watch it. Be amazed. Be inspired.

The Cops Just Came By

So this cop just appeared at our door. He wanted to know who was sitting in the passenger seat of my car an hour and a half ago, at the Arby's on Patton and Florida. We called A's boyfriend J to the door, since he was the culprit. Turns out that he flipped off the Arby's, which he has a grudge against, and the cop, who was sitting inside the Arbys at the time thought that HE was being flipped off, so he spent the last hour and a half running my tags and tracking us down.

Don't Asheville cops have anything better to do? Is there no crime in this city? I mean, since when did flipping off a fast food joint become a crime? I grant you that it was a tacky and somewhat unpleasant thing to do (please note that I don't endorse this use of the middle finger in most circumstances) but criminal? Worthy of police notice? Weird and unsettling.

Shopping

Pink Feather Xmas Tree via phone
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Yesterday, as is so often the case, I was somewhat hungover. The shot of Jamesons with hot tea and lemon and honey, kindly made up by the nice server at the New French bar, would have been okay on its own but then, you know, I just had to have a bunch of beers too. Ah well. It was one of those slight disconnect from reality drowsy hangovers and so, I went shopping.

I went to the library to return my woefully overdue books and I went to Downtown Books and News & traded in a big bag of paperbacks for a slightly smaller bag of paperbacks (including a new copy of The Magus, a book that somehow forever changed my life or at least my brain when I first read it and which I have to always be getting new copies of since I keep giving mine away.) Then I went on to Ross Dress for Less, where I happily tried on many, many pieces of clothing, including a bright and multistriped snowflake sweater (bad), a pair of green jeans (worse) and a pair of plaid slacks (truly hideous.) Christmas has begun at Ross Dress for Less and there were lots of people there opining about the beauty of faux blown glass santas and plates with reindeer, including one lady who was explaining it on her cel phone "It's just the cutest thing. It has a picture on it of a dog, see, and it says, "Don't forget the dog!" What? No, honey, it has a picture of a DAWG, see, and it says, DON'T FORGET THE DOG! Uh huh."

I went from there briefly to Office Max for printer toner and then to Michael's Crafts, which is fully and completely decked out for the holidays. I love Michael's. It has that unique Michael's smell, that weird mixture of potpourri and evergreen and faint disinfectant, and all those weird Michael's things like knitting machines and large sponges cut in the shape of snowflakes, and it's always crowded and cramped full with just plain strange shit. Okay, I confess: I went to Michael's to buy some highly respectable art supplies but what I secretly wanted was a flag with a turkey on it. I'm turning into one of those middle aged women who has seasonal flags hanging outside her house and who trots out a holiday themed vest or sweater at every occasion. It is true. My lack of taste has lost its ironic, hipster edge and become just straightforward lack of taste, yet somehow this bothers me not at all. However, if you do ever see me in a Halloween vest, you can shoot me, it's okay. Alas, turkey time is past; there is no room for turkeys and pilgrims and corn at Michael's now - it's all Santa and snowmen.

And artificial Christmas trees of startling hideosity, such as this one, which I totally covet, but it was like $40 which is a little more than I could quite wrap my head around. Is it not lovely? Does it not sum up the true spirit of Christmas? This tree ROCKS.

Wigging Out

On Wednesday night, I wigged out. I was sick and running a fever and generally orbiting the third ring of Saturn and thus: wigout. I started getting sick on Tuesday - actually, at 2:00 on Tuesday, when I went from feeling fine to feeling like death on a popsicle stick with the suddenness of a snapped finger. Tuesday night, feeling bizarre, I went to the Drinking Liberally election night party and knocked back a bunch of beers which affected me not at all: I felt gruesome and peculiar, like my head was the size of a particularly tacky mylar helium birthday balloon that was 4 feet above my body, and the beer was utterly nonconsequential. So I went to work on Wednesday, still with my head floating horribly above me, and people started saying, "You look awful. You should go home, and please don't breathe near us."

I went home. I went home at 3:00 and planned to sleep a bit, get up at 6:30 and make dinner. When I woke up at 8:30 to find the house empty, dark and messy, and my daughter calling on the phone to tell me she had fed my son fast food and cautiously enquiring if she could have the car for the rest of the evening, I lost it. I started screaming at both my children. I mean I hollered. I mean I yelled like there was no tomorrow and I said all kind of things, including that I was taking the car and leaving them both forever and they should consider themselves divorced: this was it, Mom was gone.

After they had hung up a bit startled, I started weeping, which I never do, and suddenly I realized that noone loved me and the smartest thing I could do was to take my pillow and blanket and go sleep on the floor of my office. This is the flu: when you think that if you just take your pillow and blanket to work everything will be fine. This is not coherent thought. My children came carefully home when I was in the throes of this and my son walked gently into my room.

"Mom?" he said, "Are you okay?"
"No!" I sobbed, "No, I'm not okay! I'm sick and alone and hungry and noone loves me! Noone will ever love me! I am alone!"
"Shut UP YOU EMO FREAK!" said my son (the joy of my life, this kid) and damned if it didn't work like a charm.
"Don't you DARE call me EMO!" I shrieked. "I was EMO before there was a NAME for EMO!" Which comment woke even me up into laughter.
"You," said my son, "Are acting like a total emo freak."
"Shut UP." I said, but happily now, "I can't help being emo if noone loves me and I'm sick and alone."
"Oh Mom," he said, "Cut that shit OUT."
And I felt better, got up and had some soup, and I've been getting better, bit by bit, ever since.

I Cannot Resist

Billy Idol has a Christmas album. Be still, my heart - or stop beating faster at the apparent imminent apocalypse, anyway. This is all via Metafilter, by the way, and I was going to just email it to my brother with a snarky note, but then I actually watched listened to (couldn't . . .quite. . watch . . it. . too . . many. . snowflakes. . ) the Billy Idol version of White Christmas and it was so, uh, indescribable that I had to share it with all of y'all. Wow. Words fail me. And you know, Billy Idol is one of those people who I have always had a secret crush on, even though I know that the purer people and those with good musical taste scorn him, and like I also have a crush on Billy Bragg, who is like the anti-Billy Idol, so I realize that having crushes on both of them simultaneously could maybe make the universe explode, but still. Ever since I was a teenager and first saw the video of White Wedding, I can't help it, I've been subject to mild Billy Idol crush flareups.

But those snowflakes. My god, those snowflakes. They may have put a quiet blanket of white death on my Billy Idol crush forever.

I Have A Cold

I am sniffling and miserable and that is why there have been no posts lately. Also, if you didn't hear about it elsewhere, we mostly won the election. Me, I was too involved in the process of getting ill to enjoy the victory party much, but apparently the entire government is going to get better now. And Donald Rumsfeld resigned, which is awesome, and I seriously hope he is off somewhere in outer darkness weeping and gnashing his teeth. So, to sum up: Yay politics - clearly my year of attending Drinking Liberally has had a beneficial effect on the whole country and Boo colds - they're closing schools and churches and stuff all over this area because everyone has the flu, but I'm at work, moaning now and then.

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 Painting Is Done

tabletop for new french bar two
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

This is a painting/collage I did for the New French Bar in downtown Asheville. Soon, it will join the rest of their collection of local art - as a tabletop, having beer spilled on it, cigarettes ground out on it, you know: the appropriate treatment for art. ;-) I've been a museum person for long enough where this thought both horrifies and amuses me. I get tired of people being all precious about art. You make it, you use it, it goes away - some things need a lifespan.

Actually I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out - it's a thoroughly new medium for me. Acrylic on wood and then collaged with images from the internet & from me, printed on transparency. There are a couple of my own photos, normal prints, also in there. I'm also really glad they asked me to do it, since it got me working again. It had been ages since I sat down and made a painting. Now I'm all fired up again and want to go get some Fredrix of Hollywood canvases (I hate making stretchers and then stretching canvas - hate it, hate it, hate it) and more ink for the printer and more transparencies (which are expensive as FUCK, why can't I have a cheap hobby like leaf collecting or something?) and make more, more, more!

The Hangover Journal Bus Project: Asheville Buses SUCK

I rode the bus again today. As you may or may not know, my daughter's car went belly up, died, was nailed to the perch and is currently providing charming condo space to varmints in my front yard. Therefore, for over a month now we have been a four person family with one car. The strain is beginning to show because the buses SUCK. Yes, they suck. I'm sorry, Brainshrub, but they SUCK donkey balls in hell.

My daughter ends up getting the car most of the time, because she works way the hell out Hendersonville Road and public transportation out to South Asheville and beyond is a sad, sick joke. The bus goes two or three times a DAY (yeah, a DAY, not an HOUR) and it does not stop between the Wal Mart and the Airport, a distance of 12 or so miles. Somewhere in the middle of those miles is where my daughter works. Note that this is still theoretically within Asheville city limits. She has found that the individual drivers are usually pretty nice about letting her out, although the people on the phone at the Asheville transit authority say that they're not allowed to, and if you need to get anywhere within those 12 miles you're just fucked, sorry. And then, once you've persuaded the driver to let you off somewhere, you still face walking down Hendersonville Road, which seems to have been specifically designed to discourage pedestrians. Or possibly it was designed by crows looking for human roadkill - something like that. At any rate it was taking A 3 to 4 hours to get to work via public transport, and then a taxi back home costs $30 (if you're not in Asheville, you may think that buses run all the time! Ha ha! You are so naive! The Asheville buses, my friend, just this year started running past 6:00 pm at all and now they quit at 10:00 pm, although in actual fact that really means 9:00 pm) so A gets the car most of the time. I, in turn, am taking the bus, because after all I work downtown, which is very close to West Asheville, and what the hell, I said. How bad could it be? Pretty damn bad.

M has been taking the buses for months now, because I have always felt that a teenager who can get himself around town is a happy teenager, and, more to the point, has a happy mother who doesn't have to be chauffering him on all his dubious teenage errands 24/7. M has complained bitterly about the buses, but I mostly ignored him, since M is 14 and complains bitterly about many things. Until lately, when I myself have started taking the buses and have discovered that they do, in fact, as I may have mentioned in the first paragraph, SUCK.

Why do the buses suck?

1. They are routinely late; that is, when they show up at all. The 9 bus I rode today was 35 minutes late - I stood out in the cold for 45 minutes tonight, waiting for the bus. Last Friday, after waiting for 40 minutes, I gave up and went to the bar and got a ride home from a friend.
2. They hardly ever run anyway. The buses that run between downtown and West Asheville run once an hour. Once. An. Hour.
3. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, they simply do not post. On Wednesday, I had to go pick M up at the bus station, since the 6:30 bus was just not going to happen. Tough shit, people. Wait another hour.
4. The people on the buses are scary. And I say that as a long time denizen of inner city Baltimore who has ridden buses and trains all over the east coast, through all of New York and Baltimore and DC and so on and so forth, not a naive young thing fresh from the suburbs but a woman who has routinely been lulled to sleep by the comforting roar of urban gunfire. Yet even to me, the people on the Asheville buses are actively frightening. Last week I ended up getting off the bus two stops early and hoofing it halfway up the hill because I really thought there might be a crack whore war and I was standing right between the two of them. Also, I had heard all the details I could take about Crack Whore A's big fight, subsequent months in the hospital, husband in jail and Mexican pimp.
5. A corollary to 5: the people on the buses are so damn depressing I can't stand it, and the advertising on the buses, which is pitched to the depressing scary people (i.e.: Sell Your Plasma Here!) is also deeply, deeply saddening and wrong. The class system in this country is wrong. The educational system is broken. And nowhere, nowhere, my friends, is that more evident than on the buses.
6. The bus that routinely goes to West Asheville, the #9, is tiny. It's the short bus, but it's packed full of people. It's packed full of people because a lot of people actually live in West Asheville, which you would think the transit authority would have noticed by now, but alas, not so.
7. A corollary to 6: Not everyone who is waiting for the bus can fit onto the tiny bus, so some people must wait for the next bus. An hour later.
8. If you are one of the lucky and or rude ones and have managed to squeeze yourself onto the tiny bus, then your trials are not over. The driver goes like a bat out of hell and the bus heels way over to the side on the turns and the rims of the tires scrape on the roadbed making sparks and frightening noises and you think you're going to die. I have never seen Clingman Avenue flash by so fast as when I'm on that bus - and I have driven it just about every single frickin' day for five and a half years. Some time soon that driver is going to kill a whole lot of people.
9. You never know where the driver is going to stop. It's totally fucking random. You push the stop requested thing or pull the little wire and he will stop. . .eventually. When he feels like it. When a sufficient number of bus stop signs have flashed by. Whatever. Walk, you stupid bus riding peon.
10. The bus maps and schedules are indecipherable, which doesn't really matter, which is why I put it last, since none of the drivers obey them anyway.

So fuck the Asheville buses. I am sorry to report that they suck most horrendously and you know, as a good little liberal type person, I went into this really wanting to like them, but I can't, because (did I say this already?) they SUCK.

Alpha Dog

Puppy is the alpha dog now. We pretend his name is Django, but he doesn't know it and we don't call him that. We call him Puppy, because this is a household of four fairly bright, fairly creative, extremely verbal types. . . who call their puppy Puppy. I realized that he had become the alpha dog today, when Theo stood back gloomily and let Puppy have his pick of the doggy dinners. For a while there, Theo was in charge of which dog ate out of which bowl; this was a time in which Theo grew fat. Now, though, Theo hangs his head and lets Puppy have the first go at both bowls.

My first emotion was to feel sad for Theo, but then I realized: Theo doesn't want to be the alpha dog. I empathize strongly with that, because I'm not alpha either. I know I'm not alpha because I went to one of those PR meet n' greet thingies this afternoon with some of the WNC tourism movers and shakers. I used to dread these thingies and not take them seriously but nowadays I have decided that my ass depends on networking like a motherfucker. So I am networking, which isn't really too hard, because at this point I've actually known most of these people for years (and by know I mean seen at a bunch of cardboard chicken luncheons and smiled and exchanged business cards with) and they're all really pretty nice and so what the hell? I'm going to get a new boss sometime soon and if s/he isn't to my liking, I'll be back out there with the resumes. This is how I know I'm not an alpha: I am not applying to be my own boss, and several people I saw this afternoon who hadn't seen me since my year's hiatus from the tourism scene said, on hearing about my place of employment, "Oh, did you take the director's job?"

No. No, I didn't, and I don't want it, and frankly I don't want to be in charge of anything at all, really. If I was in charge at a real job I couldn't fiddle around with photoshop or do elaborate Excel to Word mail merge letters, which, take it from me, is the absolute best thing to do when you're hopelessly hungover at the office, which might have happened to you the day after Halloween. I know that this state often happens to people the day after Halloween, because some people are incapable of staying quietly home on Halloween and instead must go off to the bars to see the costumed masses and in the process drink entirely too much beer and stay up until quarter to two in the morning, which is a really bad idea on a Tuesday night.

That is why some people are not out at Drinking Liberally but instead are quietly at home on this Thursday night, like the actual dedicated and good employees and homebodies and mothers and carer for alpha Springer Spaniel puppies that they, in fact, are, despite their occasional resemblance to wild drunken revelers. But you see, if you are an alpha dog, you can't ever shed those responsible moments and act like a wild drunken reveler but instead must be sober and responsible at all times: among other, more pressing reasons, you'll be the first one called when the alarm goes off for no apparent reason at 2 in the morning, and if you'd been revelling, that could get ugly. So fuck being alpha. I can take being second at the food bowl if it also means that I get to be second or third when the shit hits the fan.

Alone With a Bowl of Candy

me halloween 06
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

So here I am, in my default Halloween blue wig, just me and a bowl of candy. Fortunately, I am currently immune to candy, since I gave in to temptation at work and now my teeth hurt and I feel a little ill. I keep watching the clock and wondering if I should go out and then listening to the little voice of sanity in my head, squeaking from under the sugar high. The little voice says, "You have barely recovered from the hangovers of the weekend! You do not need to go out drinking on a Tuesday night even if it is Halloween! Besides, you don't have any money!"

I must listen to this voice. Hell, I should have it recorded on a loudspeaker (maybe like M has done on his cel phone - whenever he gets a text message his own voice says, really loud and dripping with teen irony, "WOW! Hey, I got a text message! Gee!") and make it play a small recording of sober goodness to me all day long, every day. God knows that should certainly make me even more interested in beer than I usually am -

In other news, I finished the painting I was doing for the New French bar and I will attempt to photograph it tomorrow before work. It's very shiny & thus hard as hell to capture. I had not one, not two, but THREE hangovers last weekend, which is some kind of crazed record, but I'm better now. The party turned out to be a huge success with tons of people showing up. In fact, it was such a success that the puppy got sick on Monday from all the goodies he ate late Saturday and then all day Sunday while I lay there and watched episode after episode of Lost while resolutely ignoring the dishes, the mess and the dogs. A good time was, I think, had by all, or almost all. I haven't finished cleaning up yet anyway and a three or more day cleanup usually means a good party.

And now it's Halloween and I'm all partied out. Ah well, I think I've done enough Halloween over the years - it's somebody else's turn this year. Although. . .

A Quick Note

This is just a quick note to say that I am having a bunch of people over for dinner tomorrow night, so if you're in the area and hungry, come over around 6:30. Or later, because I usually ask people to come over about an hour or two before I actually feed them, since hunger is the best spice and tends to disguise any heinous cooking mistakes the chef de nuit (that's french for me) might have made.

This was a good idea about 5 days ago when I first conceived it and it's still a good idea but going out to Broadways tonight and getting all drunk up and taking pictures of J playing pool (really well) was probably not such a good one, preparation wise. But oh well, what the hell, so forth and so on. Come on over tomorrow night. I'm making pasta.

On Being A Celebrity

So I go into work on Wednesday morning (just for the record, for once it is not my own lameness that causes this blogging lag. No, just this one time, it is the fault of blogspot/blogger. I could at this point insert some undeserved vitriol towards them since they were down much of yesterday or I could say, which I will, thank the gods they exist, and honey, this is FREE, and so anyway. . . back to our regularly scheduled programming.) and I'm a celebrity. My bosses watched CNN, my friends watched CNN, friends I haven't even spoken with for three years watched CNN and a coworker who didn't even know I was going to be on grabbed me to tell me she saw me on CNN. Yes. I am famous now and apparently people on DailyKos were slamming us all for not having team spirit and supporting Heath Shuler unconditionally, for which I say to them, fuck off. Heath Shuler is anti-choice and anti gay marriage and for those two things alone I will be GOD FOREVER DAMNED if I support him unconditionally. I'm supporting him because he is, a) the lesser of two evils and b) because he is not Charles "Darth Vader" Taylor and c) because he is pro universal health care and pro union and d) because he is earnest and honest and trying very hard and e) because his campaign staff is doing this for love and not for money and f) because he named his kids cute names and f) because he is, yes, extremely cute. And also because I am a dead yellow dog Democrat, for better or for worse, or until we finally get a third and fourth and fifth party in this country who will actually represent my own personal political wishes, which are not aligned with the Demopublicans at all but instead favor accountability and the crushing of the corporatocracy and the question, what can governments do for their citizens, to wit, health care and time off and limits on the credit card companies and food for the children and the artists. God damn it.

I watched Iraq for Sale tonight and while I can't really recommend it wholeheartedly in the spirit, say, in which I would wholeheartedly recommend Mars Attacks , still, if you want to see something utterly depressing and sobering, I recommend it. The gist of it all is that there are far too many private contractors in Iraq, making horrifying bazillions of tax dollars doing things that we shouldn't be allowing them to do. This is not really a huge surprise to anyone who is even slightly politidcally aware, but it does bring it all together in a chillingly thorough way, plus a lot of very sad and depressing interviews with families of people who went over to Iraq apparently naively expecting that these companies wouldn't send them into the line of fire which is, of course, exactly what happened and then these people died. I will say that if you take a job with Halliburton and they send you to Iraq you are really kind of staggeringly innocent if you think you're not going to get shot at, but still, in the larger sense, the growth of "private contractors" in this country from the truly horrifying like the interrogators at Abu Ghraib to the small and sad like any given clerical employee at your favorite telecom is a large and terrible evil worthy of record and eradication.

And now I must go and do the dishes because I seem to have been talked into a written private type contract with my son whose dish night it is supposed to be, in which I will do his dishes tonight and then I get to take actual pictures of him for 10 days, except I'm not allowed, of course, to blog them. Hmmmmmm. Perhaps it is unwise to sign contracts when you get home from Drinking Liberally.

Malevolent Deities and TV

You know that last post? The one where I’m all happy and shit and say I’ve been replaced by a joyous pod person of loving grace? That’s just the sort of drooling idiocy that you’d expect from someone who momentarily forgot that this earth is a vale of struggle and thorns and the gods are armed malevolent beings with macabre senses of humor. In other words, my car broke down and the Saturn people have no shame at all about charging a hundred bucks for a radiator cap. Such is life: we’re all doomed and the best you can get is a gallows laugh on the way down. Or not. Actually I’m still pretty cheerful – significantly poorer, with no prospects for being able to heat the house this winter, but cheerful. Relatively, anyway.

REMINDER! I am going to be on NATIONAL TELEVISION TONIGHT, as part of a documentary on CNN this very evening at 8:00 pm. Sources say my part is towards the end, so if you don’t tune in until 8:30 you might still see me. Or you might not. If not, can you live with the guilt? Hee hee. My brother said, “Aren’t you going to tape it?” and I said, “Of course not, I don’t even have a TV, remember?” Which is true – all I have is a DVD player with a screen. I mean, I could turn it into a TV with the application of $15 or so a month but I have these moral qualms about paying actual cash money to invite the media demons into your house to corrupt your children’s brains. Also, TV makes me jittery and I don’t have enough of an attention span to actually watch it. So my brother said, “Oh, I see. There are two kinds of people – those who are ON TV and those who WATCH it and you’re going to be the first kind, huh?” These words, believe it or not, were just slightly tinged with sarcasm and irony but I chose to take them literally and actually they made me feel like a photographer from People Magazine might appear behind the butterfly bush in my backyard at any moment, which is a really good feeling unless, of course, you happen to be wearing your red plaid fleece baggy pants.

Perfect Fall Day

It was an uncannily perfectly beautiful day and so I went hiking with A & J and both the dogs. It was great and I hereby command that you, whoever you are, must go hiking out at Bent Creek immediately, because you just will not believe how totally beautiful it is. Actually, it's been a pretty awesome weekend here at Hangover Headquarters - yesterday I actually worked on a painting and while it's not done, just having worked on it feels pretty damn great. There are omens and portents abounding, and they're all good - yesterday I walked outside and looked up only to see a red tailed hawk about 6 feet above my head. I could see his whole belly as he swooped by me, chased by 3 angry crows. My friend J says this is a good omen, and since he was utterly dismissive of the jabbering crows, I tend to agree with her. Then today I got a ladybug on my hand just as I reached the highest point of the trail. These are all good omens, happy portents, and so I think the words ominous and portentous must be reclaimed for luck.

Things are actually wonderful lately and it's beginning to unnerve me a little. I'm happy; I like my job; my kids are fine;(sure, M is fucking up at school wildly, but for whatever reason I am not stressing about it. Probably I should be, but I'm not.) the puppy is almost housetrained; my mom's health is only at about low yellow alert & anyway my brother is sort of living there, which takes a lot of the weight off my shoulders and all in all, y'all? I am genuinely cheerful every day. I am feeling alert and creative and beautiful and all kind of good things and to top it off, I'm managing to lose weight and save money. In other words, I seem to have been replaced by a pod person.

I can't thank the aliens enough. This pod person is fabulous. I think I like her and I definitely intend to keep her.

Collies, Springers and Shepherds

the wily stalk
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I've just been out watching Django & Theo play in the sock strewn backyard. I found my sneaker out there yesterday morning, which prompted me to give a lecture on logic to the dogs. "You want me to take you for a walk," I said furiously, "so much that you get excited whenever I put my sneakers on, but then you steal one of my sneakers and take it out to the yard to chew on. Is that logical? Does that make any sense? See, now we can't go for a walk and it's all your fault." They looked suitably chastened but I'm not sure the message got through, somehow.

Theo, as you know, is a mostly Collie dog from Madison County. He was raised by a mostly German Shepherd from Baltimore. I have a theory that in parts of the country which were settled mostly by German/Eastern European immigrants, like Baltimore, most of the mutts are Germanic as well, whereas in areas like Appalachia the dogs are mostly Scots Irish collie types like Theo. It's a good theory. Someday someone will get a masters thesis out of it. Not me. Theo, however, never picked up any Shepherd traits like guarding the house and children. Theo thinks the house and children can take care of themselves, although it makes him very happy to herd children into small groups in the center of a field. He also does this weird, purely Collie thing where he lies down if he sees another dog or something to herd approaching. Toby never did that in his life and he was as puzzled by it as I was at first, until I met another Collie owner who told me that it was a total Collie thing. Therefore I postulate the Collie genes are tougher than Shepherd traits.

Now Django, as we also know, is an aristocratic full bred Springer Spaniel. I had Springers before, as a child, and knew them to be just as dumb as posts. They like swimming and eating and, well, I never noticed much in the way of instinctive Springer behavior, which apparently consists of flushing game anyway. That's probably why intellect is not high on the list of Springer traits: hell, even I can flush game - all you have to do is run through the bushes with a complete disregard for the fact that there are men with guns getting ready to shoot past you. Yes, idiocy would seem to be helpful. Django, so far, appears to be rather brighter than the average Springer, which may explain why he is turning himself into a Collie.

He's started doing all kinds of Collie things, from nipping at everyones heels to get them in order to lying down whenever he sees or hears the cat approaching. Since he's still a baby, and he looks nothing like a Collie anyway, the effect is both strange and hilarious. It's very cool though, and gives one hope for the future. If he can stop being a Springer and become a Collie, perhaps even my son can graduate from high school before he's 30 and maybe someday I will earn a living wage despite my unconscious vow of poverty. Miracles can happen after all.

Stepping Outside the Comfort Zone

I went and volunteered at MoveOn this evening; they have an office in Asheville since our congressional race is so important - we're trying to replace an old, evil, corrupt Republican with a young, fresh, soon-to-be-corrupted Democrat. I was reluctant to go volunteer - I'm terrified of things like that and I was afraid they would ask me to make phone calls, which I loathe. Naturally, that's exactly what I had to do. I had to call and try to convince people to volunteer to make calls themselves - GOTV calls, which I learned tonight stands for Get Out the Vote - that's a good thing, because everyone at Drinking Liberally (DL) was talking about doing GoTV this weekend and I thought it was yet another TV station that I would never encounter. Anyhow, our upbeat MoveOn staffer told us we would be calling only other Move On members and it would all be fun. Naturally, though, the third person on my list listened to me say, "Hi! I'm Felicity, calling for MoveOn about our Call for Change campaign to get the Republicans out of Congress" and then snarled, "I'm a Republican! Goodbye!" This sort of thing takes the heart out of one, particularly when one doesn't have much heart to begin with and besides one has never been very good at recruiting volunteers even when it is one's actual by god job which it in fact is.

Still, it is a good thing to do and I felt virtuous - and I even told them I would call people to GOTV myself. I snuck out a bit early, because I felt duty bound to stop in at DL (Drinking Liberally) and knock back a pint or two and a couple of slices of pizza. Then I took the 8:30 bus home (another virtuous choice. I am just steeped in goodness at the moment.) so that I could reach a new low in the homework wars. We have this homework plan now, see, where I sit at the computer and type M's papers while he lies on the kitchen floor behind me, moaning occasionally. It's very productive: I ask him questions about important choices he's made in his life (god love the 9th grade teachers. Can you imagine anything worse than 90 papers on important choices written by 14 year olds?) and he grunts in agony.

For more of me on politics, by the way, check out CNN next Tuesday, October 24, from 8 - 9 pm, because sometime after 8:30 is my national TV debut. I was interviewed about the Taylor/Shuler race and that's when my little segment is going to air, I hope, and if the October surprise doesn't preempt me. I'm psyched: I'm going over to my Mom's to watch it with the whole family so we can all be impressed with my television star self. You must watch it too, so that I can soak up the adoration, or, failing that, the laughter.

Oooooh, Shiny!

I went on a field trip today at work - a very dangerous field trip, as it turned out, a field trip into the dark valley of temptation: a field trip to the wholesale gem and jewelry show at the Civic Center. Yes. Wholesale gems and jewelry, scattered across a bazillion tables in a huge room full of bright lights that made all the multitude of strings of beads extra, extra shiny. They were so shiny. And all of them were so incredibly cheap that my self control just snapped and my magpie instincts took over. The good news is that approximately 1/6 of my Christmas shopping is now done. The bad news is that I spent 1/3 of my saved Christmas money for a ratio that is really, in the cold light of home, rather distressing.

I spent money on ridiculous things. I bought a jade alligator. And three Halloween charm bracelets, and two hair clips with skull & crossbones on them - the skulls have rhinestone eyes! Is that too cute or what? - and, uh, a couple of pairs of earrings and some pendants and a bracelet and, um, another stone creature that looks kind of like a cross between an alligator and an aardvark and possibly some other stuff that I don't remember too clearly, like a boar tusk and a couple of aliens carved out of bone. It was the shininess of it all, and all the signs saying 50% off marked price and. . . and. . . there's no excuse. I've just been spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave lately and it is true that I have the instincts of a drunken, sailing magpie at the best of times, eccentric taste and no self control.

I even bought some beads in a sort of hopeless, doomed, last ditch attempt to redeem myself by pretending that I would make jewelry with them and sell it, thus recouping my losses! Yes! And pigs will sprout those proverbial wings, etc. I came home and made two bracelets while I was having my brain sucked dry by M's science and math homework. "No offense, Mom," said M, peering over my shoulder, "But your crafts suck." Alas, he is right. They are shiny, my bracelets. . shiny. And if I was five, they would be excellent but somehow, they are, uh, lacking that subtle je ne sais quoi, that certain something that marks objects as having been created by a mentally competent artistic adult. Which is partly because they keep falling apart, since I'm not very good at tiny knots, and partly because, well, stringing shiny beads on a piece of elastic string, while brilliantly good for recovering brain tumor patients and the criminally insane, just is not a technique that really cuts it in the world of serious jewelry.

Ah well. I'm way broker now than I was this morning, and I was not flush this morning. But I am bedecked. I have jewelry all over me. And a jade alligator to admire (he is a handsome fellow indeed) and a whole bunch of shiny beads all over the dining room table, safely dragged back to my nest where I can stare at the shiny for a nice long time.

One of Those Days: Self Pity Redux

craggy gardens view five
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I got out to Craggy Gardens on Sunday; a perfectly beautiful perfect fall day with the leaves changing and the blue sky and the crisp wind and so on. Good thing too, because I need to look at those pictures right now, when it's pouring, as it has been since yesterday night, and gray and damp and cold and miserable and fuck it, I'm wearing leggings. I have a sore throat; M is home in bed with a cold; A is home in bed with ennui; the plants I dragged in so they wouldn't get frostbitten are drooping all over the living room and the puppy ate my umbrella. I got stuck in traffic and was late; I got locked out of the building in the rain and I can't find my PSP disc. Also, I have to pee and I'm the only one in the museum except for three visitors, so I am sitting here with my legs crossed. I don't usually blog from work but when you have to pee and you cannot leave your desk all bets are off.

Also, I wrote a haiku. Here it is:

Return of Winter
Still No Heated Toilet Seat
Cold Butt Memory

Halloween is Up

I decorated my house for Halloween today. If you live here, you should most thoroughly drive by. Hell, you should drive by, park, gawp, and then knock - chances are very good that I'll give you a beer, particularly if you say nice things about my fucking AMAZING Halloween decorations. I swear, it always give me such a total kick to put them all up. I impress myself, and then I go around doing a loud mad evil scientist laugh and pointing and occasionally, god help us, even cavorting about the front lawn, while, naturally, rubbing my hands in that special evil way. My children are mortified. My mother will not even drive by my house. It's awesome.There's just something about Halloween, even if it's true that all the women dress up sexy and all the men dress up as women: okay, gender anxiety aside, it's a fabulous holiday. It makes no real sense; it isn't officially sanctioned (when I become the Evil Overlord, etc, etc, the day after Halloween will SO be a national holiday) and yet it chugs along, year after year, the closest thing our puritan nation has to Carnival. I love it. And I love the utterly awful tackiness of it all; the unfettered dreck that we bring out to teach our children not to fear Death. It's great. The macabre become banal, on a large Dollar Store scale.

Damn.

teenager
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

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?

A Day In Jeopardy

Today I drove 8 hours so that I could subject myself to 2 hours of abject terror. Also, buy a shirt I don't need at Macy's, but that's all part of the story. I went & tried out for Jeopardy today. Did I make it? I don't know, although I seriously, seriously doubt it. I blew it, actually. I completely blew it, but oh well, what the hell?

I went and got a rental car this morning, which was a big enormous PITA as always: apparently by law, renting a car cannot be a simple, straightforward procedure. This morning's particular and unique problem was that they did not, in fact, have a car for me although I had reserved one. After we had discussed that for a while, they drove me to the airport to get a car, which put me about an hour behind schedule and screwed up my plans to take the back route to Atlanta whilst taking photographs on the way. I took the highway. The drive there was uneventful and I'm happy to report that the CD player worked like a charm (in order, there & back again: XTC, Neutral Milk Hotel, Counting Crows, John Hiatt, different XTC, Amadou & Merriam, the Ramones, lots and lots and lots of Ramones.) and the small gold rental car moved smoothly. Road trips always make me feel like my head is floating about three feet over my body. Which I'm still feeling now, just in case you're noticing a certain disconnected factor to tonights installment of deathless prose.

The hotel where the Jeopardy tryouts were held was a large and fancy one smack dab inside the Lenox Square Mall, which is an extremely ultra super fancy mall: it's the mall I was looking for the last time I was in Atlanta 2 1/2 years ago, actually. Not because I can afford anything in it, but because it makes me feel sophisticated and glamourous to walk around ogling incredibly high end merchandise - they have Betsey Johnson and Neiman Marcus and stuff like that. Not an Old Navy in sight. By the way, if you ever want to spend huge sums of money on something utterly impractical for me (and god, I hope you do, whoever you are) you could do worse than this. I was early to my Jeopardy appointment, which was unfortunate, because it gave me time to decide that the sweater I was wearing Would. Not. Do. and then buy a blouse (and put it on) at Macy's that only seemed cheap by comparison to Bloomingdales and the fact that I then had 15 minutes to make it back to the hotel and I was starting to panic.

Panic would be the keynote of the next two hours. Of course I was the last person to arrive and I had to fill out paperwork and have my picture taken - a truly attractive polaroid that showed each of my chins to its fullest advantage - and then we all traipsed into the room to sit facing a screen and meet our cheerful and perky hosts, who apparently do this for a living. They told us what was going to happen and asked us some general trivia questions and asked us where we watched Jeopardy, which was difficult for me to fudge, since I haven't watched it in many years, gulp, and then Alex Trebek came on in the form of a DVD and told us all how incredibly great we were to even have passed the online test and yay, us. Meanwhile, I edged into full blown panic, and looked around to see a room full of people so normal I suspect they were grown in vats. Nice people. People dressed like they had a job interview. For an accounts receivable position at Boring Corp.

Then we took a written test and I'm sorry to report that I bombed this utterly. And I still don't know, and may never know, which state flag has a badger on it and why this would be considered self evident enough that the question was phrased "Naturally, this state has a badger on its flag!" Nor do I know which flower vanilla comes from, who the 2003 winner of American Idol was, or, shamefully, the last name of Helen Keller's teacher. So I blew that test, and I was kind of happy (except I felt small, and dumb, and utterly outclassed by the nicely dressed grownup vat people,) because I thought, "Aha! Now they will flunk me and I can slink out of here and go back to the mall and get up to the mountains in time to take the back road and get some pictures of the sunset!" Alas, no. They don't do it like that anymore. Now they make everyone go through everything, which is why, I guess, that I still might have a shot of actually appearing on the show, although I think possibly hell might have to freeze over first, along with the appearance of the winged pigs.

The next step was the mock game. We were called up in groups of three to stand in front of everyone and play a mock game, complete with buzzers. My buzzer technique was not perfect, but they asked me a lot of questions. Those questions, I mostly got right, except for the Susquehanna, which does not in fact have four letters. All would have been well, except then everyone had to make a perky little speech about themselves.

Well. I was not prepared. Everyone else had this perfect Jeopardy speech prepared, but as I said, I haven't watched the damn show in ages, and when they said "interview," I foolishly thought they meant, you know, an interview. I was the 4th person up, too. And, I made the classic mistake: I forgot that the internet is not cool. I said I was a blogger and spent a lot of time on the internet, and they all moved away from me on the bench, and then I tried to redeem myself by mentioning political involvement (don't ask. Along with Drinking Liberally I've been roped into doing a volunteer stint for Move On) only to realize halfway through my sentence that politics was a No No. I should so totally have skipped the mall visit before the Spanish Inquisition and gone to the hotel bar for a bloody mary instead; I know, that would have been Wrong, but oh my lord, I bet if I had I would be feeling a lot more confident about my chances now.

Then they let me sit down again to watch everyone else and that was that, except for a long speech about how they only pick 400 contestants a year out of about 6000 qualified candidates and if we get picked they'll call us and if not don't be all bummed out, just reapply next year, because they only keep candidate files for one year. They also said we could keep the pens, and there at the top, as you see, is my Jeopardy pen to prove that actually did go and try out for Jeopardy. Yes. Yes I did. The drive back was utterly hairy and horrible and full of weird lightning storms and fog and shit and took five frickin' hours but I think it was worth it, if only for the fact that next year, I will so have a suit on and a little speech prepared.

And you never know. Pigs may grow wings yet and I may yet be called to California to panic on national television.

Neuroticon 6

Tomorrow, gentle readers, tomorrow I'm going to drive for 8 hours to make a goddamn fool of myself. At least that's how it seems right now. I have been going through all sorts of interesting stress symptoms since this morning, ranging from a hot red face that will not fade to going to Belks. My friend S called this evening and said, "How are you doing?" "Fine!" I babbled, "I've just been to Belks and bought some shoes! They're super cute!" "I'll come over," she said, because random Belkian shoe buying is, as we all know, a major distress signal.

Everyone at my work wished me luck and told me if I won any money I would have to give it to the museum. This made my craven plan of just staying home tomorrow under the bed and then lying and saying I had been to Atlanta and failed the test look bad, so I had to give that one up. Okay, I'm not THAT neurotic and I wasn't really going to do that, no matter how comforting it seems right now. I'm going to do this, and I'm going to be wearing new shoes, so how bad could it be? Pretty goddamn bad, I know.

Which leads me to the title of this post. Neuroticon 6 is a planet I occasionally visit, an unpleasant planet, but a familiar one. It's a planet where all kind of bad things happen, like you show up to try out for a quiz show and they laugh and jeer at you and then save your audition tape to put up on Youtube with the title Moron! At one point I thought I would write a cogent and funny book of essays entitled Neurotica, and I may yet. If I do it will probably be on Lulu.com and you, given sufficient masochism, might even be one of the four people who buys it. It will have an essay about waiting to drive to Atlanta to fail a quiz show test - possibly this essay, even. Only a bit more obsessively proofed.

So I am hanging tonight on Neuroticon 6, where the bars are glossy and elegant and full of mean strangers and perfectly turned out smart blonde women who look far, far better than I ever will; the beers cost $11 and, worst of all, noone will listen to me babble. My friend S gave me some beers and told me how smart I was, and how it was all going to be okay, which should have made me feel better, and it did for a bit, but now I'm back on Neuroticon 6, revisiting all the various ports of call, continents and capital cities and, hey, major waterfalls. At least I have cute shoes.

Winging It

The day after tomorrow. . portentous music here, please. . I'm getting into a rental car and driving 3ish hours to Hotlanta, where I will try out for Jeopardy. I have not studied. I have not dieted. I have not, god help me, even had my eyebrows waxed, which was like the total minimum thing I was going to do before I tried out for Jeopardy, as everyone knows that excess eyebrow hair pull your IQ down. They extrude it. Or something.

My daughter made me play the online version of Jeopardy for a while tonight and I'm here to tell you that it kind of reeks, although I found that if I used the bald guy with glasses as my avatar I got smarter. Maybe I should shave my head tonight. Or not. My daughter is disgusted with my lack of doing anything about jeopardy but honestly, I find that I don't care. The whole thing kind of fell out of the sky in the first place: I wasn't really looking for it and being on Jeopardy, while it's always been something that I thought would be sort of fun, hasn't ever really been a life's ambition or anything. In fact, I haven't even watched the show for like 10 years, unless you count the couple of times I've been in a bar at the right time. In those bars, and alas, there are far too few of them, I rock and people are impressed with me, except of course for those people who find me intimidating, or, like the guy at the Brew N' View (which isn't Jeopardy but that weird trivia online bar game thing that people play at the Applebys in Timonium as well as other assorted creepy bars all over the interior of the US) get all offended and obnoxious because I'm beating their high scores. Actually that guy was the only one and I think he was just your common garden variety asshole. Too bad for him: I beat the pants off him - not, thank god, literally.

So wish me luck. Off I go. Unprepared, unwaxed and unthin, but with a devil may care attitude that's okay, not hard to beat, but well, more interesting to beat anyway.

Bat Cave Garlic

fog countryside
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I went up to Bat Cave today to visit my friends D & A, and their kids, N the prodigal son & R. It was a gray, misty, rainy day and cold up there on the mountain, where the leaves are just starting to turn. I took my brother, because ever since my brother read this article, he's been obsessed with the idea of becoming an organic gourmet garlic farmer himself, and this idea involved using my backyard as the starter farm. He came over on Friday and looked at my sad excuse for a vegetable garden, which I abandoned to weeds a while back and listened to me explain my vision for the backyard, which involves raised beds which in turn involve a lot of money and an obscene amount of work. "Lot of work," he said dubiously, and I agreed. I don't have that kind of energy for gardening this time of year: I get gardening energy in about March and it begins dwindling in June, only to peter out altogether by August when the weeds get fierce and I never want to see another goddamned green bean again anyway. Garlic, though, must be planted in the fall, thus keeping vampires at bay throughout the wintry months and a good thing too.

Then I bethought myself of my Bat Cave friends, and their large well established garden, so we went on up the mountain today to check it out. Worked like a charm: I am patting myself on the back with the simple joy of the successful matchmaker. Now D & A will have a frequent visitor; my brother B will have somewhere else to go on his motorcycle, and in a few months, we'll all have enough garlic for, well, pretty much anything that requires gigantic amounts of garlic. I knew they would all get along, with visions of garlic millions dancing in their heads, and soon, Bat Cave Garlic will be a reality. A reality with a really great name; I've already got the logo designed in my head.

Sure, He's Cute

django run
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Yeah, he's adorable, but arrrrggggggghhhhhh! Yesterday he peed on my bed and then, in case that wasn't enough, he got into my closet and took out all my shoes, which he redistributed around the house and yard before settling in to eat one of my favorite, favorite clogs. Grrrrrrr. That is why he and Theo are now locked in the kitchen when there's noone home, which isn't fair to Theo, but oh well, them's the breaks. I've never been one of the crate people, because Toby was claustrophobic and hated them totally, and Phineas, the awful Shih Tzu (Shih Tz'livingroom) just shat all over his and spread it everywhere and after that experience, I decided I never wanted another shih tzu or another crate. So no crate for young Django, but oh. my. god. I had forgotten the true scale of the destruction a puppy can create in a very short amount of time.

OVERHEARD RECENTLY:
While walking down the street, said by a very drunk guy outside the College St. Pub: "If you're being chased by a bear, what you want to do, see, is run downhill."
"Naaaaaah. No way."
"Yeah, I swear. Run downhill."
At work, one geologist referring to another geologist:
"Well, he's a sedimentary guy."

Dude, New Phone!

Occasionally that which starts out rotten can end happily. This morning, I walked both the dogs: Theo, the old responsible one and Django, the tiny bouncing one. This was not as easy as it sounds, because by walk I mean get wrapped up in leashes and fall over not once but several times and by dogs I mean furry agents of Satan and by responsible I mean used to be good on the leash but now is pulling my arm off again and by bouncing I mean, in fact, bouncing like a motherfucker. If a motherfucker usually bounces, with which fact I am not acquainted, but I can totally assure you that a 9 week old Springer Spaniel indeed bounces, vertically, several feet in the air at a time. Which is why I needed a new phone.

You see, I took the dogs out on a walk through scenic foggy West Asheville (see photo) around 7:25 this morning, leaving M with instructions to get his ass out of the shower and onto the school bus in a timely manner. Which, you would think, a 14 year old could manage. Then around 7:40, when I was not particularly far along in the walk (see above, particularly referencing bouncing and getting wrapped in leashes, A called to complain bitterly that her brother had called her to demand a ride to school and it was unfair. I fielded that call okay and was thus not surprised when my phone rang again 5 minutes later, since I knew it was M calling to complain bitterly about how unfair his sister was to refuse to give him a ride to school. I had just gotten past the "You still have time to catch the school bus for chrissakes" part of this conversation when 1) puppy bounced and 2) Theo lunged and 3) phone went about 5 feet up in the air and 4 feet laterally before plunging to the pavement with an unhealthy crunch. Then I shouted JESUS FUCK! and so on, and made my unhappy broken phone way through the rest of the walk (including past that spooky playground - I did have my real camera and I hung it around my neck and hung on like grim death, so it didn't get puppy-ed) and got home where I found that M had indeed amazingly taken the school bus.

I spent the rest of the day metaphorically girding my loins to do battle with Sprint, convinced that I would walk into the Sprint store and if they didn't actually rush me with spears, well, they would certainly do so metaphorically. I told everyone how tough I was going to be and I walked in there with a fierce look on my face, ready to stand up for myself! To listen to them say tough shit and actually get mad back instead of caving meekly, apologizing for my temerity and slinking out. Which is how those encounters usually end. For once, though, I was happily surprised. "Oh yeah," said the guy, "You're way overdue for an upgrade. Here, you can have $150 credit towards any phone we have." Which is why I now am sporting a seriously slick shiny black phone WITH A CAMERA, DUDE, WITH A CAMERA and I am so, so cool now and both my children are overcome with jealousy, which is always just a sweet, sweet feeling.

Fog

There's been lovely fog in the mornings lately, as there often is in Asheville in October, and here's a charming little foggy slide show of fog images for you to mistily enjoy. You will probably notice, as I have noticed, that I actually used to take better pictures with my old point & shoot 3.2 megapixel camera than I do with my large, impressive, bells & whistles & manual stuff 5 megapixel newish camera. This has been kind of depressing me, as I have also noticed that I seem incapable of holding a camera straight. There's always a list to port on my horizon, and yes, I know, that lends itself to commentary right there, except I don't like port. I had port once, by mistake, when I was so young that we couldn't tell the difference between it and the sophisticated beverage we actually desired, wine that was not Strawberry Hill, and it was quite gruesome.

A week from tomorrow I'm driving to Atlanta to try out for Jeopardy, yikes, and alas, somehow time has gotten away from me and I'm not smart or thin yet, the two things I blithely assumed I would be by now. Damn. Oh well. I'm just going to go and wing it and if I blow it, I blow it: such is life. My family, particularly my mother, disapproves of this attitude. My mother told me sniffily not to let my children hear me talk like that, in case they started acting that way. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was far, far, far too late for that.

Comments That Make Me Oddly Happy

Yesterday, M called from his sister's car (my car, actually. Argh. Argh argh argh.) on their way home and all he had to say was "Uh, Mom?" and I said, "FINE! Just fine! It's okay with me, but then I'm not making the garlic bread!" and he started laughing and said "Okay." That left me home alone with a big pot of spaghetti while my children went out and ate burgers without me but hell, you know you grab your solitude where you can, and it was, actually, in more than even a passive aggressive way, okay with me. It's a little tight around here since A's boyfriend formally moved in. Argh. Argh argh argh argh.

Then this evening he called me at work and said, "Do you know where I can get a stuffed penguin?" "There's one in the back yard," I said practically, knowing that this was true. Not everyone can say that and it's the little things that mean so much, eventually, in one's childrens' memories. Ah yes, they will say eventually, Mom always had a stuffed penguin or two lying around in the back yard. Possibly they will use this sort of thing to make their future spouses feel inadequate which would actually, in an evil sort of way, be just fine with me.

Unfortunately, though, that wasn't the sort of stuffed penguin he had in mind, since our back yard penguin is a little the worse for wear. He wanted a clean fresh one to, hold on to your hats, give to a Girl. Being the good parent that I am, I said I would go and find one. Well. Hell. You know things have come to a terrible, gentrified pretty pass when a citizen of Asheville, a tax paying citizen and downtown worker such as myself, cannot buy a stuffed penguin in downtown! But alas, it is true. The stupid toy store was closed; TJ Morrison's has gone the way of the dodo, and there was not another stuffed penguin to be found, lo, not even in the whole of the terrifying upscale ghost mall that is the Grove Arcade. "I'll make you one!" I said feverishly on the cel phone and he shrieked, "Noooo!"

He's right. Going up to a Girl and saying creepily, "Here's a penguin. My Mom made it for you." is definitely the short road to social suicide. Even I can see the problems with that one. Pity, because I had some truly awful penguin crafts in mind.

Puppy Love

A week ago, things changed around my house. A week ago, my daughter found a puppy. And now, it's all over: we are all madly, but madly, in puppy love. Puppy has chewed everything he can get his teeth into, widdled neat little puddles in most corners of the house and done other dreadful things: isn't he pwecious! Mama's own baby angel OW STOP THAT sweetest wuzzle AAGH PEE OUTSIDE fuzzy wuzzer beans! Mama didn't need those ugly old shoes anyway. Izzum sweetie pie.

A found this puppy near a park by the Nature Center, early early on Tuesday morning when she was dropping her boyfriend off at work. The puppy was soaked and bedraggled and completely happily wandering along the side of a very busy street, so A stopped her car (my car, actually, but that's another long sad tale) and the puppy nonchalantly hopped right in. So A, having a kind heart, brought the collarless, tagless, microchip-less (we took him to a vet & checked) puppy home.

This is a purebred puppy, about 8 weeks old, fuzzy & sweet & with a badly docked tail that's already healed. A did the responsible thing: she called the Humane Society (aka the animal shelter; there's only one for Buncombe County) - about 8 times over the next 3 days. No one ever reported the puppy missing. A papered East Asheville with Found Puppy flyers. No one called her cel phone. A checked all the newspapers and the websites and everywhere someone might post a missing puppy flyer: nothing. Noone, apparently, is looking for this beautiful baby dog. And of course, by now, the worst has happened: the entire family is madly in love with Django, as he has been finally named after considerable wrangling, since I favored the name Chauncey and A was holding out for Ringo and M, disgusted by the whole thing, thought Killer or Spike were suitable.

Note that I am not posting any pictures of said adorable (OH. MY. GOD. HE. IS. ADORABLE.) puppy even though I promise you I have taken many, because the only way someone is claiming this dog is if they can describe him with no hints. At this point I kind of think they may not get him back anyway, partly because I feel that anyone who doesn't call the Humane Society about 20 minutes after they've misplaced a puppy that young doesn't deserve to own one and partly because, as I may have mentioned, we have all fallen in love with him.

It all goes to show you that you must be careful what you whisper into the ear of the universe. About two weeks ago I was saying that Theo was lonely and perhaps I should get another dog. I was thinking about a young dog, you know, not a puppy. A young shephard mix, to be specific, or possibly a lab, and not this kind of puppy at all, and certainly not an 8 week old baby with his milk teeth barely in. But there you have it: the universe, while it hears news of a vacancy appearing, is not good at specifics.

Meanwhile, Theo just remarked bitterly that noone asked HIM if he wanted a puppy, and Jesus H. Christ on a proverbial crutch, anyway. Theo is now desperate for his missing loneliness and somehow not at all as enthusiastic about the puppy as the rest of us, not to mention prone to heaving long accusing sighs in our direction as the puppy merrily chews on his cheeks. Still, he is patient, and the puppy does everything he does, which is just so cute! Stuff like taking all our socks outside, which is an old trick of Theo's, had long since ceased to be considered cute around here, but now, it's adorable again! The puppy does it so much more cutely! Mr. Bill is also not enthralled; in fact, Mr. Bill has reacted as if we had taken in a giant squid with a particular fondness for gray cats as hors d'oeuvres, not a fuzzy puppy. Every time he comes in the kitchen and spots the puppy, he reacts exactly the way I would if I came into my kitchen to find a giant squid wrapped around the refrigerator, reaching out for me with one huge and suckered tentacle, which is to say he screams and vanishes. I don't think he's really eaten in a week.

Poor Theo. Poor Mr. Bill. Poor us. But happy, lucky puppy, who is getting lavished with gigantic truckloads of love, gourmet puppy food courtesy of my mother, who is also gaga over him, a fancy collar and special new leash. Not to mention the chew toys, the gentle puppy centric flea medication and, of course, the hugging. Ah, puppy love.