I live amongst odd people. Oddities. The un-normal. The avant. (and the savant, let’s be real about that). It’s not just my bohemian neighborhood either. It’s the people I choose to associate with, those I exchange thoughts, considerations, confidences. They are all odd and eccentric. I like nothing more than the dizzyingly abnormal. There’s my husband, who looks remarkably like a midwestern Republican, but who is very much a spiritual free-spirit with a fascination with mystics. There’s my sister, who foreswears shoes and lives a very loose interpretation of a hippy life, who also happens to be the most analytical person I know. My dearest friend is a stay at home mom who bakes cookies and fights her impulse to push over people who walk with canes.
Even my neighborhood, which is filled with re-purposed old buildings, graffiti, Victorian houses, meandering crack-heads, Civil War monuments, and junky little shops is actually a vibrant community with all the amenities of the suburbs with the heart and soul still intact. We have bike rallies, cookouts, scout troops, our own basketball and baseball leagues, garden tours, etc. Only, with a twist of punchy and irreverent. That’s how I like it: sunny with a chance of raining sarcasm.
Disorderly kitchen? I can deal. Shitty service? Makes my head spin around like Linda Blair. Share your bad waitress experiences in the comments. (and for the record, I still tip 20% on shitty service- so if you’d like to pillory me on that account your ire is better served elsewhere).
I’m going to break some kind of land-speed record for how many times I use the word penis in this post. Just so you are prepared. Those too virginal or squeamish should turn away now.
I live with executioners. Unblinking, unwavering, undaunted killers. And they both LUV me. How does a kitteh show his love? (Put your lunch down right now if you’re smart) He leaves you presents – furry, feathered, used-to-scamper-and-frolic presents. The first week of spring yielded my very own horror show version of the 12 Days of Christmas.
On the first day of spring my beast of a kitteh gave to me: One dead white bunny.
On the second day of spring my beast gave to me: One stiff robin.
On the third day of spring my beast gave to me: A still twitching chipmunk.
On the fourth day of spring my beast gave to me: A field mouse, gray with pink little paws.
He stopped there THANK GOD because if I came out the front door and screamed for a fifth morning I’m pretty sure my neighbors would have been miffed. They’re musicians and they don’t get up at the ass crack of dawn like I do. BTW, all their musician friends greet my chief killer cat by name affectionately as if they are on intimate terms. I think he’s over there sitting in on jam sessions when he’s not out killing things.
So, how do I know all these delights were meant for me? (really, put the sandwich down) They are always left on the front door matt and are in perfectly preserved condition. The bounty he takes for himself ends up in pieces and parts and requires a hose to get off the porch. I hated dissection in school, but I passed, so I can tell you what a mouse spine and a chipmunk liver look like as the water wooshes them off the porch.
The carnage had stopped for a while until this morning’s offering of a beautiful little gray mouse. The creepy part is that said mouse had been totally licked clean – maybe like a kitteh Popsicle or something. I gave the cats a little bowl of milk yesterday. Really, I would prefer to have been thanked another way – maybe by a nice lap snuggle or a keyboard crawl.
Have you ever been given a gift out of the “heart” (get it!) that you really would prefer to have not gotten?
File this under: Bat Shit Crazy Stuff that Happens Only to Michelle.
I’m grooving along paying bills while listening to The Jody Grind and this song comes on. Isn’t that the root of all choices? Would you rather be bad? The song’s really about not seeing a certain guy anymore because with him she’d rather be bad. It’s the pull of the brassy.
If you were to do a little search of my google history you’d discover that at least once per day I search for, are you ready?
Amy Winehouse news.
Yes, I keep up with her exploits daily. I have both Back to Black and the indi release that wasn’t available in the US until November, Frank. I’ve listened to both of them enough times to have memorized every word, every nuance, every bit of angst and beauty. People who know me are finding my Winehouse Obsession, well, odd.
You see, for the most part, all my choices in life have been of the “I’d rather be good” variety. Don’t get me wrong – I have my vices and tattoos and explosive love affairs like any other girl. But for the balance of life I’ve made the good choices. When I was younger I had a really robust creative period fueled almost entirely by bourbon. Did I write really great stuff then? No. But I did learn I had something to say. Once I wasn’t quite so soaked I learned how to control and shape my words. What amazes me about Amy Winehouse is that she has range, control and a searing honestly. Soaked. Soaked and pickled and on the absolute edge. She’s made the choice of being bad and made it all the f’ing way. I don’t think she has many moments of being good. She celebrated her marriage by carving her husband’s initials into her belly with a shard of broken mirror. That’s so bad it’s nearly unbelievable.
We all know Good has rewards. Even when we have these moments of bad, we still strive for good because we know it’s gonna pay off! Bad might be fun and it has it’s attractions for artists – that razor edge is where most new ideas come from. Being raw and creating something new doesn’t happen on the top floor – it’s a dark, basement activity. Some lucky artists can go to that place mentally – they don’t drag their body down, shooting up between their toes or carving themselves up, they learn to do it all in a place they can come back from. I don’t think Amy’s coming back. And if she does, she’ll be Marianne Faithful – utterly ruined, yet resolute.
I was watching Project Runway this week (this isn’t as much of a segue as it appears). One of the looks sent down the runway was worn by this lanky model with black hair done up in a beehive with a side pony tail. She looked hot. And obviously Winehouse inspired, without the missing teeth, bloody ballet flats and white powdered nose, of course. There was Michael Kors gushing like a GIRL, goofy smile and lit-up eyes, about how much he loved Amy Winehouse and how great the look was.
Watching a middle-aged, iconic, man gush over Amy Winehouse made me realize something.
At the end of the day, I think we love to watch people who actually would rather be bad than good. Especially when they make things happen. It’s just too bad the creative forces being bad calls into the world eventually decimate the artist who tries to wield them.
A Warning: If you are squeamish about mother-type things (most especially that mother of all mother things – the breast) then just stop reading right now.
Okay then. Breastfeeding has been on my mind lately. No plans to take it up again, of course, but I’ve had one of those odd full-circle moments that sometimes happen in life. My first baby and I had a really tumultuous nursing experience. Her mouth was itty bitty and my breasts were incompetent. We made it eight weeks. The other mom’s in my little post-partum yoga group would gasp and avert their heads when they saw my breasts – they were that bad. After several bouts of really severe mastitis (if you don’t know, that’s this lovely thing when your tits feel like masts) my midwife (MY MIDWIFE!) said, “time to quit, darling. Your health is declining and the baby is losing weight.”
So, I became intimately familiar with cabbage leaves. Later that year I was at one of those faculty mixer-type things that grad students who teach sometimes get invited to and the wife of one of my favorite professors was there. We began talking about mother-type things because my friend was about to rush off to nurse her baby. The prof’s wife got this look on her face that, for some reason, stuck in my head. It was a look both proud and defiant, with just a glint of malice. She then said, “My youngest is five and I still have milk.”
Huh? She then went on to declare that she didn’t actually nurse the child anymore, but the milk just never completely left. My brain tucked that little moment away.
Flash forward a few years. I have my second baby and triumph above all nursing issues. I nurse him for nearly two years and even after I cut him off he keeps asking for another three years. Poor thing. The reason I cut him off to begin with was because he was the most acrobatic nurser of all time and I just could not see allowing my nipples to continue to stretch like Cirque props.
I’m haven’t been sad to give up nursing. Until recently. You see, there’s this baby boom in my neighborhood and our discussion boards are full of all the young mother’s giving each other nursing advice and lamenting the stares and shock of strangers.
And now I understand the professor’s wife. Saying to women in the full flush of their childbearing years that I HAVE MILK is a certain claim on your own youth. Milk is bounty, it’s beneficience, it’s beauty, it’s the elixir of life (literally!). When you have milk, you are a woman with every piece of your physical passage of life intact.
When it’s gone for good, a piece of your youth goes with it.
My mother’s house was deep in a canyon, surrounded by foothills, every piece of earth covered with dry brush and oak trees. My father’s house was high in the San Bernardino Mountains, tucked into a pocket called Cedar Glen. I’ve been evacuated from both places, more than once. Evacuation is a tricky business. What do you take? How much time do you have?
At my father’s house the danger was being too leisurely and getting cut off. There are only so many ways off a mountain, you know. He was a confirmed bachelor so trying to decide what to take was easy. Hunting riffles, fishing poles and photo albums. The second-hand dishes and cheap appliances could burn. At my mother’s house evacuation had a logical order. Every car was loaded, precisely and efficiently, with a pre-determined list of items. We prioritized based on the distance of the flames. Close? Ourselves and photos. On a high ridge? Silver, paintings, books, photos, jewelry. With some time to kill? Anything not nailed down. We never bothered with clothes. Those can be easily replaced. Except prom dresses – those were always included.
We were lucky. At least, for a long time. The Old Fire in 2003 finally claimed my dad’s cabin. He’d passed away in 1996, but the cabin had been in our family for over thirty years. Both my sister and I lived in Atlanta by then – our only connection to the terror of fire came through long buried memory as we watched CNN. The fires were horrifying – filling every ridge, every foothill, and every valley – all across Southern California. You can’t imagine it unless you’ve seen it. I think I know what the end of the world might look like.
We knew the fire was raging through Lake Arrowhead and Cedar Glen. We could only hope it didn’t reach Hook Creek Road. Then, the truly unthinkable happened. Right before our eyes, CNN brought us an image of our beloved cabin burning. There is nothing quite so surreal as seeing a place of memory and love destroyed on national television. Just one more “structure” lost.”
The fires this year are bringing up all those images. Just a while ago my sister found a still shot of the cabin burning. A Riverside County newspaper had old photos up in a sort of horrid retrospective of infernos through the years.
Nothing you own safely belongs to you once you’ve faced evacuation and loss. I’m going to write about it. Someday.
