Bureaucracy

Hello, and welcome, all you hordes of Mountain Xpress readers and please god, tell me you’re not friends of my mom. She’s excited about my picture being in the paper – hell, we all are. Right? Right? And now, the gratuitous use of the word fuck: fuck! We do a lot of that here at Hangover Headquarters. Also, we say Jesus H. Almighty Christ sometimes, which is a good old Irish Catholic curse much beloved of my father and if it bugs you, go away.

Anyway, forget the introduction. Today we will be discussing, among other things, the horror that is the Innsbruck Mall. Whoa. The Innsbruck Mall is a zombie mall, a lurching, shuddering undead thing plonked down on a particularly unsavory part of Tunnel Road. Why am I thinking about the Innsbruck Mall on this bright Wednesday? Well, it has come to my attention that a) my car inspection sticker has expired which means that b) my car registration has likewise expired and c) my driver’s license has somehow faded so it’s illegible.

I knew about the inspection sticker but it was brought rather more forcibly to my attention at a roadblock over the Labor Day weekend. The very nice cop smiled at me – it helped that C and M and the dogs were all in the car, so we looked all nice family-ish, ah, how appearances can deceive! – and told me I needed to get that done right away, since it expired, um, a while back. Like a month. Okay, July – but that’s almost August and August is only barely over so I sort of thought maybe it didn’t really count.

So it’s been about two weeks and I’ve seriously sort of been trying to get all this sorted out, without much luck. I tried to renew my registration on line but unfortunately, it turns out I still owe Buncombe County money from my vehicle tax. Naturally, you can’t pay this at the same place where you go to renew your registration – that would be too easy. You must go down to the courthouse to pay your taxes and go through the metal detector and up to the third floor and then pay the whopping lump sum of SEVEN DOLLARS to the nice lady behind the counter and THEN you go on over to the Innsbruck Mall.

Well, first you go to the creepy little Ingles behind the Innsbruck Mall, because the tag people don’t take credit cards and thus you must buy lettuce or something and get cash back. The creepy little Ingles, which is entirely staffed, as far as I can tell, by senior citizens and slowish seniors at that, is still there, by the way, in case you, like me, were vaguely wondering. It’s still horrible too. It hasn’t changed since, I would guess, about 1974. Neither, for that matter, has the Innsbruck Mall – the stores have all gone, to be replaced by thriving businesses like the tag office, the genealogical society, the Carolina Hair Academy and a few desultory realty/lawyer offices that reek of despair. The whole place reeks of despair, actually, starting with the tangible smell on the escalators and, well, escalating by the time you get into the drooping, miserable, broken down main plaza, with it’s sad linoleum floor and forlorn kiosk advertising some children’s hospital that isn’t even in Asheville. And then the line for registration renewals was out the door and I waited around for a while, but the futility of it all got to me and when the Muzak – god, why Muzak? – started playing, I kid you not, a horrifying Muzakified version of John Hiatt’s Ethylene, well, I had to leave. Or slit my wrists, one or the other.

So I have to try to do all this again tomorrow as well as get a new driver’s license. Why do I need a new driver’s license? I need one because the state of North Carolina, in it’s infinite wisdom, is using some kind of bargain basement laminating on their licenses that rubs all the info off and you can no longer see my birthday, height or weight. This is just fine with me, as I feel that that information is none of anybody’s business and, let’s face it, I don’t get carded anymore.

Well, until yesterday, that is. Yesterday, I went over to the Orange Peel to get two tickets to the Meat Puppets (which I am DAMN excited about wahoo!!! Who’s going? Let’s all go! It’s gonna be awesome! Woot! For those about to rock . . &etc. Yeah.) and the girl at the counter told me that they probably wouldn’t take my license and thus probably would not let me in the door. At first I scoffed at her and said, look, my daughter is now over 21, okay, so get a grip, but now I have become infinitely paranoid and, while it would be kind of fun (at my advanced age; we cougars have to get our lameass fun wherever we can, okay?) to be not allowed into the Orange Peel because my ID looks fake, well, it wouldn’t be as much fun as the Meat Puppets. So wish me luck as I venture yet again into the NC DMV. The Patton Avenue ones, this time.

project 365 #253: I 40 at sunset

project 365 #253: I 40 at sunset
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I'm having a crisis. My mother called me fat. Not only that, which after all she's entitled to, because I am, in fact, fat, but I read this AskMe thread and it introduced me to a whole new slang term I had never heard before and I was faced with the definite possibility that I am actually a cougar. Except for the part where they're supposed to be rich and well groomed and the part where they pick up young guys, because frankly, I'm poor and shabby and, while I certainly am completely down with the idea of picking up young guys, in practice I'm hopeless at it. At the bar, anyway. Hee.

I was never even very good at it when I myself was young and nowadays I sort of more or less assume that no one in the bar could ever possibly be interested in me at all and thus I think I may be missing any number of subtle hints and cues that could lead to me having, if not a satisfactory sex life, at least a much more, um, diverse one than I have now. Or not. Maybe it's the part where I get out the reading glasses to peer at them that turns them off - go figure.

When I was in college, my roommate and I decided one evening that the only possible way out of our current financial dilemma was to become high class hookers. Clearly, there was no alternative. To this end, we smoked a joint and dressed up in what we considered high class hooker wear, which, if I recall correctly, was our old prom dresses or maybe some party dresses of my mothers from the 50s that I had snagged out of the Goodwill bag, put on a lot of makeup and hied ourselves down to the bar at the Francis Marion Hotel in downtown Charleston, where, we reasoned, there would be tons of out of town men looking for high class hookers. We sat at the bar for a while, drinking up our rent money, waiting to be approached and beginning to appreciate the function of the pimp. Finally, just as our career path began to look dim, a very nice dentist approached and bought us each a bourbon and coke. He told us kindly that perhaps we should go back to the dorm and then he said that dental hygiene was an exciting and lucrative career for smart girls and maybe we should drop the poetry and art and go for that instead. And if only I'd taken his advice, I probably wouldn't be writing this. But I'd still be fat.

It was mean of my mother to comment in her inimitable way on my tummy. Plus, she just had to call it that, as in, "Felicity, you need to lose that tummy, dear!" I had to call my daughter and say, "Guess what Gramma said right when I was leaving?" "Umm, let me guess," said my daughter, "She said, "You're fat?""

It's all very well for Mom to say. She hit the starved-out waif-thin Kate Moss look about four decades early and was occasionally told firmly by doctors to gain weight, which always made her laugh merrily. Yeah, it would make me laugh merrily too. My mother lives in a nice retirement community that is fully stocked with widows with incredible bone structure. I mean there are 85 year old women in there who look better than I did at 22; it's depressing. It's the kind of thing that ought to make me come home and eat a lettuce leaf and vow never to eat again but what it really does is make me want nothing more than to chow down on a giant bag of Doritos while drinking a 6 pack of the most fattening beer I can find. If there's a 22 year old boy with good bone structure in the picture, well, hey, fucking bonus. It's vaguely possible that this is not a healthy attitude, yeah, but what can you do?

Update: M has never heard this term "cougar" before either. "Have you ever heard the term "cougar"?" I asked him. "Sure," he said, "Like, oh god, there's a cougar, run away! Hey, a cougar ate my baby! Of course," and then he looked at me strangely. "Mom, a cougar is a moun-tain li-on." he said slowly, emphasizing the syllables. So if this is slang, it hasn't made it to WNC yet. Thank the gods.

Gossipy Update on the 40 Foot Bike Guy

Asheville is a small town. This morning, when I arrived at the river to run the dogs (and no, I'm not even going to say where I go, because it's usually deserted and I like it that way) there were two kayakers already there, getting ready to put in. I see these guys occasionally and I am always amazed at their dedication - I mean, it's all I can do to roll out of bed and into the car with the dogs. Usually I'm still in my pajamas, even. There is no way I could actually kayak at 7 am. Granted, I can't kayak at any time, or at least I never have, but still. So anyway, I overheard kayak guys talking about 40 foot bike guy. "He got his tail caught in the scaffolding," said one guy, "That's why he overbalanced." Hmmm. At first I was all set to say, hey, I was there and I didn't see that, but I didn't actually dare to stop long enough to talk to them because I was afraid that if I did, the dogs would enthusiastically pee on their kayaks. Somehow I felt that would be one of those terrible park faux pas, like the time my old dog Toby peed on a guy's leg at Patterson Park and I had to explain that it was simply because he (the pee-ee, not the pee-er) was wearing brown pants and a green shirt and Toby thought he was a tree. A simple mistake any dog could make.

Anyhow, on looking back at the picture, I think maybe kayak guy was right. You can see that his (bike guy, not kayak guy) tail or train or streamers or whatever you call those purple ribbon-y things coming off his hat or shirt, are extended to the left, towards the scaffolding. So perhaps that was what went wrong. Who knows?

This update has been brought to you by the totally unreliable overheard in the park news network.

project 365 #251: LAAFF 40 foot bike rider just before the fall

project 365 #251: LAAFF 40 foot bike rider just before the fall
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Good weekend for partying - for blogging? Not so much. Sorry, y'all.

Friday night was the weekly girls' get together at Broadways and that was fun. Yes. Leave your car on Lexington Avenue until 3:00 Saturday afternoon fun. Sleep most of Saturday fun. You know. I did make it over to yet another discount grocery store - the Sav Mor on Patton Avenue, which my friend C had told me was actually the Ingles discount store. I would like at this point to point out that six months ago, there were at least three and often five people living in my house, along with two dogs, and I used to go to two grocery stores - Ingles and Earth Fare. Now, there are two people and two dogs living in my house and I'm going to three grocery stores, all of which fall under the category my friend N calls "Used Food Stores" and my weekly grocery bill is almost a third higher than it was then. This is just not right. I'm not even going to Earth Fare but maybe once a month at this point and then it's only for Emergen-C, Greek yogurt, pink lady apples and good bread, none of which are obtainable at the other stores.

Anyway, I came home from the grueling shopping experience with a pathetic yet expensive array of groceries and made dinner and watched Pan's Labyrinth. It was not at all what I expected. Whoa. Dark. Sad. Dark and sad, in fact. But kind of weirdly beautiful, for all that. It's always a little disconcerting when you turn on a movie expecting a fantasy, get away, total escapist thing and get instead, well, a bleak Spanish war movie.

I also read Elizabeth Hand's new book, Generation Loss, which I highly recommend right along with all her other books because she is a fucking genius. Yes. She's a genius and also, she has shot right up to the top of my Famous People I Would Genuinely Like to Go Out Drinking With. One caveat: if alcohol & drug abuse bother you, you won't like this book. But then if that's the case, honey, why would you be reading my blog? Hee. Actually, I'm kind of surprised I liked it so much. Usually I have a hard time with protagonists I don't like, who I find pretty much utterly unsympathetic, and I really didn't like the heroine of this novel, but the book drew me in nevertheless. Also, bonus, there's a lot of terrific information about contemporary photography.

Ah. And then Sunday was LAAFF, the Lexington Avenue Art & Fun Festival, or the Lex Ave Freak Fest as we like to call it. The big event was the 40 foot bike ride, which alas, did not quite happen. I mean it happened but very briefly because he fell over, which was terrifying even though we all knew that he was attached to a crane. Apparently, he had fallen off his 12 foot bike (one of the things I love about Asheville is that there is a guy who rides around downtown on a 12 foot high bike and we all see him often) on a warmup ride a few minutes before and messed UP his knee. We missed this part being as we were up on the Broadways roof deck drinking a quiet beer in the shade. So he gamely went on to climb the scaffolding and ride the 40 foot bike but I think his injuries from the 12 foot fall were worse than he thought and anyway, he keeled over quite quickly. 40 feet, by the way, is very tall. I mean it is huge. I mean it is bigger than every building on Lexington Avenue and it was scary as all get out. But then someone released a whole bunch of superballs into the wild and the party recommenced and all was okay.

It was hot as hell at LAAFF but fun and full of photo opps. After that we went on over to my friend J's new house for the end of his housewarming and it is a supercool and adorable new house and I am jealous. He has cool paint karma, does J - everywhere he moves is already painted in all these wacky luscious shades.

So that was my weekend. Also, I cleaned my house with bleach spray - fuck the hippie cleaners, man, they do not work - and it looks awesome and I got horrific cramps, which has not been so awesome but is, after all, the way that the gods in their kindness make sure that women are really incredibly happy to see the end of their menstrual cycles when it finally comes. Because you need 5 - 10 years of ever increasingly awful periods to prepare you for menopause. Grrrrrrr.

Blog Awards

So, as if being in Mountain Xpress is not enough Asheville bloggy goodness, it's time yet again for the annual Blogaverseapaloozathonawhonkawhonkadingdong. Or something like that. Screwy came up with the name and for some unknown reason, like maybe that particular brain cell got burned at some art student party in the woods in the late eighties or something, I cannot remember it. Can you imagine? Anyway. The party is happening on September 29, 3 weeks from today, which is, yeah, too much time away for anyone to be expected to remember it, so I will bring it up again closer to the event. It's at K & J's place, not mine. Thank god. ANYHOW, you can now nominate various asheville bloggers for prizes here. Yes, prizes, that will be given out at this faboo event. Last year I won a naughty box of faux sex toy type stuff for being funny. I think it was for being funny; it's all a blur. Brain cells were burned. Or you can email your nominations (which will, naturally, include me, for something - maybe being naked? I see that K is aiming for that one, and well, okay, I grant you that she is probably a very fine sight naked, but hey, what am I? Chopped liver? Does noone want to see ME naked? Don't answer that. No, really, don't answer that.) to scrutinyhooligans AT yahoo DOT com.

I, er, haven't done my own nominations yet either. But I'm going to! I am! I swear! I promise! Any minute now!

project 365 #248: kitchen counter just before dinner

project 365 #248: kitchen counter just before dinner
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I'm about to be famous again. I doubt it will last 15 minutes, but it's still making me nervous. Apparently the Mountain Xpress is doing one of those "Hey, check out local bloggers! Aren't they just." . . whatever it is that we are this year. Cute, maybe. Hopefully cute, because the photographer from the paper came over and took like forty minutes worth of photos of me and the dogs. I suppose it's too much to hope that the article is actually on the dogs. Not Particularly Famous Local Bloggers Pets! Yeah, catchy. I did get the dogs to do their trick, which is awesome.Their trick is impressive. It's called "Looking Very Attentive When There Are Treats Around." They're good at it.

In other news, I've spent the evening reading the New Yorker food issue and eating. Sometimes I wonder why I can't lose weight and then I bethink myself of things like the New Yorker food issue and the Travel Channel which is apparently the Food Channel in mufti, given that it runs Anthony Bourdain marathons. I have a mild crush on Anthony Bourdain and I was hungover on Monday, and the couch was folded out into a bed since A spent the night the night before and, well, yeah, okay, I confess: I lay down and watched five straight hours of Anthony Bourdain making his cosmopolitan way around the world. And ate. He ate amazing Mexican mole things; I ate french fries. He ate Vietnamese noodle salads; I ate peanut butter. He ate organic cheese made in a stone barn in the snow; I ate Kraft and a bag of generic barbecue potato chips. You get the idea. We had us a good ole time, Tony and me. I'm seriously thinking about Weight Watchers.

I can't quite believe I'm thinking about Weight Watchers - I'm just not, um, normal enough, for one thing - but apparently they're going to open up a center or have meetings or whatever it is that they do right around the corner from where I work on Wednesday evenings. This has struck me as a gift from the fat gods. I mean, the skinny gods - the ones whose muscle tone looks so awesome in marble. Some years back, a couple of my friends lost a lot of weight with Weight Watchers, though. They kind of liked it. One of them told me, "Look, you can save up all your points by just not eating anything for a day or two and then you can drink a whole bottle of wine, and then after that you don't care anyway, so you can have another one." At the time, this struck me as a dubious strategy at best, but that was a few years ago. Now, I think it's a sound plan with definite possibilities, if you can substitute PBR for red wine. I think I'm going to do it. Think. Maybe. Possibly. We'll see.

project 365 #247: fair setup 1

project 365 #247: fair setup 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday night I went to the fair. No, it hasn't started yet - it was my fifth year of being the grandiosely named Assistant Superintendent of Art at the Mountain State Fair, which means, basically, that I go every year a couple of days before the fair opens and work for four or five (or, on a couple of particularly godforsaken years, six) hours hanging up the Art that people have entered, hoping for a ribbon, at the Mountain State Fair. In other years I've also gone back at the crack of dawn the next day to help judge the art and hand out ribbons and record all this most faithfully for posterity on many complicated forms. This year I pled pressure of work (which is true) and skipped the morning bit. Besides, my view of art is not always the one shared by Mountain State Fair Artists and I think perhaps the dropoff in number of entrants I've noticed over the last five years could just possibly be related to the fact that I tend to give blue ribbons to meth inspired ballpoint pen drawings of Ozzy Osbourne on napkins (damn, that was a good year) and heap scorn upon PBS inspired insipid oil landscapes in big expensive ugly frames. Heh. I think I've improved the art at the fair no end.

Also, every year they give me an embroidered button down shirt that says Mountain State Fair on it and sports the yearly theme and logo, which this year is a goat looking all tough and biker-y and saying Full Throttle Fun! The goat beats the hell out of the pig saying Go Hawg Wild from a few years, which was on a khaki shirt and which I gave to N in hopes that he would wear it up to Baltimore and start some kind of strange new fashion. Last year's shirt was black, which was awesome and also featured a hog on a Harley and I wear it often.

It's fun to go to the fair before it opens and watch people unloading giant pumpkins and listen to people argue passionately over where creepy needlepoint dolls should go and so on. There was a man at the fair with 12 perfect eggs and he was arguing passionately that there should be a category for his eggs to be entered into while five fair volunteers were arguing back that while, in a perfect fair universe, this would be true, alas, at this non Platonic fair, there was in fact no category for eggs. One of the men arguing this had no arms and no legs, but he offered to make an omelette the next morning. It was highly entertaining.

A went with me to help out his year. Last year, S did it, and before that my friend D went with me two years in a row and we snuck beers in the parking lot, which helped the whole art hanging thing a whole lot. One of those was the year that the hurricane hit and the wind was howling and water was bucketing through holes in the roof and the art was getting wet but the intrepid fair volunteers were still there, worrying about the dioramas and the Very Special Arts exhibition. So, next year I'm going to need another helper. I swear it's kind of fun. Honestly. Yeah. You should do it. It used to be that they gave all the volunteers a packet with a t-shirt and a pin and a coupon for J&S Cafeteria and a couple of free passes to the fair and an invitation to the volunteer appreciation pig picking (which I have never attended, because I can never get anyone to go with me and besides, I'm a little afraid that I'll recognize the pig in question from the fair and that will traumatize me for life.) This year, though, volunteers don't get nothin'. Not even a free pass and that's ridiculous. The coordinator lady, new this year, said, "They only get a pass if they work 8 hours during the actual fair." Hmmm. So working 4 hours in a hot hall hanging heavy art and hurting your back doesn't count. What the hell? This isn't LEAF we're talking about here - it's a five dollar ticket. They should get a free pass.

Of course, I do. Get a free pass and also VIP parking, that is, but last year I didn't make it back to the fair after setup. This year, I wish to change that. Let's go to the fair! I'll drive! And I'll even pay for half your ticket if you promise to go look at every single llama with me, because I like llamas. And chickens. And fried things on a stick. Yes, it's fair time - wanna go?

what hath dog wrought

what hath dog wrought
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I didn't do much this weekend. I wanted to; I wanted and meant to go camping, go tubing, go somewhere, but Saturday afternoon's hike was all I actually managed. Other than that I've just been puttering around the house doing basically nothing. I did go to K Mart today though and buy three small inflatable boats. One Man Boats is what the box says, with a picture of an 8 year old boy sitting in a boat and looking like he's not really enjoying himself. Hopefully the boats are actually fun and big enough for One Man and not just for One 8 Year Old. They were 7 bucks each, though, so how can I go wrong? I really want to take them out and float hither and thither. Only not in the French Broad around Asheville, because I'm not sure my immune system is up for it.

The only other thing I've done all weekend is mourn my music. I went through the chewed and shredded remnants and made a list of what's missing. Django did a fucking job this time - he got just about half of my CDs. And we're not even going to talk about the picture CDs he ate; let's just all be thankful for Flickr.

So, this is the list. A couple of people have already offered to burn me some copies and they ROCK and, okay, this is the part where I beg: if you have any of these and you can burn them for me I will thank you from the bottom of my heart. Is it piracy? Considering that I bought them in the first place, no - and I'd still have them if it wasn't for my psycho dog. Why couldn't he just have eaten The Great Indian Masters that I got with a freeze dried pack of curry? But no, that one is still intact.

John Prine - In Spite of Ourselves (this one actually I can live without)
David Bowie - Hunky Dory (this has already been replaced, thank you K & J!)
James McMurtry, St. Mary of the Woods AND Walk Between the Raindrops (a friend has promised a copy of St. Mary, thank you, thank you, because these are vital)
Southern Culture on the Skids - Plastic Seat Sweat (my very first intro to SCOTS)
Grateful Dead - Dick's Picks Volume 20, CD 2 and some mix that someone made that had a whole lot of cool stuff on it. Argh. Argh.
Lucinda Williams - the self titled album. My favorite Lucinda album. That I can't live without.
Elvis Costello - Spike (I can also live without this one)
John Hiatt - Crossing Muddy Waters (this is another vital one that I need badly.)
Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts of the Great Highway
Robert Earl Keene - Gringo Honeymoon
Steve Earle - The Revolution Starts Now
NOFX - Punk in Drublic
Static X - Wisconsin Death Trip
Pogues - Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (I should just fucking kill this dog for this alone. And not kill him humanely, either.)
Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack
Mary Prankster, the mix that had like all of her stuff on it that I love that I listen to on every roadtrip and argh, argh, argh.
Nanci Griffith - Other Voices, Other Rooms
Rage Against the Machine - Ghost of Tom Joad
Blues Live From Mountain Stage
and three or four mix CDs, that I made, that other people made for me, that can't really be replaced.

project 365 #244: c and theo by the old bridge in the woods

project 365 #244: charles and theo by the old bridge in the woods
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

My friend C and I and the dogs went hiking yesterday afternoon, up past Candler to this trail where we'd gone once before, years ago. It's a steep trail and very overgrown, which always makes me wary of bears, although we did have the dogs with us, but I have absolutely no clue how the dogs would react to bears. Anything from puppy affection to abject terror to simply refusing to acknowledge them - all possibilities are equally likely and I hope I never find out. But we saw no bears; instead, we came to an old bridge with a hole right through it that C climbed down through while I, more cautious, scrambled around the banks and rocks of the mostly dry creek to take pictures from downstream. It was a nice hike and then we went on over to S' house where she was having yes, another dinner party, which was tremendous fun.

The other good thing I did yesterday was go to work. I actually kind of like going to work on the weekend when I'm not expected or supposed to be there, because it's quiet and cool and I can actually work with no distractions. I finished the newsletter and felt very proud of myself - I taught myself InDesign in the process and the newsletter looks okay. Not bad, really: I wrote 90% of it and edited the other 10% and imported the various bits of data into lists and took all the photographs and did all the layout and design. Yay me, I have mad skillz, or at least I felt like I did when I left work.

I got an unexpected phone call from an old friend late last night too, and he sounded good and we talked about inconsequential things for about an hour. I was surprised to hear his voice. But glad. It's funny the way phone calls can shake and rock your small universe and the ones that do are always the ones that you don't expect at all: you don't glance at the screen to see who's calling, you don't wonder, or you partly think that it's someone from the party you just left calling to tell you that your camera is still there or something like that. I suppose it's been over a hundred years now of human evolution that the ringing phone can skew the universe; I wonder if, or how, really, we've changed in that time. Like everything, I suppose it's just speeded time up: from the courier on the lathered horse with the parchment missive or maybe just the black fletched arrow coming out of his back (message enough) to the multi page letter in elegant script that your great great great grandmother read by the window in a small room with too much velvet furniture to the restless getting native and sending out easily misinterpretable drum signals ("Og say, M. . m. . mouse coming?" "Mouse? What Og mean?" (ground shakes) "M. . . mm. . mammoth!" (all trampled)) the message gets through, it's just that maybe there was more time to assimilate it then. Or not. It's just the message and the medium, all getting tangled up together.

Goddamn

I went out tonight for a little while. I went to my friend S' house and met my friend J there and we all went down to the sculpture opening at the park where we met our friend Z, among others, and then we went to the Lucky Otter and had dinner and it was all very nice and I came along home, mellow and ready to sleep, about 9ish. Home, yes. Where the heart is. Where, when I got there, I had one dog, who looked a bit nervous, at the door to greet me and no sign of dog number two. And I use number two in all it's meanings, because dog number two, Shi'thead is I believe his name in Arabic, was hiding under M's bed since, in the hour or so since I last talked to M and M had gone off to a friend's house, he had wiggled his nemesis way under the other computer and pulled out a CD folder and destroyed it, complete with most every CD inside, across the den. Also, one of my bras, but okay, that's not a huge loss, given that my bras are all like 10 years old and decrepit.

In the CD folder, however, were a lot of irreplaceable photo CDs. And - and this is where I lost it - James McMurtry, St. Mary in the Wood and David Bowie, Hunky Dory. And the Dead and Rage Against the Machine and oh fuck, I DON'T EVEN KNOW AT THIS POINT. That's what I could identify as destroyed beyond redemption. So I dragged the evil little bastard out from under M's bed and I shoved a bunch of broken CDs under his nose and walloped his ass and screamed and so on. Useless. Do you know, I've had a copy, in one form or another, of Hunky Dory since I was 15 fucking years old? Fifteen. And now it's sitting on my dining room table with a spaniel jaw sized fucking chunk out of it. And St. Mary of the Woods is my favorite, ever, James McMurtry album and now it is gone as well. Not to mention any number of never to be seen again, never to be duplicated, family photos.

So I am angry, and tired, and I couldn't even call anyone since M has my phone, because, in a perfect case of motherhood gone terribly, terribly wrong, I have been refusing to replace his phone that he swears was stolen because he loses too many phones. I thought that him not having a phone would teach him, ha! Yeah. It's taught me quite nicely, because, when I am confronted with the thought of M out there in the terrible world, unable to make a cel phone call, I am undone, and he knows this, and that is how, somehow, M has a phone (mine) and I have nothing: no phone to call my friends and describe for them in heated terms once again the perfidy of this goddamn useless dog. All I could do was go outside and smoke two cigarettes angrily and fast. Another useful plan.

This pains me deeply. When you think about it logically, M is never anywhere where there isn't a phone, because all his friends' parents, like me, are terrified at the idea of these teenagers being even briefly phoneless, but here I am at home, utterly without phone. What if a burglar comes in? I'll have to email the cops. Pity the burglar who comes in this house tonight, though. He will not survive. At the very least I'll duct tape him to a chair and then spend a couple of hours explaining exactly what my dog and my child have done to me.

project 365 #242: waterdrops on red lily

project 365 #242: waterdrops on red lily
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday's picture, taken during the approximate 2.5 hours that I spent out of bed. And that's not in bed in a good way, if you know what I mean. Sigh. I went back to work today anyway, armed with not only a can of coke but also a can of organic ginger ale and some saltines. It's been okay. Still, this pretty much sucks. I kind of wanted to go camping this weekend; in fact, I had a vague and hilariously awful plan of doing some kind of horrible new age ritual in which I would ritually get rid of all my old problem behaviors and emerge, newly fledged, from the woods like the butterfly from the chrysalis, O. (That's O as in there go the raggle taggle gypsies, O, you know, the obligatory folk music string band new age O. Just in case you were wondering.) Yeah, I know. This is what happens when you have a hippie guru shrink like mine: it starts to actually make sense. And I was kind of enjoying the thought of going camping by myself (well, with the dogs, in case there are any stray shoes that need to be eaten out in the woods) and making a fire and ritualistically burning bad crayon drawings representing, O, bad decisions and bad news boyfriends and so on. O.

Well, it's still possible. It just might have to happen in the den instead of Pisgah National Forest, that's all.

project 365 #241: back seat still life

project 365 #241: back seat still life
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I'm home sick from work today. I have no idea what's wrong with me - something involving a sore throat and sore ears and an upset stomach and fatigue - and when I woke up this morning I felt totally horrible and decided to stay home. This is approximately the same list of symptoms that had young M staying home on Monday and, as he pointed out, I yelled at him about it. "Do you want to yell at me?" I said from bed without opening my eyes. "Because go for it." He didn't. Django ate my fucking rubber clogs though, at some point this morning while I was asleep.

I just feel weird - it's hard to pin down, but I'm definitely way, way off. Bah. I hate this kind of indeterminate virusy misery because I keep thinking that maybe, unbeknownst to myself, I'm faking it. "Get over it!" I say to myself, "Get dressed! Go to the store! Walk the dogs!" and I would, honestly, but getting dressed seems impossible and I have to keep going back to sleep.

project 365 #240: fog dogs

project 365 #240: fog dogs
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

My home internet is back on - for now. Charter is supposed to be faxing me a statement today that states the following: 1) I don't owe them any money at all, 2) I get the introductory rate for another three months, 3) they're not going to turn my internet off again and 4) they're sorry and they suck. Well, I'm not counting on the last part. But I better get that goddamn fax and it better be on letterhead.

In other news, M has already missed one day of school, sigh. He's got some sort of cold/stomach thing that isn't much fun (why do people always say that? It's not much fun. Aw, too bad - I remember this one stomach virus I had, wowee man, that was big fun!) so he stayed home on Monday. This does not bode well for the year, although he says that the principal says that if he feels crazy, he can go put himself into ISS (in school suspension) at any time. M loves ISS - it seems to function as that quaint old fashioned thing, study hall. It's quiet and you can actually concentrate. Of course, there is no study hall anymore and hasn't been for years. Bah - another thing for the When I Am The Evil Overlord list. M was also told he had to have a book to read, so he went out and bought one. I was excited. M hasn't voluntarily gone after a book to read since he outgrew the Magic Treehouse series. Unfortunately, this is my son, who has inherited my warped sense of humor: he got the US Army Sniper Manual. I have a feeling this is not going to go over well as light reading during 10th grade English. Oh lord, back to the school shrink's office we go.

project 365 #236: party in leicester

project 365 #236: party in leicester
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

So, yeah, still no internet at home. I can't seem to find the sticky note with the magical phone number of the actual human being who I talked with a couple of weeks ago and I'm just so. fucking. tired. of dealing with this that I'm taking a brief outrage hiatus. Tomorrow, perhaps my fury will be back up enough where I go over to the Charter office and stage a sit in until they give me 6 months of free cable or something. Because this is way beyond "ridiculous, horrible and insane" and deeply into "if I was a lawyer I'd be filing suit right around now" territory.

Big fun weekend with S and others. On Friday night S & J & I ended up going to a fairly odd party somewhere in the wilds where Emma meets Leicester. That was a strange hour or two as parties where you really only know one person (and that person is our, uh, deeply eccentric friend A) so often are. The hostess was the seed lady: the person who makes up those odd little plastic bags of seeds one finds around Asheville in places like the laundromat and Earthfare bulletin board with small rope handles and stamped labels that include suicide prevention information on them as well as inviting one to visit what she calls her "Hippie Ranch," which is, I think, where we were on Friday night. Hard to tell, sometimes. She did have chickens. We know she was the seed lady although first she told us she wasn't; but we figured that out due to the seed packets that were scattered about - also, A had told us she was. Later, after our friend J had agreed to wear an apron - a frilly apron - she thawed a bit and allowed as to how she was, in fact, the seed lady. She also called us three random chicks, as in, when we got there she said in tones of vague scorn, "Oh look. Three random chicks." Mmmm hmmm. My horoscope on Friday, as we recall, said that my friends would talk me into something weird - I wasn't the one who wanted to go to this party.

Saturday I tried to take S & C to an art opening at the park. That would have been really fun if it had in fact been happening but unfortunately I was a week early. So we had hamburgers instead and hung out at S' picnic table for a while.

Sunday S & C & K & I went tubing. Yes, again. We wanted to try it in the rain this time, go figure. And it was fun again, although we didn't go for as long, due partly to the weather and partly to the counterintuitive fact that the water level was way lower than it had been the week before despite the rain. My advice for you intrepid tuber wannabes, by the way, is that if you are driving to the Green River and it's storming and there's lightning and thunder and so on yet you persevere anyway, don't spend an hour huddled under the bridge debating whether or not it's going to rain more. It is. You might as well get into the water straight off instead of waiting for it to get itself together to really rain on you. Who cares, anyway? So you get wet - hello. That's why you're there. It was great fun anyway and we all came back to my house and made a huge yummy feast and big fun was had by all.

So, other than the damn internet, good weekend. Damn Charter. Fuck Charter. Charter sucks. And so on, ad infinitum nauseam.

Hey, Guess What?

Charter turned off my internet AGAIN! Wowee, boys and girls, this is just so much fun! So on Monday I guess I start the whole long miserable insanity AGAIN. I just can't face it this weekend.

project 365 #235: smoke rings

project 365 #235: smoke rings
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I stopped by Broadways last night for a couple of beers after work with my friend J and brought the smoke ring gun, which, joy of joys, now belongs to me. Yay. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working, unless, as the stalwart Broadways guy pictured here discovered, you give it a cigarette shotgun and then squeeze the trigger. Great art requires great sacrifice, after all.

In other news, I'm really glad it's Friday. It's seemed like a particularly long week; I don't know why, unless it's the heat. It feels like all I do lately is explain to people that this kind of endless heat is unusual for Asheville. I should tell them it's like this all summer, every summer, which, hey, given global climate change, it may be from now on and then perhaps they would move away and the housing market would crash and burn and lo, I might be able to afford to stay here. Like that's going to happen; of course, if it is going to be this hot all the time, fuck it, I don't want to live here anymore. This is ghastly. It's gruesome. It's horrible. And I'm tired of pouring sweat from every appropriately homophonic pore.

My horoscope this morning is scary: It's crucial that you keep your feet firmly planted on the ground today, for if you stop listening to your own practical advice, you find yourself in deep trouble. It might take a few days for this scenario to play out, as others may encourage you to do something that isn't in your best interest. Trust your common sense over anything anyone says. Deep trouble, huh? Not so good. My own practical advice? I might as well start gearing up for the trouble - I can hear myself now, fully into doomed last thoughts mode: "Maybe you don't need another beer. . . " "Perhaps it would be a bad idea to kiss this boy. . . " "You don't really need an $85 dress. . . " "You know that tequila shots are pretty much always really bad news. . . " "Leave that Amazon wishlist right there on the computer, don't buy anything. . . " "Don't blow your diet - big macs are evil . . ." Yeah. Send lawyers, guns and money now, okay? Beat the rush.

project 365 #234: wednesday

project 365 #234: wednesday
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

We actually did it: we got up in time and M got on the bus and I got to work on time - okay, I didn't take a shower and I forgot my lunch and my moisturizer, but still. I got my old alarm clock working; it turns out that only the B alarm works - the A alarm, which presumably was intended for type A personalities, has given up the ghost, crumbled under the stress, had a heart attack and decided to go live in an ashram in Goa. But the B alarm works just fine and woke me up to "rock" radio which was playing something that to my sleep hazed mind sounded like a more modern and faux indie squeaky clean sort of 90s Archies clone band. In other words, Matchbox 20.

I have decided to do something new on this blog: horoscopes! No, I'm not going to cast yours; you'll have to get your own blog for that. I am going to prove, once and for all, that the daily horoscopes as provided on my iGoogle page are totally accurate and right every single time. For example, yesterday's horoscope said "You will receive an offer you cannot refuse." And it was SO right. When I got home from work, young M met me at the door and said, "Turn around, Mom, we have to go to K-Mart and get gym shorts." I couldn't refuse! I had to go! See, oh you doubting sceptics? It is magic.

Today's horoscope - shortened, because otherwise you won't read it and who could blame you - says this: This month can bring you profound realizations about your relationships, especially those with a playful or romantic orientation. You are less concerned now about success or failure. And already I feel a distinct lack of concern about success or failure. Which I know is a shock, given my driven Type Z persona. Yeah.

Mornings

I give up. Mornings just have to be abolished. As soon as I become Evil Queen of the Galaxy, I'm going to make it happen. Somehow. In some way that things will happen without me actually waking up because clearly, that's impossible. I set two alarm clocks last night. (I also mopped the kitchen floor and scrubbed every inch of the bathroom, but my bruised, chipped and battered heart got another setback, so that's par for the course.) Yes, two alarm clocks, one of which was freshly obtained from my mother so you know it worked and one of which was obtained from my mother umpteen years ago and you know it used to work before we moved but maybe it was highly location specific. It certainly doesn't get WNCW anymore but then that's no great loss since I've lost my taste for waking up to 1940s cowboy warbling, go figure. Anyway, to noone's great surprise, I must report that neither alarm clock went off. Both failed to alarm. Unalarming was the order of the morning. And the canine alarm clock slept late which meant that I woke up at 7:40 which is absolutely completely very bad no good and horrible when M has to leave the house at 7:45 if he wants to catch the bus. So we had another fun ass morning of shout, shout, unwashed M into car, traffic hell (we are SO much further away from Asheville High School in the new house and it is just no good at all) etc, etc, dogs unwalked and me 40 minutes late to work. I am consequently bitter and disinclined to effort. Also, my throat hurts.

My throat hurts because my extremely local economy, to wit, my household, is suffering a financial slump and so I've switched from American Spirit Ultra Lights to Camel Lights, which are a dollar less a pack and which I used to smoke back in the bad old days before hippies had their own special brand. I have noticed that they make far better smoke rings than Spirits do, but for whatever reason they don't taste real or right and I end up smoking lots more of them. Bah.

In other news, Django went on another rampage yesterday and I'm terribly afraid that he'll do it again today since he wasn't walked this morning. Although I did beat the tar out of him this morning in a horrific display of misdirected temper at the general morning and also because he had my goddamn black Bic lighter in his mouth, which is a bit much to take when said mouth is located on a dog who is standing in the den which is completely covered in bits of fluff, foam and upholstery from one of my couch cushions which he essentially destroyed yesterday. And his collar. This is the third damn collar he's gone through in a month and if he hadn't eaten it he'd be tied up way out in the yard today because mama has HAD it. Again.

project 365 #232: another lame parking lot shot

project 365 #232: another lame parking lot shot
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I have to work out this morning thing or, well, I don't know exactly what's going to happen - besides M getting kicked out of school for too many tardies and me getting fired for being late too often, which will of course inevitably lead to both of us living under a bridge in a cardboard box and training the dogs to go out and steal for us, which they won't do very well, naturally, so we'll probably starve - but it's going to be ugly. The best system I can come up with involves a whole bunch of alarm clocks strategically located around the house, set to go off at 15 minute intervals. Since we currently don't seem to own even one working alarm clock and we're broke as all get out, this solution is unlikely for at least another couple of weeks. It's a bitch and it's terrible to realize that you can wake up at 6:45 am and still manage to be an hour late to work - that was yesterday. Or you can be half an hour early, unshowered, hair unbrushed and clothes a bit dubious - today. Damn start of the school year.

project 365 #229: the perfect asheville tshirt

project 365 #229: the perfect asheville tshirt
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Here's Friday's picture, taken at the way too hot Downtown After Five that I left before getting to really hear any of the bands because, as I just mentioned, it was too hot. Also, too crowded later on.

Yesterday's picture was so lame that I won't even put it up on this blog (it's an exciting view of the cars in the movie theatre parking lot, woo hoo) but I did want to report that I went with my friend J to see Stardust and it was AMAZING. I think it might just be the perfect movie. I was totally enthralled. I loved it. I want to see it again. I kind of want to see it every day for the rest of my life. And I want to go live in that world instead of this one, which I realize is an ongoing theme in my life.

I spoke sternly with myself on leaving the movie theatre. I spoke very sternly about growing up and getting rid of the fantasy novels and not getting sniffly eyed about silly romances set in fictional universes and I reminded myself what a waste of time and energy all this fantasy stuff is. "Self," I said, "You must give all this stuff up and endeavour to live in the real world. You must read non fiction and get more up to date on world affairs. You must give up this hopeless, doomed quest for romance and focus on your career. Get to work, self," I said, "And stop sniffling. It's unbecoming. You need wrinkle cream. Also, you're fat." Fortunately though, after a brief wrestling bout sparked by the word fat, I managed to throw the voice in my head right out the window and now I'm happily back in my own weird magical universe, where I'm much more at home.

Tubing

We tubed down the Green River today, me and C and J and K. It was awesome. I've never actually done it before - once, a few years ago, C and I and J (a different J) went down there to go tubing but by the time we'd driven the switchback road to the bottom of the mountain to the place where you get tubes, the sky had opened up and thunder was pealing through the gorge. So we stood for a long time under the bridge and read the graffiti and watched the soaked, shivering tubers come down the river. I thought at least someone would get electrified, but it didn't happen while I was watching.

Today, of course, since it hasn't rained in 7 weeks or so, there was no fear of a storm. So we drove the long road down, hairpin turn after hairpin turn, got our tubes and onto the schoolbus and up to the put in, where there were cops watching to make sure nobody had any beer. That kind of sucks, although I can understand why they made alcohol illegal on the river last summer, but there were points in that four hour trip today where I really, really missed the cooler full of beer languishing in the trunk of K's car. (I had been hoping that that law was just some kind of not real thing. Alas, they're serious.) But we had filled C's backpack with vitamin water and grapes and melon and a bag of cheese cubes that stayed edible surprisingly long.

It was crowded and insane. There's a wide, wide mix of people who tube down the Green River on a hot as hell Saturday in August when the heat hasn't broken for weeks. You get to know them as you bang into them and they kick you in the head and so on - actually, mostly everybody was really nice. We made friends on the first leg down - a cool guy named Bear and his friends. Bear had a paddle with his tube and was an expert; he also had a lengthy conversation about tax law with some other guy as we floated. That's impressive, really. Tax law. We hung out with them for a while. There are kids. There are older people. There are people with impressive ink and people with, uh, less impressive ink and then there are people in blue jeans, long sleeved shirts and black shoes. They look a bit odd next to the girls in bikinis. Some people are serious and manage to bring their cigarettes and lighters and keep them dry. On the first leg I blew this entirely - on the second I managed to keep two dry, although I gave one away. I'd bummed half a Newport and been glad of it myself earlier - cigarettes are gold on the river.

When you go to tube down the Green, if you're coming from Asheville and points west, the first tubing place you run into is called Wild Creek. Or Wilderness Camp. Or something else entirely; all I know for sure is the tubes all say WC on them, which is amusing: less amusing while you're floating, much more when you're out of it. If you're coming from the other direction, which I guess is South Carolina, you get to Silver Creek first and your tubes say SC on them. They're also a different color, and I got this mental picture of the two campground/tubing places getting together every year and deciding on who had what color tubes this year. You get your tubes where ever, anyway, and leave your car and decide what you should bring with you (I went to Ingles this morning and got a waterproof disposable camera and I can hardly wait to get it developed) and what you should leave and then you climb into the school bus. You choose whether you want the one hour ride, which is down to where your car is, or the three hour ride, which is to the second bridge and the one we did, which took in actual fact about four hours, or the four hour ride, which I'm glad we didn't do, since ours was really enough.

There are rapids and some of them are super rapid. The trick is to pull your whole body up over the top of the tube and hope to god you don't turn over. If your butt is still down inside the tube your butt will get whacked, and severely. We sang, "Keep your ass up. . . Keep your ass up. . . Hold your ass high!" to remind us of this simple fact. There are bamboo forests that make you think Ling Ling is going to wander by any minute. There are vines. There are small islands with black eyed susans and nothing else growing on them. There are big islands with huge old pine trees growing on them. There are deep lovely parts where you can swim. There are parts where there are teenagers jumping off the top of trees, which is terrifying. There are kayakers acting all serious in serious kayaks with serious helmets and serious life jackets, which you would think they would feel a bit dumb when they're being passed every five minutes by hooting tubers in drenched shorts with coolers full of "iced tea." There are houses and trailers and campgrounds with tents by the banks and often the people who live in them are playing music and standing outside drinking beer and cheering the tubers on. That was pretty cool, actually - as you move deeper into the country and deeper towards SC you go from hippie folk guitar to AC/DC.

There were two herons, one kingfisher, one snake and multitudes of crawfish. We fed cheese to some minnows, who were deeply appreciative. There was an idiot woman with a small, terrified dog, who I think got out and that was good; there was a happy Lab who swam half the river with his owner in a kayak.

It was just starting to get a little cold when we got out at the second bridge and waited and eventually got on the Bus of Terror back to the campground with our tubes. That was very third world - inasmuch as flying way too fast down a twisting mountain road in a packed, elderly short school bus that shrieks and heels on every curve is third world (I had visions of the headlines: Polk County Tube Bus Plunge Kills Many) and we passed the place that we thought was a church. From the river all you can see is this huge white cross with writing all over it and a white building that you assume must be a church. Instead, as far as we could tell from the road, it's a Christian tube rental place. Like, perhaps you could rent a giant inflatable cross, and the whole family could cling to that as they washed down the river. Wet with parable action! Or maybe it's the church of Christ Watersports, in which Jesus walks on the water just for the hell of it - wheeee! Aren't there any stories of Jesus running on the water? Sliding? Jesus, in his tube, floating serenely down the Green.

It was a brilliant day. I was cranky and didn't want to leave my house because I had every intention of spending the day napping and reading bad detective novels and pretending to clean up and I'm so glad that I went out to the river instead. We all ended up at my house where I made pizza and salad and we drank the beer from the cooler in that perfect, summer tired from sun and swimming, pulling cans of beer out of icy water way.

project 365 #228: blurry thursday

project 365 #228: blurry thursday
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I got home last night after work only to discover that, quite unbelievably, Charter had turned off my internet AGAIN. I still can't quite believe it. To add insult to injury, I tried to call them but their 1-800 number was busy. For half an hour.

I'm going to reiterate everything that's happened with me and Charter in this post so I have it all neatly in writing somewhere. That way, if I do blow them up, no jury will convict me. I'm also going to ask all of you who read this to link to it. You know I never ask for links, but I'm asking now. I want this to get around. I want this article to be on the front page of a google search for Charter Communications. I am beyond anger and into a sort of deep, shaking, silent rage.

At some point during the first week of August, Charter turned my internet off. I called them the morning of August 3 to straighten this out. They claimed that my internet had been turned off because I had not paid my bill since May, when I moved. In actual fact, they had been siphoning $55 out of my bank account each month. When I pointed this out, they at first accused me of getting internet at two houses and then said, well, alright, we screwed up and we'll credit your account at the new house with all the money that we have removed. So that was an hour on the phone and some screaming and one would have thought, well, perils of modern life and all that, right, but it's over.

Wrong. It was not over. Charter would proceed to turn my internet off again for the same reason on Sunday, August 5: another hour long phone call, same resolution.

And again on Friday, August 10: another hour long phone call with bonus screaming which took place on Sunday, August 12 and ended up with them -

Turning it off again an hour later. On Monday, August 13 I called again and spoke for, yeah, about an hour, with a supervisor named Monica who assured me over and over that it was all taken care of now.

And it was until last night, when they turned it off again and I am even now summoning up my courage to call the assholes again. Even though what I need to do, clearly, is go down to their offices with a lawyer and sue the fuck out of them. We're going into 5 hours of phone and you know what? I charge. I charge $50 an hour (yeah, shut up. If I was a serious graphic designer I totally would.) and I figure at this point that Charter owes me $250 in lost time and an additional $250 pain and suffering. Or possibly more. And I am angry. Did I mention I was angry?

Project 365 #227: Half a Cucumber Yeah

Project 365 #227: Half a Cucumber Yeah
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

The daily photo is a pain again. It's fine and fun on the weekends mostly but during the week I just don't seem to be interested in photography. I'm much more interested in making dinner, cleaning it up and getting the hell to bed at a reasonable hour for a goddamn change do you hear me young man? So I end up taking pictures of my whimsically labeled produce.

I'm busy at work trying to teach myself, with limited success so far, Indesign. It's cool and I like learning new things but I feel a bit swamped. Ah well. What the hell. The world is just moving right along, day by day, and young M seemed to have a fairly good first day of school although he reported that cafeteria prices have skyrocketed over the summer. This does not surprise me given that I have noticed our grocery bill skyrocketing as well. I think it was a bad year to give up vegetable gardening.

Issues: An Email I Just Sent Out

I have no phone - yesterday, I had no phone, today, I have no phone and tomorrow, I will have no phone. Perhaps I will have a phone this weekend. Next week, probably no phone again. So if you are trying to call me (wishful thinking on my part) and can't get me, that would be why.

This is because M has my phone since he lost his phone and I can't replace his phone until the bank replaces my debit card which I lost (although I didn't really, but I thought I did and that was enough.) I feel that he needs a phone more than I do, although I grant you this is debatable. So. What a tangled web we weave, indeed. Sheesh. Therefore, if you would like to get in touch with me, you have three options: email, call me at work 9 - 5 M-F - or just come over to my house. Sorry for the inconvenience, y'all - just a little 21st century glitch. Technology makes our lives easier every day in every way.

project 365 #226: back to school shopping sunset

project 365 #226: back to school shopping sunset
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

A Few Couple of Sorta Lame Observations:

1. This morning, I had a choice between maybe being on time to work for the first time in, oh, a few weeks or watering my plants. This is one of the great moral dilemmas of our time.

You know what? Everyone else is late to work too.

2. I have finally gotten to the point where my most recent most favorite CD of all time no longer reminds me of a vanished lover.

Now it reminds me of missing his unworthy ass. Damn, but I guess that's progress.

3. Surely, I thought to myself on looking at a photo of Catherine Deneuve in an advertisement in the New Yorker, I will age like her.

Fat chance, Fliss.

project 365 #225: self portrait in reflecting ball

project 365 #225: self portrait in reflecting ball
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

God help me, I'm just back from back to school shopping. As if the sticker shock wasn't bad enough, we had to eat at McDonalds (this is called bribery) and listen to Project Pat full blast in the car (this is called I love my son.) My head hurts and I spent waaaaaaaaay too much money on:

1 backpack, the cheapest one, since he'll lose it. Black. All black. With a million unnecessary pockets that will never be used.
3 pairs of jeans "They fit fine, Mom, can we leave now?" "Can I see you in them?" "No."
5 T-shirts with absolutely nothing on them - "No pockets, no writing, nothing. Black and white only."
A bag of socks that the dog will soon eat.
Underwear about which I shall not blog lest my son ever, ever find out.
A $10 binder that will fall apart by October.
Filler paper, that I practically had to mug some other parents to get to, since it was almost gone.
2 spiral notebooks.
A thing of pens and a thing of pencils.
A belt.

Mom got herself some camisoles since she always needs them and a plain black button down shirt. And a 97 cent purple plastic compass about which, actually, she is chuffed. I seem to always need a compass. Mom's head hurts and she's drinking a much needed beer. The whole shopping interlude was interspersed with a visit to Gramma's, cheerful as always, in which she contemplated how much money we'd all have now if only my father had invested $1000 with Warren Buffet in 1950, how the world is ending by drought, plague and sorrow and how evil corporations are destroying us all. My son and mother, when I can get them together, get along famously, as you can tell. It's just so, you know, uplifting and fun, fun, fun around my family.

However, I did manage to steal back the glass french press that my mother stole back from me in May. This is good since my coffee machine died last week and since then I've been making coffee by boiling the coffee and water in one saucepan and then pouring it gently through a coffee filter in a colander on top of another, larger saucepan. This works but is way too labor intensive for every day use. Way.

Oh, and then when I got home? The dogs had eaten my favorite shorts, my black bermuda shorts. Ate the entire goddamn crotch out. Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

project 365 #224: orange butterfly 1

project 365 #224: orange butterfly 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday was C's birthday and so we went up the mountain to Douglas Falls to get out of the heat and celebrate by being in the woods. Douglas Falls, which you get to by turning right in Barnardsville and then driving forever (and by forever, I mean until the point where you're both, like, we must have missed a turn, how could we do that, god I'm sick of being in the car, my back hurts, we have to get out of this car right now before we start to argue and so you finally pull over and then look to the left and realize that, hey, it's the end of the road and the trailhead to the falls!) is one of my favorite spots. It was teeming with butterflies and so, so beautiful. It's also located in one of those little time/space vortices that are so common around here - it takes an hour and a half to get there but only 45 minutes to get home. I swear this has held true every time I've ever been there. Go figure - like severely localized rain, it's one of those WNC things.

So I just got off the phone with Charter yet again and I'm composing a scathing letter of complete fury and disdain that will be posted here and, hopefully, everywhere else in Asheville and the world. I have been assured - for the fourth time - that my account has been fixed, that the money they have been withdrawing from my bank since May has been properly credited and that they are not going to shut my internet off again. Yesterday, in a display of charm, tact and remarkable customer service, they shut it off an hour after their extremely nasty rep had hung up on me. Today I spoke at some length with a supervisor. I also found out where their Asheville offices are and it's all I can do not to go straight on down there. Heavily armed. Or at least with a lawyer or six. Honestly, this whole thing has been unbelievable and horrific and if there was any, any viable alternative to Charter in the internet/TV world around here, I'd be going for it right now. Charter Communications are loathesome scum who deserve to be imprisoned in some kind of Dantean nightmare for eternity. Charter sucks. And sucks some more. And did I mention that they're evil scumsucking pig bastards? Because they are.

project 365 #222: jodi on her birthday

project 365 #222: jodi on her birthday
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

So I didn't blog on Friday because I was getting ready for my friend J's surprise birthday party, which I organized (with mucho help from J's boyfriend D and our friend S) and which happened Friday night at Broadways and was, let me tell you, one of the great blowout gigandor fun party bashes of our time. Like, monumental. Like, it's Sunday now and I've finally mostly recovered.

On Thursday night I made two cakes - a chocolate raspberry pound bundt cake and a cappuccino chocolate chip cheese cake. This meant that I had the oven on in my unairconditioned house for two and a half hours, which in turn meant that my house went from its recent normal average of about 88 degrees to about 116 degrees and stayed there. It's been so fucking hot lately that it just sort of never cools off inside. But anyhow. Pictures of the cakes are on my computer at work. I dared not upload them lest J by some fluke look at my blog or flickr stream and deduce our plans. She called me on Thursday and said wistfully that, well, tomorrow was her birthday and would I like to have a beer or something? "Oh, sorry hon," I said nonchalantly, as if I wasn't aware that this was one of those birthdays, "I have to work late."

So I carried my cakes to work that morning (in a Doc Martens box; that cheesecake was keepin' it real, yo) and then to Broadways that evening where I met S who had a huge bag full of funky wild decorations and we decorated the back patio up and then D brought the unsuspecting J out there and we all yelled surprise and she was completely and utterly surprised and a whole bunch more people showed up and, yowza, it started around 6ish on Friday night and we were walking around looking for somewhere to go dancing at 1:30 Saturday morning. So yeah, it was an excellent party. Huge thanks to Broadways for being the coollest bar ever and letting us do this on two days notice. Huge thanks to my co-conspirators. And huge thanks to J for being the most awesome chick on the planet; we love you hon.

Charter Communication SUCKS

Hey, y'all, guess what? My internet got turned off again! For the same spurious reason it got turned off the last three times in the last week! So I just got off the fucking phone with Charter again! I'm so fucking lucky! I get to call Charter Communications EVERY SINGLE FUCKING WEEKEND AND STAY ON THE PHONE WITH THEM FOR A FUCKING HOUR WHILE THEY FIGURE OUT EXACTLY THE SAME THING THEY DID LAST TIME WHICH IS THAT THEY ROYALLY FUCKED UP MY ACCOUNT IN MAY WHEN I MOVED! WOW, I'M JUST LOVING THIS! THEY JUST ALSO FUCKING HUNG UP ON ME! I AM SO ANGRY I'M SHAKING!

There must be a viable alternative out there. I'm so over this I could hurl. Fuck it. I'm going to write an angry letter - a real letter, on paper - and mail it to them and cancel my fucking service. Not only are they incompetent, they're assholes. They suck. This is a total pain in the ass.

project 365 #220: wulfenite

project 365 #220: wulfenite
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Last night, in a fit of boredom, I watched the movie Dodgeball on the FX channel. I like the FX channel in a kind of horrified way: I'm all for explosions as an art form, but the commercials skeeve me out. I had actually never seen Dodgeball and I was surprised at how many little bits of that movie have made it into pop culture. Or at least internet culture, which is sort of what passes for pop culture these days. Among geeks, that is. In which category I more or less include myself. However. It was a pretty cute movie. It was mostly inoffensive, or as inoffensive as any movie that has only one "real" female character can be. Not to mention that that female character gets to pick between the lesser of two sexist bastards because, of course, she has to be mated off by the end of the movie. But, I know, I'm overthinking it; it wasn't intended to be a serious movie and so on. And I did kind of like it. I thought it was sort of sweet.

In other news, I haven't really got any. This, by the way, is a picture of the mineral Wulfenite, which should not be confused, sadly, with the movie Wolfen. Too bad, really, because a horror movie about werewolves and killer orange rocks would be excellent. Wulfenite, I have learned, comes from molybdenum, which is totally fun to say out loud but, alas, rarely comes up in conversation. At least not in the conversations I'm in.

project 365 #218: my soapstone dog

project 365 #218: my soapstone dog
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

On Monday night I went to a small stone carving workshop and it was totally fun. I think I've discovered a new hobby. Soapstone carving, it turns out, is extremely easy and, to make things even more excellent, surprisingly cheap, in that you can carve this stuff with, like, paring knives and a nail file. I was a little dubious at first, since we had to start with precut forms that were, predictably, a coyote, a buffalo or a bear. (You may have noticed, as I have, that soapstone is the accepted media for bear sculptures. Your half naked women with laurel wreaths or conquering heroes on horseback get bronze but bears? Soapstone.) However, I was kind of glad of the form and anyway, I quickly turned my coyote into a dog. "This looks like a dog," said the teacher suspiciously, "Do you want it to be a dog? I can make it back into a coyote for you."

"NO!" I said, "I want it to be a dog." She handed it back with a look that clearly said I was nuts for preferring dogs over coyotes but there you have it. Among other things, I've only ever seen like 3 coyotes in my life and I didn't exactly get a chance to study them, whereas I am somewhat familiar with dogs. Somewhat.

project 365 #217: still life with garlic

project 365 #217: still life with garlic
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I did a lot of various stuff this weekend, from the Biltmore Estate to getting new tires to a fabulous score at Salvation Army (patience, grasshopper, details are forthcoming) to hot, buggy but beautiful hiking in Bent Creek with the dogs to the Biltmore Village Arts & Crafts Fair. And other stuff, too, that included beer drinking and general fun and alas, smoking waaaay too many cigarettes, for which I am paying in today's smoggy heat. I would have liked to blog about this stuff. But I did not, which leads me to the following two observations about this past weekend:

It was hot as fucking Hades and I HATE CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS. I had no internet last week. So on Friday, since I had divined that this was going to be one of those things that involved hours on the phone during working hours, I called up Charter. Before I called up Charter, I dug through my recent correspondence with Charter, which I hadn't opened because, beacon of efficiency that I am, I let them just take their monthly pound of flesh out of my bank account directly and they send me a statement. I knew the money had been disappearing, so I didn't bother to open the statements. Charter, for their part in this symphony of ignoring, hadn't bothered to switch my account over from my old house and had happily been double billing me since May 15. Yeah. So they felt that I had never paid my bills at the new house and consequently they had taken away my internet although not, for some inscrutable reason, my TV.

It took a while to sort all this out and at the point where the customer service rep started to get snooty and suggest that perhaps I was some kind of evil fraud meister who was simultaneously getting cable at two separate houses, I lost it. Unfortunately or fortunately, in this day and age, losing it completely and shrieking like a batshitinsane bitch on steroids is the only way you can get these people to actually do anything. So they got my cable on again, in the midst of which we discovered that they had never switched my modem over and I should probably never have had working cable internet and so on and so forth and then finally it was done and I was content.

Until Sunday, when it happened again and I had to go through the entire goddamn same conversation (with additional screaming) again with a whole new rep. That's also when I found out that calling Charter's tech support line will get you a dysfunctional voice mail that just says "You have entered an invalid number" no matter what you do until you hang up. I was a bit rabid by the time I finally got through and then I just had to leave the house in disgust, argh.

However. All this is made up for by Friday's score. Friday morning I went to the Tire Barn on Patton Avenue (in WNC, btw, these two words rhyme, which is awesome) and while the really nice older Tire Barn guys were putting 2 new tires on my car I went next door to the Salvation Army. That's another good thing about Tire Barn - it's right next to a lovely strip mall containing not just a big Sally's Army but a head shop, a Sally's Beauty Supply, a giant store of wicker furniture that I have never been in, a taqueria and a KFC. Excellent. So at the thrift shop I perused the paperbacks, as is my invariable habit, and I scored a Wodehouse and a trashy sci fi novel called the Legacy of Heorot and, oddly enough, Minnie Pearl's autobiography. Cool, I thought, I've always liked Minnie Pearl, even though I know nothing about her. Guess what, gentle readers? It was signed! Yeah! I now own a copy of Minnie Pearl's autograph! Yeah! Woot! I have no idea why this excites me so but it does! Go me!

project 365 #215: biltmore estate

project 365 #215: biltmore estate
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

My friend D and I finally used up the free Biltmore Estate passes I got for working the flume there last summer. We spent the afternoon - a rather long, hot, dizziness inducing afternoon, actually - at the Biltmore Estate and we did it all, from the House to the Gardens to the Greenhouse to the Gifte Shoppe to the Winery. Actually, it was really fun. I haven't done the Biltmore like that in, oh, about seven or eight years, which I think is about the right interval.

They won't let you take pictures inside the House, which I think is serious bullshit and so, so dated and ridiculous. But then the Biltmore has been known to be dated and ridiculous before, and also, noone has ever accused the Cecils of being unable to wring every penny of profit out of every single opportunity they can dream up. If you can't take pictures, they reason, you must buy them. So what they do is ambush you as you come around the corner from the formal dining room and take your picture with the Conservatory in the background. Then they give you a coupon and when you leave, your utterly hideous portrait is awaiting, along with an 8 by 10 highly colored glossy of the outside of Biltmore House, for the low low price of, get this, $21.95. Yeah. $21.95 for two, not particularly high quality, digital prints.

Still, the house and gardens and all are amazing. I know, I curse the rich along with the best of them and yield to noone in fury against the running dogs of the imperialist capitalist oppressors of the people but still. It's a wonderful place in some ways. And even if the Biltmore corporate robot drones, who have like the strictest and most insane dress code ever, are evil in their refusal to hire the tattooed, pierced, mohawk'ed, non pantyhose wearing and/or bearded masses (and, one wonders, exactly how DO they staff the place with requirements like those? This IS Asheville.) but if it wasn't there, it would be another horrible Hendersonville Road like sprawl of condos and Mickey Ds. And it's so damn beautiful, so amazingly, achingly beautiful. I'd live there. In fact, I think that when the end of the world comes that's exactly what I'll do - get all my grunged out friends together and clamber onto our spiked out vehicles with our tough dogs and black leather and move into the Biltmore. We can put machine guns on the towers to keep away the zombie aliens flesh eating bacteria monsters and finally fill up the pool in the basement with water and swim in it, which I have wanted to do since the first time I ever went to the Biltmore when I was about 16 or so.

After the house and the gardens and the hothouses and so on, we went to the Winery, where they made us sit through a short and dreary video about the general wonderfulness of Biltmore wines, which, as any Ashevillein will tell you, is something of a joke. Released, we dashed immediately for the tasting bar, where a genial soul poured us small amounts of a panoply of wines. The only good one, and by good I mean you might actually drink it again not under duress, was, distressingly, a Pinot Blanc, which is to say, pink. Quite pink. Rose. Whatever. I bought a bottle for my friend J's birthday next week because the evil Biltmore marketing plan of getting their guests mildly schnockered in the Winery and then steering them through a huge wine themed Gifte Shoppe worked on me like a charm.

Then we went over to my friend S' house where we were joined by none other than J herself, who, during the course of a long and really fun evening of just women drinking beer and laughing for hours, mentioned her eternal hatred and loathing for pink wine from the Biltmore Estate. Well, obviously I had to give it to her right then, which led to much hilarity. It was a long and lovely day, all in all.

project 365 #214: valorie miller at the westville pub

project 365 #214: valorie miller at the westville pub
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I went to the Westville last night with my friend E to see Valorie Miller. It was a lot of fun and the music was totally amazing. E was hilarious; she is a huge, huge fan of Valorie Miller and was just sitting there gushing like a schoolgirl. Kind of the way I behave at a James McMurtry gig, actually.

I was out back smoking cigarettes with my friend R for a while as well. There was an idiot girl there with an intact young male pit bull and it's purely because he was so young and essentially sweet natured that nothing bad happened. Jesus, drunks with dogs: that girl didn't even know there was a dog at the end of her arm. She kept sort of dropping the leash and cooing, "ooooh, he's so cute." Uh huh. He was cute but jesus - there were other drunks with dogs there as well.

My opinion of all this was validated by R, who is a total dog expert and owns the Soapy Dog (which is where you should all go to wash your dog in Asheville, right now, immediately) which made me feel better and also pleasingly expert like. I have nothing against pit bulls who are properly socialized and trained - there's one in Baltimore I purely adore, actually - but they are dog aggressive, there's no getting away from it, and the interactions this one was having with other dogs were right on the borderline of getting very bad indeed. Fucking idiots. My dogs are, of course, perfect. Yeah. And R is going to loan me a crate for my Buddhist dog to prevent him continuing with his teachings - the teachings that inform me that attachment to material possessions, particularly of the delicious pillow and quilt type, is futile. Fucker ate a case of CDs yesterday and really crunched down on Lucinda Williams. Fortunately it was Essence not Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, but still.

project 365 #213: new lighter from peru

project 365 #213: new lighter from peru
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday some of my coworkers gave me a gift: this beautiful, amazing, googly eyed frog which, you're never gonna believe it, is actually an indigenous art form from Latin America! Yeah! It was handcrafted out of native unspoiled organic sculpy by some disadvantaged yet culturally pure Latin Americans up in the mists of the high Andes, where they have been making lighter cases for thousands of years. A village where the Googly Eyed Frog is a deeply spiritually significant totem animal. I know this because my fabulous new lighter came with a business card which reads (in four colors, yet, no expense was spared, or maybe they're manufactured by the ancient Macchu Picchu business card printing village) Pichincha: Spirit of the Andes. "Spirit of the Andes?" I said, examining my lovely froggy gift, "God, I hope not."

It is about the most fabulous thing ever. On the back there is a sculpy leaf and another small polished stone. There's one under the belly of the frog, too, but you can't see it since I tweaked this in photoshop to make it, you know, artsy and dark and somewhat foreboding. I wish my lighter to inspire fear. Fear and love, that's the ticket.

In other news, Django had another banner day of destruction yesterday. He cannot be left alone in the house all day or he goes nuts and chews stuff up - and I'm already running him for 40 minutes or so every single damn morning, so it isn't a lack of exercise. Theo is there with him but that's not enough, and since young M has apparently moved to his friends' house in Candler and wishes never to return home, soon I will be totally and forever pillow bereft. Yesterday he got two more pillows and most of a sleeping bag, plus he dragged half of M's clothes out of his room and into the den. Goddamn dog.

project 365 #212: sunset clouds and trees

project 365 #212: sunset clouds and trees
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I'm a bit disgruntled today, partly because I stayed up waaay too late last night listening to music and considering making intensely message filled mix CDs for pretty much all my friends. Fortunately, I didn't carry through on this. Yet. It's such a weird adolescent impulse, the desire to use pop songs to express your every wish, hope, dream and thought. Also, it doesn't work very well. You may be sure that this exact mix that goes from, say, the Buzzcocks to the Jayhawks to Lou Reed is expressing a precise and complicated mix of emotions such as "I miss you but I know you had to leave but all the same I wish you hadn't of left like that, I mean, you could have called me, you shit, plus by the way I have this huge painful bruise on my leg from the dog that reminds me of that day six months ago when you said that thing that almost, but not quite, broke my heart, remember that? Did I tell you about that?" but, once it's in his hands, the recipient is just thinking, "God, I can't believe she put Bitchin' Camaro on there. . . jesus, I hate that song."

I'm not sure what it is in the human soul that believes that it's possible to communicate in complicated ways other than language, because honestly even language doesn't really work all the time and conversations and text messages alike can be and are horribly misinterpreted on a daily basis. Without this fact, hell, we would have no comedy. Or tragedy. But somehow it just seems easier, if more opaque, to sometimes let Warren Zevon say it for you.