My Friends

Three days, 10 hours, 2 minutes and 6 seconds. 34 cigarettes not smoked, saving $6.84. Life saved: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

My cigarettes were my evil friends who helped me get through the rough times by doing bad things. You know, the best kind of friends. The kind of friends who, as the T-shirt says, can't bail you out of jail because they're in the cell next door. Now I'm sad and lonely without them. And boring. I'm getting boring and less cool already, I can tell. I know it's boring you. And I don't even promise to make it - it's entirely possible that I'll be back smoking like the proverbial chimney by tomorrow night. I keep thinking I can't make it even one more minute so we'll see.

We'll see.

Meanwhile, so that this blog isn't all just one of those horrible quit smoking do gooder blogs, here is a nifty link to a variety of funky free images, always handy.

And, here is a book review: WILHELMINA BAIRD TOTALLY ROCKS! Unfortunately, like so many other authors I suddenly discover and fall madly in love with, she's not exactly prolific (drat. Drat drat drat drat.) and I just read the three Crashcourse books. SF Reviews says it isn't a masterpiece, and I beg to differ. Okay, it's more of a pulp fiction, fastpaced masterpiece than, say, As I Lay Dying or something, but shit, come ON. It's WAY more fun to read, goes faster and you don't have to deal with some annoyingly over serious reader's guide in the back. And also the main character has TWO boyfriends and all three of them are fairly happy together for the most part, even though in the course of the three books one boyfriend dies and is replaced with another, vastly better boyfriend, and all I have to say is that this situation sounds eminently satisfactory to me. Hubris, I know, since considering that I can't even seem to get ONE boyfriend I sort of have a lot of nerve suddenly demanding TWO but, well, what the hell. Might as well shoot for the moon. At any rate get & read the books. They're brilliant.

Death, I Say

So I’m not smoking. I’m not smoking because I had this fucking two day and three night long near death experience that was either the worst hangover of my life or food poisoning or a virus or a vicious attack from outer space or possibly a virulent combination of all four of those possibilities. I have rarely been more miserable. I am still miserable. I still haven’t really eaten – I had half a bowl of chicken soup and a piece of toast on Sunday night, a bowl of rice, a banana and some toast on Monday and so far today I have had water – and I haven’t smoked. I can’t smoke when I’m that sick. Now I’m feeling better and I want to smoke, but I can’t because I was already going to quit at the end of the month anyway and now that I’ve been handed this head start of two days, I need to take advantage of it.

Which means that right now, at this very moment, I truly, madly, deeply want to kill you. Yup. I hate you. Don’t take it personally; I also hate and want to kill everyone else on the planet. And all puppies and kittens, and blue skies and big rock candy mountains and all that fuzzy shit. Unicorns. Fuckin’ rainbows. Stupid crap like that. It all must die. I want to live somewhere that looks like Mordor and I want to live there RIGHT NOW. I want to lie in the black rocks and sludge and groan occasionally. I want to be ALONE so I can sulk in perfect solitude and miss my goddamn cigarettes. Also I have a headache and I’m dizzy and I woke up at 3:30 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep for two hours because I thought I was probably dying. Yet I did not die; no, I came back to life so I could want a cigarette. Shitfire.

Psycho Puppy, qu'est ce que c'est?

Even as I type this, my son is becoming increasingly late for school - the shoe bandit has struck again. The shoe bandit takes socks and shoes and bits of trash and shirts and stuffed animals and hair clips and (damn him) contact lens cases out to the yard where he distributes them in a seemingly random pattern that is apparently pleasing to the canine eye. He rarely chews them up - just moves them out. That's funny and cute and adorable; it's so funny and cute and adorable that you just want to send him out to play in traffic. On days like today, when it's inexplicably, global warmingly 65 degrees and pouring rain, it's even worse. But that's cool, since global warming is just another part of my Extreme Dog Walking experiences.

Django has gotten to the age where he's kind of like a human five year old - full of enthusiasm and energy and charm, but no sense at all. He bounces around on the end of the leash like one of those rubber balls attached to a wooden paddle: a toy wielded by a completely spastic toddler. This morning, in the warm rain, he discovered the joy that is puddles. "Rivers!" he thought (occasionally, I can hear the dogs think. Shut UP. I can TOO.) "There are rivers all over the road today! Yay, rivers!" and he bounded in. To. Every. Single. Puddle. There were a lot of puddles. He became a very, very wet puppy. He likes to jump up on me. I became a very, very wet extreme dog walker, while Theo, who has his own agenda, mostly focused on his arch-enemy, the chained up chow behind the stockade fence, just got bigger and bigger and bigger: rain affects Theo's collie pelt like a blow dryer affects a certain kind of Southern lady.

Yesterday, we were just in time to see a couple of school buses unload. Theo has never liked school buses: they're too big, too noisy, too, well, YELLOW. (What he really hates and fears, though, are UPS trucks. Go figure.) However, Theo is extremely fond of children, although he has a tendency to try to herd them. Django knows very little about children, has hardly ever met any, and knows nothing about school buses. The bus doors opened, the kids filed noisily out and Django watched in horror as the huge yellow things began to spit out midgets. He did a complete back flip at the end of the leash, ran between my legs and tried to get the hell away as fast as he possibly could. It was hilarious. Sad, but hilarious. Meanwhile, Theo, desperate for love, stood there wagging his tail so hard his whole fat self shook.

Shark's Teeth

Today at work, a group of severely mentally handicapped children came in for a class. I mean, these are kids with really serious problems - tards, as we used to call them. Before you get mad at me for linking to Tard Blog, hush up. Sure she's evil. And her blog is all ended now anyway. Still, she was funny as hell, and she was working with those kids every damn day, which is probably more than you're doing, and definitely more than I'm doing, and so she got, in my book, a free pass on some serious gallows humor.

At any rate, one of the boys today was a little out of control. He was more out of control than the boy who kept coming in and out, panting and saying "Drink water! Drink water? Drink water!" and more out of control than the swaying girl and the boy with the big, huge scar that ran up and down the back of his head and neck. This boy had a devilish grin and more motor control than most of the kids. He came swooping by the front desk, where, as you know, there is a basket of free shark's teeth. He grabbed a whole handful of sharks teeth as he dashed by.

And ate them.

That made his aide angry and she was yelling at him and pulling them out of his mouth - and dropping them back into the basket with the rest of the sharks teeth even as I tried to stop her.

It's not that I'm prejudiced against the disabled - I'm not keen on anyone's drool in the shark teeth basket. I wouldn't let the Pope spit in the shark teeth, frankly. It's bad enough that a hundred little kids a day root around in there with their grimy little fingers - saliva is de trop.

The aide was actually more interested in shopping and talking to the other aides, though, than she was in watching her charge. I don't entirely blame her, but on the other hand, perhaps she might have stopped him before -

He came through again and grabbed another handful of teeth! This time I said "Oh, no, no, honey, those aren't for eating, they're not good for you, they don't taste good!" which I grant you is fairly idiotic but some of those teeth are sharp as hell and I can't imagine that they'd go down easily. So the kid paused, with a few shark's teeth in his mouth and the rest in his hand, grinned wildly, and flung the teeth all over the gift shop. And my desk. And just around. Which, you know, totally made the field trip for the third graders from the nice charter school who were all at the time standing there gaping. And the damn aide started picking up the sharks teeth off the floor and off my desk and (naturally) pulling them out of his mouth and putting them back in the basket while apologizing all over again.

"Oh no," I said, "Really, it's fine. Really, I'll clean it up. I'm just worried about him! I think eating those teeth could be dangerous."
"He's eaten everything else," said the aide darkly, "A few teeth won't bother him one bit."
And then she put a few more spitty sharks teeth and some gross carpet gluck from the floor into the shark tooth basket and went back to the gift shop. And I hid the basket and gave everyone my best great big fake customer service smile.

Fun Homework

So my son had to do this epic tale thing for English homework in the form of . . a comic book. This is a fun assignment, right? Except for M, who became overcome with gloom and sorrow until we bethought ourselves of the Historic Tale Construction Kit. Remember them? They are fantastic and as a result, M & I just did the most totally kickass epic ever tapestried. It had better wow the 9th grade English teacher.

I'm always terribly disappointed when a project of mine my kid's doesn't get a good grade. I've never forgiven A's 8th grade teacher for only giving a C on my her Slake's Limbo diorama. I mean, a whole bunch of actual certified artists worked on that thing, and we made wee figures out of Sculpey, and even a cardboard escalator. It was a rockin' diorama, as diorama's of slightly uneasy children's books go, and it should have gotten an A. So, come to think of it, should the several papers I my children have written on Harriet Tubman. Not to mention M's "auto"biography, which took days and was quite epic itself. But this kind of homework is fun, unlike math homework, at which I am frankly hopeless. The math homework he's bringing home now has those weird quasi medieval swooping fs in it. I admire the typography, but the formula escapes me.

On a more serious note, this project was also, well, noteworthy in how difficult it was for young M to grasp the concept of the classically epic hero. He's so post modern, so steeped in contemporary culture, that every single hero he came up with at first was fatally flawed. Sure, that's what makes heroes interesting and human to us, but you don't find Beowulf emoting over his Oedipal issues, or Hercules having much of a crisis of existential dread. Okay, Hercules does go mad for a while, but that was probably manure fumes. Every single story M came up with (and there were some extremely awesome plots in there) featured a doubting, flawed hero who has to overcome personal shortcomings. It's damn hard to escape your culture, even for long enough to write a comic book.

The Watering Hole

This is an African watering hole that will happily run all day on your computer on windows media player. It is pretty nifty, really, even though so far all we have seen are bugs. Phosphorescent bugs, granted, but bugs nevertheless. Not dissimilar to the bugs we have right here in North Carolina. Still, as my son said hopefully, "But they're special Africa bugs!" And they are indeed. The soundtrack is really cool, though. The African night is much, much scarier than ours, even those nights of ours that are punctuated by random gunfire, like Thursday (I guess I wasn't the only person who got stressed out by Thanksgiving.)

My son, despite his advanced age, is fascinated by the watering hole. He thinks it would be better if there was a speaker, though, and we could talk to the (so far hypothetical) animals through it. "Wouldn't it be awesome," he said, "If like there was this lion just having a drink, and then you yelled OOOOOOOGA OOOOOOOOGA OOOOOOOGA through the speaker and he just like jumped straight up in the air?"
"Yeah," I said, "Although I'm not sure that's what Dr. Doolittle meant by talking to the animals. I mean, you know, learning their language so you can play mean practical jokes on them."

Mean practical jokes on animals can be amusing, though. Django is terrified of the rooster noise that M can make come out of his celphone, but the scary monkey-hyena-leopard-invisible-smoke-monster roaring noises from the watering hole aren't fazing him one iota. I remembered freaking Theo out one time with the sound of a fox on the computer (he wigged right the hell out) but the watering hole noises aren't bothering him either. So we tried playing some other sounds: lions and foxes and wolves. Theo did get off the couch to bark at the front door when the wolves howled, but Django just stayed on the kitchen floor chewing up a dishtowel. This proves that instinct has been completely subsumed by modern life: you know your dog is a suburban 21st century wuss if he's more afraid of roosters than of lions.

Conan Movies Are Way Underappreciated

Here at Hangover Headquarters, we have special ways to recover from post Thanksgiving stress disorder. It's a multi part process that involves first laying around in bed most of the day, reading magazines. By the way, Bark magazine? Really strange. Who knew there were so many expensive dog thingies out there? Or so many dog obsessed yuppies to buy them? My brother brought it over as part of his latest quixotic campaign, which is to turn my daughter into a dog whisperer and I read it cover to cover yesterday. Sorry, Bark people - I really hate to break this to you - but dogs aren't kids. They're dogs. I have two dogs and I love them dearly, but they're dogs. They're fine with plain dog food and a backyard and sleeping on cheap dog beds on the floor. They don't need clothes, designer bowls, handmade treats and special environmentally conscious toys that have been hand made by disadvantaged handicapped blind children in Nepal. They like empty water bottles to chew on and tennis balls. Their collars came from K-mart. Their rabies tags came from the clinic. And their ID tags came out of a machine at the Petsmart.

But wait. Back to Thanksgiving recovery. After you're done marveling at the weird world revealed by niche magazines and napping (many naps. Naps are mandatory.) you must eat Thanksgiving dinner all over again and then settle in for an evening watching both Conan movies, back to back! Yes! Conan movies are AWESOME! Conan movies RULE! Conan movies require NO HIGHER THOUGHT PROCESSES! Although you can mentally note that the director was smart in keeping Arnold's lines to a minimum - mostly he just says "CROM!" with a look of surprise. He's very good at saying "CROM!" Then his muscles ripple or something else amazing happens or they have a big old clanking sword fight and it's all good. You can relax into a leftover turkey haze and just lay back and enjoy. Seriously, though, they're not bad movies at all. Trust me on this - I watch bad movies for fun, and neither of the Conan movies qualifies - although the second one comes perilously close in parts, particularly the parts where Olivia D'Abo is required to do something besides look cute. They're well paced; they're nicely shot; the dialogue is mercifully minimal and the actors don't go insanely overboard.

Besides, my favorite movie line of all time is in Conan the Barbarian: "A couple years ago it was just another snake cult. Now, they're everywhere!" Truer words were never spoken - a subtle political observation that's more valid today than it was even then and makes the recent elections even more heartwarming, since we got to crush our enemies, see them driven before us and hear the lamentations of their women.

Thanksgiving, a Post Post

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

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

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

Exploding creamed onions in a glass bowl are not fun.

I fucked up the gravy.

I burned the rolls.

Dinner was cold.

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

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

Thanksgiving, Live from the Trenches

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

A Hidden Post

This will soon get swallowed by Thanksgiving
Which is good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dude. Thanksgiving!

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

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

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

5.

Dog Walking Fashionista

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

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

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

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

The Marathon Begins

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

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

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

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

Red Sonja!

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

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

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

Utterly Pathetic

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

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

Printer Vigil

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanksgiving, Anyone?

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

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

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

So seriously, let me know.

Me and Andy Goldsworthy

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

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

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

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

The Cops Just Came By

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

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

Shopping

Pink Feather Xmas Tree via phone
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

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

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

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

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