Long, Strange Trip

I'm back.

I'm tired. It was a long, heavy, strange weekend in which I said goodbye forever to one old friend, started to see another old friend in a completely new light, saw and cried and laughed with any number of other old friends, got confused, got sad, got happy, got drunk, got sober and altogether crammed more into four days than really could possibly fit there. Forgive the resultant disjointed prose; I drove for 9 hours today; I haven't slept more than 4 hours at a stretch since last Thursday and, well, there you have it. Adrenaline is our friend. And coffee. Coffee is our other friend.

My great and good friend Michel Zeltzman died at home after Tibetan Buddhist prayers, on Friday at 12:55 pm. I was too late to say goodbye but his family was wise enough to keep him there for a day and night after his death and so, in a way, I did. I knew him for 20 years as a good friend, a father figure of sorts (I keep tearing up on one sentence that runs through my head: I've run fresh out of fathers now) an inspiration, a help - everything a close friend should be. Michel gave me books and the New Yorker every year for years, signed Uncle Vibius. He yelled at me when I needed it and poured wine for me when I needed that more than yelling. Once he told me that I should have been a kings' courtesan, which I still consider one of the nicest compliments I ever got. He introduced my son to Welsh mythology and paid my daughter $5 to learn The Jabberwock off by heart. He sat with me all one long long night in the Johns Hopkins emergency room when I panicked after my marriage and thought I was dying. He corrected my French, encouraged me to read Proust (I rebelled, but I'm thinking I'm going to try it again) and emailed me snippets from the New York Review of Books. He was the first person into the room after my son was born. His wife and daughters and son are among my closest friends; my son came very close to being born in his house; I consider myself honored and lucky to have been able to be there with them these past few days.

When my father died I thought it was the most intense few days of my life. These past four days, when my other father died, are right up there as well. I have kind of learned a lot about family, or remembered it: to wit, families are more than just the people you are related to. This is my family, up there in Baltimore, and I grieve for and with them, and love them and they love me.

Moods

I'm in a pissy, miserable, cranky and awful mood this morning and it makes me want to smoke, or throw myself off a bridge or something. This mood was brought to you by a) stupid knee, still injured and making my life difficult; b) puppy, who has apparently decided that if I'm not walking him, well, he's not housetrained anymore, so that for the second morning in a row I began the day by stepping into a large puddle of piss on the kitchen floor and c) my son, who missed the bus and then presented me with the worst report card I have ever personally seen. If I had given a report card like that to my father in 9th grade I probably wouldn't be here typing this for you now, because it would be difficult to type missing my arms, if, that is, I was alive, which would be doubtful. I said this to my son who said that he was sorry I'd had such a rotten childhood and I said that that wasn't what was bothering me at all, that instead I was upset since I didn't have a man handy to beat the crap out of him. At moments like this I become unexpectedly Republican and feel that all my problems could be solved by the application of a little old fashioned military discipline, god damn it, whereby I would throw away everything, leaving only perhaps a shield and a gun or two and some bare boards to sleep on, and everyone would be beaten regularly and fed corned beef hash. Unfortunately I am soft and weak and not a member of the superior anything and so I always cave in and there's no discipline of any kind, really, around our house, except inasmuch as the dogs have us trained to feed them.

The other option that occurred to me this morning is more feasible, though: leaving. Packing up the dog, a few clothes, some CDs, my camera and my tent and moving on, preferably to some kind of slow country western lament about drunks and jukeboxes and the rain. Divorcing my kids and the puppy and starting a new life somewhere else, somewhere bleak, somewhere with a lonely aluminum diner and one flickering streetlamp. Somewhere I could wear red lipstick without looking like a crazy bag lady. Somewhere where I wouldn't know what the hell a report card is and they don't have puppies. I can just imagine my kids, left behind, almost like the Rapture came - they'd be delighted. They'd let the puppy shred the couch into tiny bits all over the floor and they'd all lie in them and have a generally great time until the canned food ran out and the water got turned off (they like long showers.) It's not good when I am the only civilizing influence in a household because we might as well face it: I am not particularly civilized at all.

Alas, though, I 'm not quite able to tear myself away, even if some of it is just an unholy fascination at this point, like, how bad can it possibly get? Pretty damn bad, I'm afraid, pretty damn bad. The house just gets nastier and my knee keeps on hurting and the report cards. . . jesus, the report card. I try to reassure myself on that point since even if he is doing terribly academically, at least he has a lot of friends (mumbling friends with long hair, who smoke cigarettes and have bottle rockets behind their backs) and is socially quite adept (do they honestly think I don't know a high school FREAK when I see one? What the hell do they think I did in high school? ) and, well, hell, he's just like the president. Except, of course, for the money and the family connections and the frat boy attitude and, thank god, the apparent callousness, although M does seem to think he's both immortal and always right. He is 15, it is true. Possibly M will make it to the White House yet - we can only hope that it's not with high level explosives strapped to his body.

Merry Christmas and All That

Live blogging from the wreckage of the dining room, this is coming to you direct from THE NEW COMPUTER! YEAH! It's set up and working and hooked up to the intarnets and EVERYTHING, baby! So that's our big exciting Christmas news - we are now officially geeky, a two computer household. Just in time, too, since old computer has gotten really crotchety and miserable. But it will soon, soon be happier, because I'm gonna fix it all up.

Christmas is moving along nicely, actually. The only problem is that we were visited in the night by the Christmas cold fairy, and all of us are sniffling and sore throaty and a bit out of it. I personally have been feeling for several days like I'm orbiting the third ring of Saturn, but then that's hardly news.

Everyone got nice presents yet managed to complain anyway. The dogs each got a large ball and a large bone: Theo turned up his nose at the ball and stole half of Django's bone, which made Django sad. Then they both got thirsty and nearly knocked over the Christmas tree trying to drink the water out of the stand. M got lots of clothes which didn't make him entirely happy, since he's still young enough where clothes don't seem like they should be presents, but too old for toys: an awkward age indeed. A got lots of clothes and other stuff which should make her happy, yet she was not happy, because none of these clothes added up to the perfect Christmas afternoon outfit. I got a tripod, which was what I really wanted, but I managed to get cranky about it anyway, since A & her newly made up with boyfriend J bought it for me and I felt that they should spend their money on getting a goddamn place of their own to live in rather than on expensive presents. On the other hand I really, really, really wanted a tripod. The gods bless my brothers though, because they gave everyone gift certificates, and gift certificates are GOOD, and my mother is the Santa Claus who delivered this shiny new computer, yay, upon which I am typing, if I didn't mention that already: yay, yay, and yay some more.

And I hope that all of you are wrangling along as nicely as we all are, because complaining means we're alive and for this family anyway, it seems to be Just the Way It Is. Love & Peace & All That Good Shit to you! Merry Christmas, ho, ho, ho!

Stress Rising

Well, we're only two days away from Christmas and the stress is thick enough to cut with a knife. M & A & I are all at each other's throats already: yay, Christmas. We walked out of the Five Points Diner this morning because they were out of Coca Cola: this is extreme even for me. But I needed coke this morning, because last night I was out with both my brothers. Naturally, because I was wearing the second most hideous item of clothing I own, I ran into not one but two of the cutest guys in Asheville. Death take me now: I have been seen in a Christmas sweater. Yes. Yes I own one and yes it has bows and little wreaths on it, but that doesn't mean that they had to be so mean about it. Or maybe it does. It was pretty funny: the whole conversation about how the Christmas sweater was controlling my brain, making me say bright and perky things, removing my cynicism and making me love the baby jesus. Or maybe not going quite that far.

This morning as we all spat at each other, leaving one diner and heading for another, I broke down and accused my kids of hating me, hating each other and hating Christmas. "No, we don't!" they cried, "We love each other and we love Christmas." "Oh," I said, slightly mollified, "Well, I guess that's alright then."

But it isn't. Everyone is freaking out now; M is standing behind me with a litany of Christmas misery and god, this is getting old. I like Christmas. But I'm beginning to wish I could go like Christmas all alone, in a cave in Tibet.

Ancestors

This is a portrait of one of my ancestors, proving for all time that I had some seriously dorky ancestors with highly peculiar ideas of how to dress their kids. I post it now for your enjoyment because I meant to do a far more interesting post, but alas, I've been sucked in to Ancestry.com. Every few years I get interested in genealogy and do something dumb like join ancestry.com or buy some family tree software. I don't know exactly what I'm looking for - evidence that weirdness is in my blood and bones, maybe? Some explanation for young M? The alcoholism gene, coupled neatly with the restlessness gene, as I misheard it explained on a morning public radio talk show some ten years ago? - but I do know I never find it. That may be because my enthusiasm wanes so very, very quickly. It's a royal pain, looking up all those records, and ancestry.com is one of those evil sites that charge you extra money every time you think you might have a lead. I hate that. I refuse to pay extra; it's as bad as Match.com not letting you get emails unless you pay them, the bastards. It's already ridiculously expensive and I wish they would fuck off with their intimations that not knowing when your grandparents died is somehow declasse. Ancestry, not Match, although I wouldn't put it past them.

According to family legend and rumor, I come from a long line of crazed gothic Southern Irish aristocracy. There's frighteningly little evidence to support this claim despite the miasma of secret doom, fin de siecle ennui and faded grandeur that surrounds me. Which, granted, I may just be imagining - that could be damp and dog fur, true. It's even possible that my whole family tree was made up; nobody was ever particularly forthcoming about any of it. When I was a child, I was sure that the reason we seemed to have hardly any relatives and all references to ancestry were veiled and murmured (and usually discussed only through the bottom of a bottle) was because my father was a spy, or there was some terrible secret in the family tree. As an adult I'm beginning to think that they were just all too lame to remember anything. Except, okay, there is this tendency on the part of the women of the family to go mad. These things happen in the best families, after all.

And then there is the undeniable existence of these weird cousins who come out of the woodwork whenever there's a funeral, eat a lot and then fade away again. I've always wondered who the hell they are; I'll never know, since the vast majority of that branch of the family have died off now. I think. There is the one who went off and became a Mormon, and then there's the one who works tirelessly for the anti abortion people, but she creeps us all out and we do not speak of her. Bunch of goddamn wackos, my father would say with some satisfaction. Jesus Christ, Felicity.

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!

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!

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.

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.

Apologies and the Traffic Report

It has come to my (admittedly fleeting) attention that I haven't been a very good friend lately. Many emails have gone unanswered; many phone messages have gone unlistenedto and worst of all, I totally forgot to go to a birthday celebration on Sunday night. So, friends, I'm sorry and I suck. Don't worry, it's not just you: I'm also busily being a bad daughter, bad sister and bad dog owner. I am, however, being a really goddamn good museum employee and also, I think I might be being a good parent, but it's difficult to tell, because my children are pretty much never home. When they are, though, I'm doing a lot of shouting from the kitchen about things like homework and responsibility and duty and good citizenship and, naturally, the dishes, and while it's just vaguely possible that they aren't listening to me, deeply absorbed as they are in such vital occupations as World of Warcraft and watching Fun with Dick and Jane, still, according to the 1952 Dr. Spock, quantity shouting = quality parenting. Things will shake down soon and perhaps I can resume what tattered remnants of my family and social life remain. At least I hope so.

Either that or I'll die of being too busy and in that case I want whatever eventual mythical inheritances are coming my way to go to my kids, because I saw some street kids walking depressedly from the Rescue Mission towards the park, and it put me in a tizzy of worrying about my children, who may yet wake up one day and discover that achieving Level 40 and the resultant fire breathing horse in World of Warcraft does not a useful job resume make. Then I thought about how I had nothing to leave them if I fell over and just died, as sometimes seems likely, particularly in heavy traffic on the Smoky Park Highway Bridge (which bounces alarmingly when you're sitting there at the red light) and I nearly sobbed at the thought of the two poor waifs with noone to buy their frozen junk food or wash their dishes or hear their sadness over the clothes that they must have that their evil parent will not buy. That proceeded into a small Shakespearian frenzy over who would be more likely to kill me for some mythical inheritance: my brothers or my kids? Ah, the time honored question that all mad tyrants are prone to - it is a poser.

I have come to the conclusion, by the way, that there is no good way to leave downtown Asheville at 5:00. No matter which way you go, you will sit there in hot traffic, trying to take blog notes and discovering that stopping and then going 10 feet and then stopping again in a standard shift car is really, and I do mean really, not conducive to taking blog notes. Or much of anything else, really, except wondering what the hell Ms. S.D.A. means on the vanity license plate on the white minivan in front of you and hoping that the rapture comes within the next four minutes. When the rapture comes, the traffic will improve. In the meantime, it's probably better to go have a beer at 5:00 than try to go home.

A Bad Case of Cousins

We have cousins. It's kind of like having ants, except that you know, they're people, but they have the same sort of unexpected, inevitable, unstoppable quality. Cousins shouldn't be unexpected: we knew that this wedding, the first one of the new generation, of my cousin P's stepson, was coming up, but like an ominous bad dream, we kept on thinking it wasn't happening, or that through some kind of magical anti-cousin fairy the whole thing could be avoided. Impossible, of course. Once you have cousins you have to see the entire weekend through: there is no escape.

It's not that I dislike my cousins. Actually I really enjoy them: they're nice people. I try to avoid them because I feel inferior: my cousins weem to have all successfully mastered this life thing. They have Marriages and Houses and Careers, and their kids go to good private schools and on to good colleges and then even their kids get Careers that are all far more worthwhile than anything I have ever done in my whole life. My brothers and my mother and I all say that this is because we, unlike our cousins, are Imaginative, Artistic, Creative and Sensitive and it is true that the cousins don't seem to spend acres of their lives crouched in dark smoky bars worrying about the Meaning of It All, which pursuit, of course, my family excels in. Also, they're all jocks. A couple of them came damn close to qualifying for the Olympics in tennis, and they all have the hearty off handed grace of jocks. It's good to see them. I'm glad they're all here. And they know me, which is why I have ended up at this wedding this weekend despite determined protests on my part: they wouldn't let me wiggle out. Damn.

So anyhow, I have Cousins this weekend, which explains why I just finished vacuuming the living room at 1:00 on Saturday morning.
M said, "What the hell, cousins. What am I supposed to do with them?"
And I said, "Some of them are very pretty girls," which elicited only a snorting noise.
"I'm leaving," he said, "Or I'll just say hello and go back to World of Warcraft. I mean, what am I supposed to DO with them?"
"I don't know," I said helplessly, "Play kick the can or something?"
"That," said M with enormous dignity, "is the total lamest thing I have ever heard. Dude."

Ah well. I love them very much, and it's awesome to see them, and all these kids are growing up by leaps and bounds, and all in all, you know, cousins are better than ants. It is way better to have cousins than ants. Dude.