Modern Thought Can Get the Best of You

The Guy maniacally and simultaneously spanking the cats' asses.

It's beautiful here today. I went for a walk downtown on my lunch break and saw a very pregnant woman sitting on a bench. My first thought was, "Whew! I'm glad I don't have to do that again." Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I did it when I was younger, and I love my girls, but my tolerance for certain things seems to get so much lower the older I get.

I'm also glad I'm not as poor as I was back then, I'm glad I'm not in an abusive marriage, like I was back then, I'm glad I have more free time and I'm glad I have a hell of a lot more options than I did in my twenties. Of course, the cats are kind of annoying, but that's just a given, right?

Kiss Me Now That I'm Older

Me on RAGBRAI in 2006.

Soooooo. People have been asking if I really love to ride that many miles on my bike, or if it's something to do as a way to spend time with The Guy. Well, let me tell you about my cycling history then:

I first started riding bicycles with my brother, before I ever got into running. He got a really nice ten speed from his Big Brother (he was in the Big Brother/Big Sister program) and I rode my 1 speed red, white and blue Liberty Bell bike with the banana seat. We would get bored and ride our bikes for hours out through the alfalfa fields and orange tree groves of Mesa, Az. and I loved it.

Then we moved to Chicago and I rode a bike to commute through junior high and high school. Running took over as my favorite drug. Running was the perfect poor girl sport. With biking there were all those gadgets and gee gaws to buy and maintain and I know I've mentioned several times that I have no mechanical skillz whatsoever.

Here's me taking a break from the bike ride and "Havinfun".

When I got to college, my brother spent the first half of one Summer fixing up an old 60's 3-speed called a Hiawatha Flyer for me for my birthday. I rode it everywhere. I again went on long rides with my brother and my best friend Mark and I loved it.

Once I had kids, my riding days were over except for commuting. I didn't have the time to go on long bike rides and couldn't really afford even an inner tube for a blown tire. I could get a hell of a work-out while running for an hour as opposed to biking an hour

In the last couple of years, I've had more time and went on a lot of bike rides by myself. Now, that I'm with The Guy, my girls are older and don't necessarily want me around much, I have help with the mechanical part of biking, and someone to ride with so I'm not out by myself for hours on deserted country roads, I am able to bike on really long rides again and I love it.

So, in answer to the question: Yes. I love to bike AND it's a great way to spend time with The Guy.

Tuesday's On the Phone to Me

Well, it looks like Coadster is settling into college life pretty well...I think.

Today was a busy day, so this will be short. I rode my bike home from work, drove to the woman's house and mowed her yard, drove home, ran 6 miles, went to the store, made dinner and watched a cheesy TV show with Stinky. I am pooped.

On Sunday when I was cleaning, I was listening to the Black Keys (who I love), but one of their songs sounded a lot like the Beatles to me and I realized I haven't listened to any Beatles lately. They can get overplayed, but they are total nostalgia music for me. They remind me of so many different phases of my life. So, I switched from the Black Keys and listened to Abbey Road and Revolver - my two favorite Beatles albums. It was perfect Sunday afternoon cleaning the house music, just like when I was a kid. How about you all? Are you Beatles lovers or haters and what is your favorite Beatles album?

The Sound of Silence

Here is a cow that I met on Sunday, warily eyeing me.

So, today turns out to be that day - the day you take your car in and walk to work in the morning on the path that runs by the river. As you pass the Dairy Queen on Riverside, you get a little nostalgic thinking about when your girls were younger and every Saturday afternoon you all went to the pool, then to the Dairy Queen for ice cream cones and then home for a nap in the air conditioning. Since you worked two jobs back then, you usually dozed off with them.

Back at work you get the call from the muffler place. The guy asks you how you are and you say, "I'm not sure. It'll depend on the estimate you give me..."

"Oh. Then I think you'll be doing pretty good then. You had a crack in your tail pipe. So, we can patch it for $48.15 and I should have it done in less than an hour..." You thank him and then extend your lunch break, so you can walk back to the shop, get your car, drive it home and ride your bike back to work. You find your afternoons are a little nicer, after you get some exercise in the middle of the day.

After work you run your 6 mile route and contemplate whether you should take one or two days off of running before your race on Saturday morning, without actually reaching a decision.

When you get home, you plan your evening. There are things to do around the house, but you got most of the gardening done over the weekend and you aren't due to mow the lawn until tomorrow. This is when you decide to make it THAT day - the day when you try out the new reading chair on your porch.

You grab your book and a drink and get all set-up. Ahhh. You think the chair is perfect and you put your dogs up on it and commence to reading sentences like, "Gary struggled to think of something undepressed to say, something reasonably unhostile, but he was rather drunk."

You realize you left your phone in the house. You consider going in and getting it, but then decide against it. Both your girls are safe and busy and you don't really feel like being accessible to anyone else. Then you remember you were going to listen to your iPod and left that in the house as well. You are suddenly aware of how loud it's been this whole time and you hadn't even noticed the dueling buzzings of cicadas and lawn mowers. "How pleasant," you think. What a nostalgic soundtrack of every Midwestern Summer you've ever spent and how odd that you rarely notice it until it stops in the Fall. How like you to focus on the absence of a thing.

The sun finally starts to set and you reenter your house, happy with your decision to make it that day...The day to try out your new reading chair. It was exactly what you needed.

Words Like Conviction Can Turn Into a Sentence

This is what I see when I look out my living room window.

Tonight I'll just go ahead and continue with the old writing exercise. Ready for the rough read?:

The first time she moved to California, it was to chase a fantasy. Her college roommate told her about how her sister joined the California Conservation Corps. and got to live in the Redwoods and loved it until she met Dinah Shore's son in a laundromat in Eureka and left the Corps. to move in with him. She didn't have anything else going on and she was 19 and she wanted to make a difference somehow. Working at two different restaurants wasn't doing much to foster her need for adventure and community service. Since living by herself in a shabby motel room in Santa Rosa made her restless and lonely, she headed down to Arizona to stay with her sister and wait until she got her confirmation.

The second time she moved to California, she had an actual job and destination and chance for structured adventure. Her loose ends felt tied up and that provided her security, but still felt a little stifling. She would like to think of herself as a person who didn't need that security. She was quickly made to realize that she was again delusional.

This time her destination was Sacramento - some kind of processing station, where they took all of her information and would later use it to place her in a site after she finished her training. The woman looked over the table at her and seemed to struggle with her words, "I see you've been to college. I'm not sure how well you'll fit in here. Most of the other kids are lucky to finish high school. They're either from poor rural towns or inner urban areas. And you're from...Iowa? Hmmm. I just don't know how well you'll fit in..." She explained to the woman that she had also lived in Chicago and Phoenix and would be interested in helping tutor people to get their GED's. "Well, okay. I guess we'll just see how it goes. You're done with me then. Go over and stand with that group there. A bus will take you guys to the training academy. Good luck..."

She walked over to the group. Most of the girls were from the L.A. area. Apparently, the style there was to wear their jeans inside out. Two of the girls stood waiting for the bus with their pockets sticking out like tongues, lolling from each hip. She had never seen anything like that in Iowa and it made her wonder if the intake woman was right to worry.

Slow Demands Come 'Round, Squeeze the Air and Keep the Rest Out

The girls' friend did a project for her English class where she recreated a picture that was taken 7 years ago. Here are a lot of the neighbor kids and one of the moms. This is the original...

As we get closer and closer to Coadster's 18th birthday, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my parenting throughout the years. I became a mom in my 20's, when I was too young, and immature and didn't have the self-esteem to pick a better dad for my girls. I was the sole financial provider for the girls for most of their lives, which meant that I continually struggled to pay the bills and day care and food and we lived above a bar for the first few years of grade school because it was the only place I could afford and it was close to the store and their school and we could walk whenever my 1981 Toyota Corolla broke-down. I didn't have parents to ask for advice, and I just had to figure it out as I went. I can guarantee you that I made a shit ton of mistakes, I was cranky, I spoke in a harsh tone sometimes and said things I didn't mean. There was a divorce, a move out of the only home they knew at the time, there were nearly fatal accidents and illnesses and much, much, much flying by the seats of our pants.

To my credit, I've always tried to be fair and open and honest and affectionate and compassionate, and if sometimes my initial reaction was one of impatience and annoyance, I always tried to come back and apologize and let the girls know that I was having a bad day and not to take it personally.

...And this was taken this weekend. Pretty cool, huh? It's so weird to see how much everything has changed in that time. Most of the facade of the house was ripped away by the tornado...And the little kids were ripped away by age, hormones and experiences.

The other day, Stinky and I were driving by her grade school. She went to preschool there as well, so she was there for 9 years. Stinky started talking about some of the proposed redistricting the city is considering. Since her school is the oldest in the district and most of the neighborhoods around it are full of college students, they bus a lot of kids there and they're considering closing it down. Stinky said that she would be really sad to see it vacant, since she spent most of her childhood there. I asked her if she had a happy childhood, with more than a little trepidation. You never know how anyone perceives things and she may not have thought the positives outweighed the negatives. But she responded by saying, "Oh yeah. I loved my childhood. That's why I'm scared to grow up a little..." I told her that for me, everything keeps getting better and better as I get older. Adult life can be hard and a lot of work, but just like having kids, it's always worth it and the positives have always outweighed the negatives. I hope it's the same for her and Coadster too.

Everyone Can Focus Clearly With Such Shine

Here was the view out of my window during last week's blizzard.

I have two things tonight. First, I'm taking suggestions about what color I should paint my bathroom. It is very small with off-white wainscoting. It has a small South facing window. What color would you paint the walls?

Second, I actually went to the pool and swam laps tonight. Weird. It was actually just fine, but I REALLY need to work on my breathing. I'm a strong swimmer, but I still have trouble getting my breathing regulated without swallowing too much water or feeling like I'm going to suffocate. Stinky was on swim team for a couple of years, so she was very helpful and gave me lots of good advice. I think if I keep practicing, I'll get it down. In honor of my swim today, I thought I'd repost my piece on a couple of near drownings I've experienced when I was a kid. Enjoy!:


As kids in Arizona, we all looked forward to monsoon season. Sometimes, it was the only rain we got all year. Once, it didn't rain for several months, and when it finally did, even the Mormon kids got to go outside after 8 p.m. to play in it.

When the streets flooded with rain we would sit on the curb and let the cars splash all the dirty, oily water off the road onto us. We also loved to have boat races in the gutters. My best friend Skip and I would find twigs and start at a particular place on our street. We'd race our twigs as far as they would go before they got caught in a big pile of tangled debris and we had to start again.

One day the water was particularly high and we made it all the way around the corner and onto Horn Street which was way busier. I was walking backwards, just ahead of the twig-boats because I was winning and really excited. Once we got to the next corner, I was suddenly sucked into a drain where the manhole cover had come off. I couldn't see or breathe very well in the muddy run-off. All I remember is that my friend Skip's hand found my arm and was able to pull me out against the force of the rushing water. I know I should have been indebted to him forever, but my friend Marcia and I stuck rocks down his pants where his butt-crack was showing the very next day.

I was four years old at the time of my first near drowning. My brother and I were both learning to swim at the same time. Back then, my Uncle Jack had been recently divorced and was living in an apartment building with a pool. My uncle was working with us on our swimming lessons that day. He left me to hang on to the side of the pool while he went over to my brother. At some point, I got tired of waiting for him to come back and I simply let go. I think it was the only time in my life when I didn't spaz the second I was in danger. I calmly sunk to the bottom of the pool, and when my Aunt Merilee saw what happened, she jumped in after me. She was of a heavier build and was fond of wearing those big, floral muumuus. I have no recollection of what happened after she saved me. Did I cry? Did my parents cry? Who knows. It's all eclipsed by the image of my Aunt Merilee's gigantic dress opening out like a parachute once she hit the water.

Okay. Now, I'm going to fill some cracks in my bedroom walls with drywall and go to sleep, so I can face my day off in the middle of the week well rested.

But Now it Feels So Strange Out of the Atmospheres

Stinky getting beaned with snowballs by the neighbor kids on her walk home from grade school.

Well, bloody hell, kids. It's been a long night of packing and sorting and cleaning in my world. I know that they say you never know what you've got 'til it's gone, but right now it seems more accurate to say that you never know what you've got 'til you have to pack it and move it. I tackled the huge walk-in closet in the girls' room and to everything I pulled out, someone would say, "Wow. We still have that?" I'm sure that will be even worse after I've had a garage for a couple of years.

I'm at that point where I'd be happy just to toss everything, rather than move it. Luckily, most things are boxed up, so I don't get rid of stuff like this year's tax documents or my high school and college diplomas or the girls' birth certificates.

I think I'm going to ask to take off work a couple of hours early tomorrow, so I can stop by Goodwill and the recycling center, before they close and while it's still light out.

Coadster goes to her dad's tomorrow night and then leaves for All State in Ames on Thursday afternoon, so this is her last night at this house. We've been here for eight years, so it feels kind of weird for all of us. But we're on to a new adventure, and life is always better with a new project and and a new adventure... At least as far as I'm concerned, anyway.

And It's the Damage That We Do and Never Know

My last daisy hanging on for dear life in November.

Tonight was a blur of people viewing my apartment, running and driving the girls places. I'm going to try to write a little fictiony'ish thing on here tonight. Since I'm moving again, I thought I'd write a little on that theme. It was from a time in my life when I was in my late teens and moving every few months to a year. I like to call them my lost years. This particular incident takes place on a Greyhound bus ride from Santa Rosa, California to Tempe, Arizona. I will warn you that this is an EXTREMELY rough draft that may or may not turn into anything. I'm sure it also has miles to go before I can veer it away from self-indulgence, but I gotta start somewhere don't I? Here we go:

It was the first time since she was a kid that she felt it. That hot, dry wind that came close to singeing off her eyelashes when she stepped off the bus. She could almost feel it sucking the natural oils out of her skin. She remembered it fondly. Southwestern wind was so different from the heavy, humid air in the Midwest, that bogged down everything and was always breathing down her neck.

When she was little and lived in Arizona, she used to jump in the middle of dust devils. She liked to be in the center, looking out at the dirt swirling around her. She always came out feeling cleansed...Until her mother told her that she could catch Valley Fever playing in them.

This is exactly what she needed, she thought walking through the parking lot to Kmart to buy some new batteries for her Walkman. This change in scenery and climate. She was just killing time, logging miles waiting for her job in the California Conservation Corps to begin in a month. Originally, she thought she'd stay in a motel in Santa Rosa for that time. She had felt alone so many times in a room full of people when she was in college. She thought the real solitude might do her good. You know, give her something to be lonely about. But it was too much for her. Being left alone with all of her thoughts, and without anyone distracting her from the places her brain took her, was almost more than she could handle. So, she was heading back to Arizona to stay with her oldest sister for a few weeks.

There was always the hope that she would be a different, better person when she moved somewhere else. A person who wouldn't get chased out of her motel room by her own thoughts. The hope was that moving to California would make her more comfortable in her own skin. But there she found herself, in a parking lot, walking in a hot dry wind. Without even the slightest chance of it drying out her skin enough to finally shed it. She had definitely given herself something to be lonely about, alright.

Uh, yeah. That was a little of it. Like I said, very rough and possibly unusable, but who knows, I might be able to dig an image or a word out of it for something else.

My Luck's Like a Button, I Can't Stop Pushing It

Here is a skeleton on a fence.

Please see the post below for the back story and Part one before reading this. Here is the second part:

"Get her a bag," the big nurse says to a nursing assistant who is just checking to see what's causing the raised voices.

"What?" the nursing assistant asks.

"A bag. A paper bag. She's starting to hyperventilate!" the nurse says with some urgency. By the time the nursing assistant comes back, it's too late. I'm shaking, but not just trembling. I can't control it and my whole body is spastic. Heather says she thinks I'm having a seizure. The nurse holds the bag over my nose and mouth. My arms are shaking so badly that I can't swat her away. I want to, though. The bag isn't giving me enough oxygen and I know I'll suffocate.

"Breathe, honey," Heather says. She is rubbing my back. "Coadster is fine. They think she broke both her legs, but baby's bones heal really fast. They said you saved her life. You protected her head so she didn't hit it. It was just her little legs dangling down when you hit the ground. So, you need to breathe in here and relax. As soon as you calm down, we can go see Coadster. Okay?"

I nod my head to show that I understand. I've stopped shaking and can now hold the bag by myself. Heather keeps her hand close in case I start spazzing again. The big nurse leaves and the nursing assistant takes care of my paperwork. She makes me sit a little longer until my blood pressure goes down.

When I'm finally calm enough, they let me leave the ER. On the way out, we almost run into the nurse who has been attending to me. If I were a more gracious person, I would stop and say thanks for all of her help, but I'm not. I can only feel embarrassed. I look away and Heather pushes me past her. I just hope the nurse doesn't ever come into the business office with questions about her bills.

Lady Be Good, Do What You Should, You Know It'll Be Alright

Here is a green goblin from the Halloween barn pics I took last year. I hope you like them, because you'll be seeing a lot of them this week.

I still don't have a lot of time to write, but I figured I'd at least keep my foot in it by pondering how I want to fix my old stuff. I'm going to put another excerpt from the horse and buggy accident story I showed you earlier. I'm still trying to figure out if I want to keep it in first person or not. I once had a writing exercise where we were supposed to write about something that we were either really embarrassed or ashamed about and try to be as honest about it as possible. This portion of the story would probably qualify for both. I had a concussion and I was trying to make sense of what happened to my baby. I'll just warn you, this won't be pretty.

Heather is the girl who's parents owned the acreage where the accident took place. At the time I wrote this, I was working in the business office of the hospital. I saw everything from the back end - after people already dealt with the physical and emotional pain, they then had to pay the financial price. It was another heartbreaking job for me and I wanted to incorporate that into the story too. Here is the first part and the second part will follow tomorrow:

At the hospital I am difficult. They want me to pee in a bedpan. I can't. There is a big open sore on my foot so I'm not able to walk to the bathroom. They tell me if I don't go soon, they will have to use a catheter. I was cathed when I was in labor with Coadster and I know I don't want that again.

"Where is my baby?" I'm together enough to know that I have one now, but no one will tell me where she is.

"She's with her father. She's okay," A big matter-of-fact nurse says. "You just concentrate on going tinkle."

"Coadster is fine but you really have to go in the bedpan." Heather is standing beside my bed in the emergency room. The fact that she's seeing me like this makes me hysterical.

" I can't. I just can't, okay?"

"Then we'll just have to cath you, ma'am," the nurse says. She says the word "ma'am" with the same emphasis I use when talking to pain in the ass patients - like it's another word for bitch.

Okay, I'll end here. This post is already WAY too long. I'll finish it tomorrow.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Here is my sister and myself climbing around rocks in Tonto National Forest when we were kids.

Sooooo, no more word on how the FHA inspection/appraisal went yet. I know I say this all the time, but I hate not knowing a thing one way or the other. I do NOT need any room to create scenarios in my head. From an early age I've been way too familiar with the worst case scenario, so when I'm not sure, that's the first place I go. As a way to stop doing that, I thought I might just take my mind off of it all, by doing a little writing exercise. I decided I'd write about the first topic I read about on a blog today and that happened to be Tara at Eclectic Spaghetti where she talked about snakes.

It's not something I think a lot about anymore, but I grew up in Arizona where I often came in contact with poisonous creatures. One of my first memories was with my family being in the Superstition Mountains. My dad was holding me, so I had to be 4 or under, if he was still around. All I really recall was being terrified of snakes and not letting him put me down. He was really annoyed and tried to calm me down, but when that didn't work, he still held me and didn't make me walk around where the rattlesnakes could get at me.

Once when I was around 9, a rattlesnake wandered (or more accurately, slithered) onto our street. It must have been after work, because all the dads were home. All it took was for the kids to go home and report the snake finding, and suddenly there were 5 or 6 dads out on the street with bats, sticks and one even had a hammer. They wailed on that poor snake for what seemed like hours. It couldn't have still been alive, but from what my mom tried to explain to me, it was still moving because its nerves were somehow still functioning. It was so horrible and brutal, but none of us kids could stop watching it.

When I was 19, I dropped out of college and moved to California to do environmental work. Mostly, I worked on the Salmon Restoration Project, but once in a while we'd get pulled to do wildland firefighting or cut fire lines to prevent said fires. One day we were cutting fire lines in a park that was closed due to a rattlesnake infestation. We were told to be very careful and stay on trails and make sure we traveled in packs so we could all keep an eye and ear out for snakes.

I know this is going to shock the hell out of all of you, but I have a bit of an impetuous nature. Weird. A group of us girls were heading to a new site, and I didn't really feel like taking a trail that wound all around a hill, when I could just run up it that much faster. So, as I bounded up the hill, all the girls in my group started screaming. Like an idiot, I stopped and turned around to see what all the hubub was about. I looked down to see that I had just jumped over a nest of baby rattlesnakes. Baby rattlesnake are that much more dangerous than adult rattlesnakes, because they haven't learned how to control their venom yet. When they bite you, they give everything they have. I was inches away from the nest and very carefully continued up the hill. I never left my group or the trail for the rest of our job there. Wouldn't it be cool if I didn't always have to learn the hard way?

Ain't It Hard When You Discover That He Really Wasn't Where It's At

Here is a picture of my brother when he was very young. One of these days I'll actually take some pics, so I don't have to keep recycling these old ones.

So, remember how I posted part of that story I entitled 1969? Well, since I'm reworking the whole thing, I thought I'd get all crazy and start posting it from the beginning. Chronological order. Weird. I'll try to post it every week as I work on it. Just a reminder, it's mostly fiction with some fact or someone's memories thrown in for fun. Here we go:

I am eight years old today. My mom had to work, so we will have my party tomorrow. My dad was supposed to get my cake and decorations but he wanted to stop at the track for just a minute and now I think he forgot. Bill says not to worry about it. Our mom will take care of it later. She will be mad, but she'll get everything I need for my party. Now, Bill says we should go watch the races for a while and I can have my birthday tomorrow.

We go to tell my dad that we are going up front to see better. He is watching the horses. The old men at the track call them ponies. When there is a race going, he won't look anywhere else until the last horse crosses in front of him. Sometimes he won't look up then. He will just stare and stare. He won't look up even if I stand in front of him and scream right in his face. I know because I did it once and he didn't blink. He doesn't do anything when we say where we're going, so we know we can do whatever we want now.

My father used to work at the racetrack taking pictures of the winning horses. I don't know why he doesn't anymore, but my uncle still does and that's why we get to sit in the VIP section. VIP doesn't mean vice president. When I tell my brother that's what I think it means, he calls me stupid and now I don't think that anymore.

"It means very important people," Bill says and laughs the way he does when he hates my father. I know better to ask why it's funny that we sit in the very important people section.


That's probably more than enough for now. Tune in next week when our heroine braves even more family dysfunction at the racetrack...

Soul Radiation in the Dead of Night

Here are some cat tails.

I'm delighted at the prospect of tomorrow night. The girls will be in Dubuque at a football game, leaving me blissfully alone in my apartment. My detailed plan includes an evening of running, heating something up and eating it without really paying that much attention to what it actually is, doing some superficial cleaning and then reading my book and listening to a DVD full of new music a friend of mine recently gave me. So it is now that I'm old and boring...

I remember other Friday nights in different places that weren't the least bit boring. For a while I lived on 24th and Harrison Street in San Francisco in an apartment overcrowded with Europeans all living here illegally. I slept on a mattress on the floor in a room I shared with an English girl named Susan. We worked together and I was desperate for a cheap temporary place to stay. We didn't know each other very well. She was really pretty, but also a little distant. She came and went with different men. One night I woke up to her and one of these men sitting naked on her mattress on the floor, snorting lines of coke from a mirror. I pretended to be asleep, because I had no idea what I'd say to them. The year was 1986, so I'm guessing it was a pretty typical experience back then.

I used to work almost every Friday night at Great Midwestern through most of the 90's. Toward the end of my marriage, while I was marking time waiting to be able to move out of my house, I tried to make sure I got home long after my ex went to sleep. It was so much better than trying to avoid each other at home when the girls weren't awake. I usually hung out in the closed coffee shop/ice cream place reading books and listening to music. Every once in a while, one of the college students who worked there would talk me into going out with them. Going to the bars always seemed like traveling to a foreign country after hanging out with my young daughters all day.

I spent a Friday evening in 1999 trying to keep my daughter from pulling an IV out of her arm. She had been unconscious for a couple of days. The IV was pumping three different kinds of antibiotics into her body, just to make sure at least one of them worked. Without them she would be dead. The doctors told me it could be at least three days until we knew if she would be okay and able to respond to anything. I kept trying to calmly talk to her while holding her arms down. "You have to just leave it alone, sweetie. I know it feels weird, but you can't pull it out. It's helping you get better. I'm sorry. I love you," I said. I had been saying something similar to that on and off since they set us up in our room.

"I love you too, Mommy," she responded. It was the first thing she had said to me since before she was in the hospital.

When I lived in Los Angeles in 1988, I worked in the juniors department at the Glendale Galleria and sold overpriced clothes to young, D-list starlets. I used to have to take the bus home. Apparently, Friday nights were full moon nights for public transportation. (actually, noon on Sunday was probably a full moon experience on most LA buses too) One night I sat next to a tired looking woman wearing nursing whites. Directly across from us, a man in his twenties scooched to the edge of his seat and leaned over, "Hey, are you a nurse?" he asked the tired woman. She wisely ignored him and stared intently out the window. "HEY!" he yelled. "I SAID, are you a NURSE?!" he asked again. He was ignored again. "Well, if you are a nurse, can I have a shot? No. If you're a nurse, can I have an enema?" He continued to ask for an enema with the persistence of a two year old until the tired woman and I both reached our stop in Eagle Rock.

So it is now that I am old and boring... There are so many other Friday nights from other lifetimes, that have made me extremely happy about that.

I Rode My Bicycle Past Your Window Last Night

A recycled picture of me from about 4th grade. Sorry to have to keep using the same ones, but I'm the youngest, so I only have a few kid pics.

Ananda at Oodles of Funch was talking about her first cycling mishap. It sounded like something fun to write about, so I'm copying her:

"Put the pedal to the metal, Linetti. Burn rubber!" I yelled because I just looked back and saw the boys gaining on us. She was riding my new red, white and blue Liberty Bell bike, with a banana seat. I let her because she was bigger and stronger than me and I knew she would make us go faster.

It was all my fault the Peyton boys were even chasing us. We were in my yard eating lemons with salt, when Mark yelled at us, "Hey, stupid girls!" I never liked him. His brother Glen was nice. Glen used to mow our lawn and one time he caught a horny toad for me for my birthday. Because it was an endangered species, I was going to let it go in 3 days. But my cat bit its head off before I had a chance and I was sure I was going to jail. Mark was just plain mean, though.

So, I took aim as they headed toward their house and hit Mark right on the back of his head with my lemon. He called out to his brother and they both stopped. Before they could turn their bikes around, Linetti and I hopped on mine and there we all were, racing around the block.

I sat behind her and let my feet dangle down as we sped down the street. It was good to feel the wind against my bare legs and feet. Since we lived in Arizona where it is almost always warm, I hardly ever wore shoes. My mom made me around my grandma, because it bothered her and she would always tell me that my feet would get too wide and I'd never be able to buy shoes when I got older, but mostly I went everywhere barefoot.

We were almost at the Harley house, when my heel got caught in the spokes of the back wheel of the Liberty Bell. Clunk! The bike just stopped and Linetti went over the handle bars. I'm not sure how I landed, just that I was really scraped up and my heel was cut and flapping when I tried to walk.

All the bikers hanging out at the Harley house ran over. First they checked to see if we were okay, then they yelled at the boys. The Peyton boys were no strangers to trouble and were smart enough to ride their asses away as fast as they could.

Linetti was fine except for a few scrapes and walked my bike with me through backyards to get to my house faster. Flap, flap, flap, went my foot as I walked. And the blood. There was so much blood. I didn't cry until I saw my mom. That's how it was with me. I was always fine until I saw my mom...And then I lost it. We didn't go to the hospital. Instead my mom ran some water in the tub and had me soak my foot in it. She bandaged it after the bleeding stopped, and to this day there is a crooked smile on my right heel.

Cause I Couldn't Bear to See What I Might See

So, I know I talk about Facebook way too much, but it's such a weird thing for me. As I've said before, I moved around so much when I was younger, and I suck at emailing and calling people, so I never got to see what happened to most of the people I knew when I was younger....Until now.

I think I've also told you before that after Coadster and I were in that horse and buggy accident when she was a baby, I've had some memory loss. It's hard to know if the things I've forgotten, especially from high school and directly after, are from the accident, or a lot of me blocking out some really bad times in my life. Either way, Facebook has been bringing it back to me a little. And it's been interesting.

Last week, my friend Jim sent me a message through Facebook asking for my address so he could send me something he found. I gave it to him and yesterday when I got home from work, there was an envelope with that Deadwood photo booth strip (circa 1984/85) posted above inside it.

I don't remember taking those pics at all. He said he found it in a box of old photos at his parents house. I vaguely remember the other girl. She was a year younger than me and we hung out together almost every day for about a month before she moved to Madison and I never saw her again. I have no idea who the Tony Orlando looking guy is and nobody on Facebook has been able to help me with that either. Nice 70's stache, though.

Also last week, a girl I went to high school with got on Facebook. I liked her a lot and we both went to college here together too. She wrote this on my wall:

Churlita, I'm thinking about h.s. alot tonight, missing h.s. friends, and remembering the Anne Boelyn(spelling?) report we did for Cor-key Ste-vens. How did we ever get away with that!

I responded:

Wow, A. You are waxing nostalgic. Ha ha. I'm not sure I remember the report, but if I know myself, I bet I probably felt the need to talk about her third breast or something equally mature.

And then she commented back:

Churlita, how could you forget, we made her out of playdough and shot her head across the room.

After she wrote that, it did sound a little familiar, but it makes me wonder what other incredibly awesome things like that I did (because that is incredibly awesome) in high school and don't remember. It was actually nice to have a fun memory from high school, since most of mine are so horrible. Because I normally have such great recall, it bugs me when I forget something, but I guess I should have thought about that before I smoked all that pot and drank all that beer in my late teens and early twenties, huh?

Well Can't You Just Let It Ring a Little Longer, Longer, Longer...

A photo of Sequoia National Forest that a friend of mine took when he was making trails in the back country there in 1986.

I heard the phone ring, but thought it was my alarm. I was confused at first, because I was pretty sure it was Saturday and my alarm is only set to ring during the week. I finally figured it out and answered my phone.

Me: Hello?

Neal: Hey there. What are you doing?

Me: (Trying not to sound like I just woke up) Nothing?

I looked to see what time it was and realized it was barely 9. That would mean it was 7 in the morning in California. What kind of insensitive idiot calls someone before 10 am on a weekend day?

Neal: You feel like coming to see Van Morrison play at the Greek Theater on the 1st?

Me: What? The first of which month?

Neal: June. You wanna come?

Me: (in disbelief) No. I don't live that kind of life. I can't just take off to see a concert in Berkeley. I wouldn't miss that much work or spend that kind of money unless I was doing something with my girls. Sorry.

In my head all I kept thinking was, "Shit. Shit. Shit! How do I get out of this?"

Neal: (sounding disappointed) Oh. Okay. So, um....Are you going running today?

Me: Oh, no. I have to go out of town to do this family thing in...Ottumwa. How about you? Are you going running?

Neal: No. I might walk into town at some point. I think... (Extremely long and awkward pause that I didn't even fill with nervous laughter, like I usually do when I'm on the phone)...Hey, my son got MVP on his basketball team...

Me: That's great. Did you go see one of his games?

Neal: No. He knows I don't like basketball. I've never been very good at it. If he played football, ran track or played baseball, I'd go see him. He's fine with it. He's really well adjusted. We talk on the phone, but I just don't really have time to go visit him...

Me: (not even trying to hide the annoyance and judgment in my voice) Really? Are you serious? Don't you think he'd be thrilled if you he saw you sitting in the stands at one of his games? Didn't you say that you were really hurt when you were younger and your dad wasn't around for you?

That was pretty nice of me. In my head I was thinking, "Can you be a parent and really be that fucking selfish? Do you understand how unattractive that is to a single mom? No, probably not, or you wouldn't tell me that and still think I'd ever date you.

Neal: No. That wasn't me. That must have been some other guy you dated...Or maybe that was my brother. My brother was really pissed-off at my dad. I already told you my son was fine with that. He doesn't feel abandoned by me at all. My ex was the one who decided to move my son an hour away from me, so I guess that's what she gets...Actually, I've been talking to my ex a couple of times a week lately...

Me: Hey, that's great. Maybe you guys can finally work things out...

Neal: Yeah, well...I gotta go. My cat's jumping all around on my deck.

Me: (laughing a little at his excuse, but also relieved) Well, you better go take care of your jumping pus...cat then. Bye.

So I Turned Myself to Face Me

Here is a photo of a red door with a fun address.

I'm still deleting D songs from my iTunes. Tonight I made it through all the David Bowie I have - which is a lot. I like David Bowie. When my girls were little, they liked him too, but they called him David Bowdie. They must have felt that he needed a harder consonant to break up the vowel sounds in his last name.

When I first went away to college, I had no idea what to expect. It never occurred to me in all the years after my mom died that I would be free of my aunt and uncle's control. I think I assumed I would just drop dead the minute I turned 18, but I didn't and I hadn't planned for that. So, I went to college, because that's what everyone I knew did.

My roommate didn't show up until the next day, so I spent my first night in my dorm room alone. It was hard to imagine a life where I wouldn't be constantly yelled at, threatened and belittled. What would I do with the hours of free time I would have now that I didn't have to cook and clean for six people all day long? It was weird to think I could leave my room anytime I chose and do whatever I wanted. The possibilities scared the shit out of me.

It was all so unfamiliar to me, this freedom and a room where people had to have permission to enter. It was hard to sleep. I lay in bed listening to all the strange voices out in the hallway, trying to imagine what the people who were speaking out there would be like? Then from the other side of my room, I heard music coming from the courtyard through my open window. It was echoing off the other walls, so it was hard to make out at first. Then I realized it was David Bowie's "Space Oddity", followed by "John, I'm Only Dancing" and "Changes". I found out later they were playing the ChangesOneBowie album. I had never heard it before, but it was exactly what I needed that night. It was finally something familiar and good. Lying in bed, and being calmed into sleeping by music was something I had done since I was a little kid. I went out and bought the greatest hits album as soon as I found a record store in Cedar Falls. It was my first music purchase as a free woman.

So Says I

Here are some old recycled photos I took a while ago. The old Greyhound bus station in Iowa City.

Maybe it happened from watching too many movies or reading so many books - that thing I did, where I looked for signs. You know, like in a story where you know the one guy is going to die for sure, because he's too nice, or that something bad is going to happen because everyone is so damn content?

My friend Sara's screen door from her old house in Minneapolis.

Things seemed to be going really well right before my dad disappeared and we had to move. My mom worked and I remember my dad taking us to the movies and no one seemed quite so worried about money. It was the same thing when my mom died. I started 5th grade in a new classroom with nice kids and funny boys, I had my red, white and blue Liberty Bell bike with the banana seat and my brother and I would ride for hours past orange groves, and I just got a new kitten for my 10th birthday. I was happy. In junior high the pattern continued. Believe it or not, I was popular in junior high in Alsip, Illinois. I had tons of friends, and babysitting jobs, and I was excited about going to high school, and then my Uncle got transferred to Ottumwa, Iowa where I was miserable and isolated out in the middle of nowhere for the next four years.

What I found in the alley between Hotz Street and Rochester Ave. the morning after the tornado.

I wasn't even aware of it, but I made a connection between all of those events and decided that by being happy, I had just been asking for it. The forces that be must have decided I needed to be taken down a notch...Or 5,000 notches, and I was. The trick, it seemed to my fucked-up younger self, was to remain unhappy in general. If things were bad, maybe I could ward off the bigger catasrophes. Those unhealthy relationships were my way of taking control back then. Of course, I wasn't aware that I was doing that until later, when I got out on my own and tried to figure out what the hell I had been doing through much of my twenties and early thirties.

A cemetery off of Newport Road outside of Iowa City.

Once I looked very closely, that original theory proved false. I was with my abusive ex-husband when Coadster and I were in that horrible horse and buggy accident. I was dating the emotionally unavailable guy when Stinky got meningitis, so being unhappy wasn't keeping me safe from disaster. None of us can prevent bad circumstances. My house would have been hit by the tornado no matter how happy or miserable I was. It was in the way. In real life, there is no helpful foreshadowing. We all have both good and bad experiences and everybody dies before the story ends, not just the guys who are too nice for their own good. The true test comes in how we deal with those experiences and bounce back...Or not.

So, if that means I'm asking for it, I figure I might as well be happy and dance around like an idiot while I wait for whatever "it" is to hit.

What Did You Do to End Up Here?

Kids, I seem to have lost my internal germ battle, and went home sick from work. I must have a fever, because I'm super dizzy and most of my co-workers practically shoved me out the door, before I could infect them too. I've been sleeping on and off all day. So, I'm stealing from the old blog. This post was from January 2006 too. It's about a time I got sick from meat and marijuana poisoning. Some might say that would be a perfect illness. Anyway, here it is:

Because the Conservation Corps was a state organization, we got pulled wherever they needed us. We were all trained to fight wildland fires and floods and once a couple of groups had to go to an area in the Sierras and comb the backyard of serial killers named Lake and Ng looking for teeth and personal items of victims. Since we lived right on the border of Humboldt County, one summer we were summoned to cook for CAMP (campaign against marijuana production). No one wanted to do it. For one thing, we didn't believe in it, for another it was dangerous. Most of the growers were Vietnam Vets and had all their fields booby-trapped with fish hooks at eye level and other ingenious snares. If they found out we were connected in any way, it could have been very bad for us. The bigwigs told us that if we didn't do it, we would all be fired. Myself, my boyfriend at the time and 2 others agreed to go so that everyone could keep their jobs.

CAMP was made up mostly of CHIPS cops (man, the state loves it's acronyms) from the LA area. Picture Panch and John, overweight and dressed only in camouflage. Do you feel the bile rising in the back of your throat yet? Yeah, me too. Of course, they wouldn't speak to us and just assumed we were prisoners. We were reminded several times a day to make sure we wore gloves when we served them their food. After all, you wouldn't want us convicts passing on the HIV to them.

Their job was to fly around in helicopters looking for weed (No more lookin' for weed in all the wrong places...). When they found it, they would land, cut it all down and confiscate all the shit on the property. Then as we saw, they pinched enough of it not to get caught - the stuff, not the weed. The weed was all still green. They then flew back in the helicopters with the cut down weed in a net hanging from the bottom of it. The helicopter always looked like it had lost one of its cajones when it was flying in. Once they arrived at the camp, they would put a bunch of gas on the weed and burn it in a huge, expensive and sad bonfire.

One day when we worked there, they had confiscated 180 lbs of Thai stick in the San Francisco Bay. It was quickly shipped up to Humboldt and what didn't get taken by the CHIPS guys, was burned in a bonfire for over a day. We took turns going down to the trailer where the pot fire mountain was and emptying the already empty garbage can. By dinner time, we had been slow roasted in pungent herbs. The CHIPS guys liked steak. Every night, they liked steak. I hadn't eaten meat for over a year at that point, but the steak looked so good. Duuuuude. So, I ate half of a steak and then got very, very sick.

The best part of this story is that the next day, my new boyfriend's mother was coming up from San Francisco to meet me and apparently judge me very harshly. Even if I hadn't had the hazy fazies from too much weed and been lost-enzyme-sick from eating steak, she still would have hated me. She was originally from Trinidad. In our first meeting, she asked her son very loudly in front of me, "Why do you want to date this woodsy looking white girl when there are so many beautiful, refined, black women in the city?" Then the rest of her stay, she constantly brought up his ex-girlfriends who were all still single and brain surgeon super models. I met a few of them later, after we moved to San Francisco and I was sorely disappointed.

I dated Mr. Man for 2 1/2 years and got to know his mother better during the relationship. She was totally crazy and always still wished I was black, but she ended up liking me in the end. When we finally broke up, she kept voicing these scenarios about how her son and I would meet when we were in our thirties and both finally had our shit together and we'd live happily ever after - who knows, maybe I would submit to some kind of pigment enhancing procedure too.


My ex-boyfriend's mom took this picture the day we met and as you can see, I'm not the only woodsy-looking person in it. Can you tell I'm still green around the gills, though?