So much is happening that I'm frozen. Last night I stayed up until about four stressing. I kept up the Mister most of that time, too, dealing with my shit. We're moving, and there's still Christmas stuff to do, because I didn't get it finished before Christmas. The Bug is rotten and refuses to be happy today. I can't find stuff around here in all the mess. My brother is going to Iraq for fourteen months starting in February. We're about to spend every cent we have and some cents we don't have on this move. Although all the money will be replaced, it's unnerving.
I've just been watching masses of TV, hours and hours a day, and laying around with Mister Aran who has the week off, and eating my weight in chocolate and falafel. I wish my brother weren't going. I wish I'd kept FLYing so this move would be easier. I really really wish my brother weren't going, and I also wish he were a nicer person. I don't even expect him to be a nice person, but a step above Utter And Complete Asshole would be nice. I wish he weren't going.
It pisses me off that my mother doesn't know as well as I do how to run her life. I swear, she takes one step forward and three back at every turn. She staunchly refuses to be healthy in any way. She seems willing to throw everything good in her life away in one stupid moment. She stockpiles these stupid moments, has them every day. Every time she calls, I sincerely expect her to say that she's lost her job and her home because of some easily preventable fuckup.
Yes, I'm a control freak, okay. I hold the reins of my life and the lives of everyone I love very tightly. My son is not going to have an easy time of life and I know this going in. Let's just hope God warned him before he decided to plug his belly button into my uterus.
This is going to sound dumb, but I need to see it in print:
If I let go, everything will fall apart.
Actually, I thought that would look dumber.
That's my inner monologue, right there. Constant. Beating with my heart and my step. I thought that I was supposed to learn how not to live from my mother, so I went the opposite: planning everything, controlling everything, and when I wasn't on top of everything, worrying.
***
My mom isn't evil, she's an addict. Alcohol, unhealthy food, cigarettes, bad men, bad friendships, internet, you name it, I've seen her get addicted. She doesn't indulge. Her life is so full of sweets and fried foods and cigarettes and booze and ugly relationships that she lives
inside indulgence.
I used to think that if I just yelled loudly enough, or shook her, she'd change. Then I thought if I was sweet to her, and reflected her true worth, she'd change. Then I thought if I gave her calm advice, step-by-step, she'd change. Lately I've just been listening, and shaking my head, because I'm at a loss. She has responded well to everything but the yelling. She agrees that she's fucked up. She even attempts change every once in awhile, but she does it all wrong. She's one of those people who will decide, on New Year's Eve, to change her entire life, and spend the first week in January drinking water, chewing Nicorette and killing herself at the gym, only to fail, grinning and shrugging about the uselessness of even trying.
I know real change happens a little at a time, and only with great effort, and I know it's worth it. She doesn't listen, though. She won't admit it, but she likes living in her squalor. She enjoys chewing on bad relationships and candy, and she thinks drinking and smoking make her cool.
***
It's frustrating because I admire her so much, how easily she gives of herself and forgives others, especially me. I wish I could cry as easily as she does. I crave her open spirit.
I know the problem is with me, that my pushing and shoving does not help her and only causes me grief, but I want her around for my son and she refuses to sidle away from the edge of death. Given two choices, she will always choose the one that shortens her life another day. She calls from her car in a snowstorm while lighting a cigarette and I wonder, will I have to listen to her die in a crash?
***
I started this thinking that I would write about the mother I wish I had, and how that mother wouldn't have messed me up so bad. I was also going to congratulate myself on forgiving her so many things, and have a little holy party, population one. If I'd written that, I wouldn't feel so wretched right now. Writing through this, I realize I give my mother so much shit because I'm ashamed not of who she is, but who I am.
It must be horrible to know that your kids wish you were someone else, and blame you for their problems. But that's motherhood, and it's my turn. Batter up.
I need a workout
Today I was feeding The Bug bananas with an orange spoon and this went through my head:
"I was feeding my son bananas with an orange spoon... when the bomb fell."
I've had a hard time with church for the last five or six years. It's hard to go, knowing all the mess the church is in now, with the priests and the children being hurt, and then all of it being hidden and the great sums of money being spent on lawyers, and all the smaller things that are wrong with the Catholic church. It's really time for another Catholic revolution, a la Vatican II, but until then, lots of us are pretending like we're missing nothing by skipping mass, sort of holding our breath.
It's especially hard when you have a kid. I think religion is important for children. It provides a structure to life, coming-of-age rituals, a respect for the divine and an awareness of God. If you don't get that stuff, you end up looking for it all over the place and being disturbed by it. I think it's important to always question, and to reevaluate your beliefs, but the structure is good.
So I've been going round and round with it.
***
There's that one time that I sort of saved a baby sparrow. Just thinking of it makes me remember waiting up all night for it to die, only to find it breathing the next morning, then frantically feeding it and keeping it away from the kitten until we found someone who could take care of him. Then I went to a Native American mass early one weekday morning and part of the reading was Matthew 10:29: "Not even a sparrow, worth only half a penny, can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it."
I want The Bug to believe that these things are not coincidence, that God is there if you are quiet and open.
***
I was watching Bruce Almighty today, a movie of not much merit, but it was a channel away from Legally Blonde and I was boredly switching between the two when one would go to commercial while The Bug napped in my lap. I haven't ever seen Bruce Almighty all the way through, though I always stop when I see that brilliant moment with Steve Carell, my new favorite comic genius. Anyway, I saw this part at the end this time, where Jennifer Aniston is on her bed weeping and praying, and it was sweet. It was pretty real. She was in love, she had to let go of a bad situation, and she was praying for the strength to do that, sort of. It was that mantra-like prayer you do when you're totally lost, something like, "Please help me forget him; please help me forget him."
Prayer is often like that. Like how my grandpa always says, "When all else fails, read the directions," sometimes you go through all your resources and find yourself at a total loss, just flailing around in the black cosmos of doom and nothingness and futility. Praying, then, is admitting that you can't fix everything and you aren't in control, and it's that last string of hope, that maybe someone is and that maybe he likes you enough to swing things your way. For me, the answer to prayer comes in the hot shower after a workout, or in the dawn of a new day, or a kiss from my husband, a smile from my son. Just that glimmer of an idea, that foolish idea, that we are all connected and loved and that we have a purpose here.
***
Today I was in line at Target and this kid in front of me, maybe ten years old, had saved up money for six months to buy a toy, and the checker was telling him he was three dollars short. On the counter between them was this mountain of change and one-dollar bills. You just know the kid was ecstatic to finally make this trip to the store to buy this thing, only to find out the dirty truth about sales tax.
So I gave him three bucks. He was really happy, and his mother told him to thank me, though the more I think about it, the sadder I get because she must not have had the three dollars herself. She looked relieved that they wouldn't have to gather up all those pennies and take the walk of shame out of the store, but I could tell she was also a little embarassed that a stranger had to help out.
Mister Aran thinks I'm great for giving this kid three dollars, and I kept impatiently telling him that I am not great for god's sake, three dollars doesn't dent our bank account in the slightest, but it meant the world to this kid. He would've given the kid three bucks, and I'm willing to bet any of you reading would have, too. It's just that, yeah, I stepped up, but the kid helped me out more than I helped him. I got this fantastic hug from him, and for a few minutes while the checker counted all that change out into her drawer, I got drunk on the insane kid-joy. Also, it was a last-minute, unplanned trip, and I was in a bad mood. So really, for the price of three dollars, I got a whole new attitude and a hug from a stranger. Cheap at twice the price.
Damn
Damn, but it's cold in here.
Know how long it took me to even say
damn? Fifteen years. Fifteen years with that jackass. I didn't realize it when I was among the living, that part about my husband being a jackass, because the Bible explains everything away if you look at it from the right angle.
Come to think of it, I never have said
damn. Feels like it, stuck in here, looking at the backs of my eyelids. I've been thinking to myself so long that it feels like talking to myself, at least what I remember of talking to myself, except the conversations are more interesting now.
Being in here feels exactly like one of those nights where you can't tell if you're asleep or not. You wake up and wonder if you've been awake all this time, so you look at the clock. Except, without a clock in this
damn thing, I don't know if I've been asleep for five minutes or five years. Could be nothing out there, but I assume somebody is up and running around, pulling levers and pushing buttons, or it wouldn't still be so
damn cold in here.
My skin can't feel it any more. The cold. I remember feeling cold, kind of how you remember being a kid; it's a memory all in words and pictures, and all you have left of it is the emotion. I remember my pores bumping up when I walked outside into the snow, hugging myself in thick coats, first cheap ski jackets bought secondhand and then, after I married the jackass, real furs in varying lengths, hats and gloves and muffs. I remember the crunch of salt on ice, both on the street and in margaritas, but I can't feel or hear or taste these things anymore. Just the relief at going into a warm room, or the humiliation of falling.
My skin doesn't feel, and my tongue doesn't taste. Either my baggage of a body is dead by now, or it got used to the cold, the way a woman can get used to being married to a jackass, until the cold is just a slight pain you feel way down in your lungs whenever you breathe in. Which isn't often, and kind of keeps me company when it happens. Like the occasional beat of my heart.
There it goes.
*
The Lord provides, this I know. Whenever I asked the jackass how we could afford another Jaguar or trip to Japan or addition on the church, he'd tell me, "The Good Lord provides." Now that I'm in here, I want to know if there's a Bad Lord too, and if he's the one the poor people pray to, because obviously the Good Lord was too busy providing for us to provide for most of the members of the jackass' church. Or maybe every one of those people in the congregation were The Good Lord incarnate, providing us with 10% of their paychecks every Sunday and figuring that would plant their butts at the Right Hand of God in the Hereafter.
What I still don't rightly understand, even after all this time talking to myself in this
damn thing is, why didn't anyone come up and ask why? If one person with four kids and a mortgage they couldn't pay had ever asked me, "Why do I give you money when you have so much already?" maybe I would've questioned the jackass. Maybe I wouldn't have. Maybe I would have patted their hands and fed them the jackass' other favorite adage:
Your reward is in heaven.
*
When I'm tired of being pissed off at the jackass, I think about my son.
Damn, but he was a beautiful boy, taking after me, with dark hair and light eyes, and a big dick too, which also certainly couldn't have come from the jackass, but since I can't claim big-dick genes myself, I'll just assume that the Good Lord provided the boy with that dick. I know about the dick because I saw him changing clothes on accident when he was thirteen years old, and my first thought was of that big expensive movie Terminator 2, where the Terminator was defeated and replaced with a much more handsome, slick version who was
damn near indestructible. Because the boy was an asshole, one step up from jackass, and those genes came directly from deep inside his father's little squinched-up balls.
A full 8.5% of that last thought back there were words I have never spoken aloud. I do math in my head now, just like I did while I was up and running, and bored. I did it during sex with the jackass and during his sermons and whenever he drove very fast, like he thought the rich men of the world did, so I was calculating how many miles longer I had to sit in the passenger seat while the jackass cut across four lanes of traffic, missed his exit and slammed the Mercedes into a guard rail. The first time I woke up in this thing, I was converting those miles into kilometers; my mind was polite enough to check out during all the things that must have happened between the crash and me waking up with few nerve endings to speak of in this freezing cold tank.
The doctors all called it a "chamber," but I called it a tank, because it had glass everywhere, and the people inside looked like sleeping fish. Like octopi when they turn white. The doctor gave us a tour around the facilities with aplomb. Brain wave activity that perfectly matched sleep. New advances in science all the time. And, of course, Nancy Brown, the fragile, dull woman who'd made headlines and talk shows everywhere just because she'd risen from the cryonic tank looking, at a glance, just like a 23-year old and minus a nasty bout of breast cancer which a brand-new, clever little bit of laser technology had zapped away like it was a bothersome wart. She celebrated her 79th birthday on a morning talk show boasting the same blank look she'd had on Letterman and Leno and I don't know what-all. I watched all this because the jackass forced me to. He loved Nancy Brown,
damn near had a schoolgirl crush on her.
His reward was waiting in heaven, and he was scared shitless.
He laid his hands on the heads and, I found out later, a few other body parts, of the sick congregation every Sunday and begged The Good Lord loudly for healing, but if the jackass or I or the terminator ever so much as coughed, he sped us double-time to the doctor. When Nancy Brown came out of her fishtank, devoid of pigment and dull as a brick but cancer-free, the jackass was one of the freakish masses who immediately made an appointment to reserve a fishtank of their own. He showed me the one he'd reserved for me, so I have a good mental picture of where I am now.
Sleepy-time brain wave activity. Those morons. Hello? Are you measuring this, out there with your computers and clipboards? I for
damn sure never dreamed like this.
*
State of the art, this fishtank, costing more than many Jaguars. More than the house. And there's an additional retainer cost for every year I'm in here, so the scientists can go about the business of measuring my brain waves, keeping me cold and showing off my pale octopus skin to other jackasses wanting to preserve their miserable existences. That's how I know that the jackass, terminator, or his spawn, are still out there in the world somewhere, paying my freezer bill.
The terminator might still be sixteen, the age I left him, still getting in trouble. Sure wasn't nice of him to get that girl pregnant, especially since I had to load the little hussy into the passenger seat of my Jag and take her to the clinic to have her insides scooped out. Cost the jackass a pretty penny, too, to keep her and her father, both members of our congregation, quiet. The girl woke up weeping and reached for me like I was her momma, but I had enough problems with the men in my life, and men are simple. I took the girl home. I meant to affect a worried wrinkle in my brow when I delivered her into the hands of her father, but remembered afterward that I'd had all that Botoxed two days prior. The terminator was in choir practice.
Damn, but that boy could sing.
If it took me awhile to come around, then he could be thirty, with a woman he cheats on and little kids bred to be even more evil than he and his father could dream.
Or he could be dead, or if he never garnered some sense for himself, he could be frozen too. I wonder how many generations are frozen here in this place, if there are grandchildren and great-grandchildren paying the bill for the helpless, octopus bodies of ancestors they've never met.
If the jackass didn't die from that crash, he's almost certainly frozen in a tank right next to me, with his itty bitty, bleached-white penis there for every rich shopper to observe. The thought of that makes me almost feel like I could bust through the glass of this fishtank just long enough to unplug the jackass. I'd watch him die, however long it took, slow, watching his fishlips say, silent, mom, mom, mom, until he was no longer a waste of oxygen.
*
I wonder what scientific miracle my body is waiting for. What happened to me? Even if I'd been found headless, the scientists would lock my corpse up in this thing with the cheery promise that medical science would find a way, someday, for me to exist again, just like new, so they could get their endless retainer fee.
Nancy Brown, in all her octopus-like wonder, turned out to be a fake, a granddaughter of the first woman who was ever frozen and, as it turned out, killed by a cryonic tank. Eerie resemblance, said the papers. The jackass didn't care. He was rich, but he wasn't smart. He'd been wowed by the tour of fishtanks. A little hope was better than heaven. Besides, who knows what I might have found out about him up there? Maybe he really believed his hellfire and brimstone sermons, and deep-down figured he belonged down in the suffering.
What do I look like now? Do I still have legs? Have my fingernails curled over on themselves? Maybe I've sprouted tentacles, a mean expression, and a tendency toward changing color with my mood. I wouldn't know. Maybe this is heaven.
There it goes again. Bloomp. The lazy, frozen beat of my heart.
Hey, you brain-wave reading bastards! Can you hear me? It is
damn cold in here.
It took more than a month for B&N to get my ordered copy of
Dermaphoria in. I got two pages in before I had to type stuff. Nothing of substance, but my mind was going again, gears cranking away. Clevenger is probably the tightest writer I've read. He leaves no loose ends. Clean, cold, hard, perfect writing, and with an original style, rhythm and flow that makes me need to
type, man.
I can't make myself pick it back up again, because that will mean it'll be over eventually. I have it sitting on my table like a chocolate cake I'm holding off eating.
Brendan is a lucky bastard for having met Clevenger. I wish I had a few moments with that guy. Might make me get serious again.
The gas prices are lower in Colorado. Back in Los Angeles, I watch the prices drop. Today the lowest is $2.29 and I remember it being about $2.07 back home.
Half my dad's back porch was taken up with firewood. He had chopped up a log house.
My old back yard is so expansive, so beautiful. I remember the corn growing in one spot, zucchini and rhubarb and cherry tomatoes in another, wild strawberries and flowers in another. Snapdragons and rosebushes and peonies and other flowers surrounding the house. My sunflowers, which I planted in a styrofoam cup in Sunday School and transferred to the yard. For years they grew and multiplied until they threatened to take over the corn.
The yard is a hill that my dad built into sections separated by big logs. He put in stairs with concrete and logs. There was a sandbox and some beehives up top. My brother's Tonka trucks might still be rusting away up there.
The zucchini grew so big that my dad made jack-o-lanterns out of them in October. It always, always snowed on Halloween and Spring Break, but never on Christmas.
In 1997, I was working at King Soopers and I could not wait to get out of there. I'd dropped out of Red Rocks Community College, I'd just made checker and my paychecks were getting nicer. I was talking to a girl who worked in the photo section, Carly, about taking off to Seattle. I was high on Tom Robbins then. I'd romanticized the mansion hiding in blackberry brambles. Every time it rained, I pretended I was there. Carly had a crush on a guy who lived there. He was in the Army. I was ready to pack our little shit cars and go. I had a little crush on Carly. She had super long brown hair, doll eyes. I went to her place one night, in a bad area of Denver. We drank cheap wine from Mason jars and played dominoes. It's one of my favorite memories.
It was AOL back then. That's how I met Mister Aran. My mom was a falling-down drunk. The men parading in and out of the house were frightening. Mister Aran came to live with us that winter.
In April, we took the Grayhound bus to Los Angeles. I had about three hundred dollars, scraped together from my paychecks and family. My grandpa bought the bus tickets. We had no jobs and nowhere to live. For six weeks, we lived with Mister Aran's family. It was a difficult adjustment for me, family-wise, but I emailed my mom every day about California: the scent of the lemon tree, the intense green, the feeling of a palm tree trunk against my hand. It was all magical. It was years before I took palm trees for granted.
I never wanted to move back. Sometimes, I'd try to convince my family to move to California. If I had a lot of money, I'd have moved my grandparents out, but it would mean a hell of a lot of disposable income, because their medical benefits don't apply anywhere but in Colorado.
Since having The Bug, though, I feel differently. My dad's back yard looks enormous. I can imagine my son making snowmen out there, or running up and down the stairs with the dog or cat, like my brother and I used to do. In Colorado, we could own a house, easy, with that kind of yard and a park nearby. He'd wake in the gray fall mornings to the honking geese flying south, not the honking SUVs merging onto the 5 South. There would be far fewer freeways, less worry about crime. People are used to weather and drive slower.
It's goddamn cold. I'm used to the warm now. But, visiting my family, even as fucked up as they are, I felt like I would trade the weather for that yard.
***
It was a madhouse at LAX when we got back. Traffic was nuts because it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. My inlaws took over Baby Patrol and as they chattered with Mister Aran I felt outside again. The Bug screamed all the way home. I snatched him up and jogged inside with him, leaving the others to take in my luggage. It was awhile before he cooled out. I fell asleep with him in the big reclining chair until early evening.
That night, we went to see Walk The Line and all I could see were flip-flops.
***
I feel better now. California is home. Missing Denver is just an extension of my fear for The Bug's safety. It's so much better for my family here. The drama in Colorado would eat me up and the opportunities for Mister Aran are slim.
Plus, it's damn cold. Fuck that.
***
nz gf c ccvvv7777n jjjjjjj mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm r nnnn
***
The Bug typed all that.
When I was about fifteen, Evil Aunt compared our bodies all the time. She told me I had a better belly, but her butt was nicer. I went to church with her because there was this totally hot guy who went there named Tony. Evil Aunt and I got into a fight one Sunday morning and that was it for our relationship. The fight started over what I was wearing. She still talks about my outfit that day, how inappropriate for church it was. I was wearing jeans.
Yes, it was inappropriate for that church, but it's interesting to wonder why she was so upset by it.
How fucking boring is this entry? I write it because I've been feeling badly about the last post, where I secretly gave her shit for being fat now. Trying to explain, I guess. It's because she's always put herself in competition with me, always made me feel low, and now I win.
Dude Sabrina, check out my nose
My hair isn't done and I have no makeup on, but I HAVE BOOBS NOW, and the photo evidence is in. God, I am hot.
It's been stressing me out, thinking about what the ladies will look like when The Bug is done with them, but I'm just going to not think about it, because nothing will be done about it.
***
I saw Evil Aunt in Colorado. It's just sad. She looks like a pumpkin in a fugly flowered shirt. I took her hand at one point and said, "Isn't it sad how designers make only ugly clothes in plus sizes?"
No, I didn't do that. I said, "Love that outfit. You think they make it in a size ten?"
I didn't say that, either. Sorry. It was all pretty benign. She tried to get dramatic, I shot her a look, she simmered down. She tried to get dramatic, I changed the subject, she simmered down. She could hardly get a word in, what with all the Bug worship that was happening at the table.
I instructed The Bug to scream when she held him, but he disobeyed me. I forgave him because he did one better: he took a massive shit instead. Awesome.
