You let your mind out somewhere down the road

Links you can use. For good or evil. Links like a dandelion spreading its seeds on the wind,  links like sugar, Johnny Applelink, Malcolm Gladwell's Link.

You know, links you might find mildly or wildly interesting.

David Cay Johnston gives us a Tale of Two Healthcare Plans. Warning: contains graphs, charts and the mention of taxes.

Paul Krugman (who had a cameo in Get Him to the Greek, much to my surprise and delight because if I have to sit through a film featuring Russell Brand and a scene where his character demands that his handler smuggle drugs up his butt (the handler's not his own), then I'm going to need some sort of smartypants liberal elite elixir to provide some balance. One can't sue Hollywood for brain atrophy, can one?) Where was I? Oh, yes, Paul Krugman. His piece on obstruction and exploitation. Also known as <redacted>.

I'm trying to not curse. It's an experiment, an exercise in self restraint.

Which reminds me, I'm listening to the audio version of Frank Delaney's Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland and have laughed uproariously while driving to and from work. Which is saying something because lately I have been in one pissed off and holler mood. To crack this marble face takes some true comedic talent.

I bring this up because in the book, there's a character who seasons every sentence with a sulfuric dash of that oh so versatile word fuck. When the narrator reports any conversations he has with said cuss monster, his mother insists he use flock instead of the other very bad word.

To wit:

...why in the flock does she need a flocking ladder to get to the flocking flowerboxes when I flocking told her that I would flocking help her in a few flocking minutes.......

It is perfect, of course, with the Irish brogue.

Douglas Coupland offers some advice to writers. Specifically, to young writers, but who's to say what's young anymore? I'm not biologically young, but my writing is young. Anyway, it's a bullet point list so it won't wear you thin with paragraphs and contains some points I haven't seen elsewhere in my search for enlightenment about writing (a procrastination tactic familiar to writers the world over.)

Gwynne Watkins interviews Amanda Palmer.

Super8. Have you seen it? Sophie interrupted her own raving about it to ask me to watch it with her. I said I'd watch a few minutes and then probably get back to whatever it was I'd been doing. Two hours later, I was still glued to the television. It held my interest enough that I didn't multitask once during the entire viewing and it made an ELO fan out of Sophie.

Bra Recycling. Surprisingly, I don't mean turning bras into charming chapeaux. Although one could, I suppose, but let's leave MathMan out of this.

I'm reading Rachel Maddow's Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. Talk about taxing my ability to remain curse word free. I'm only up to the part about how Reagan funded the Contras in Nicaragua and have already worn out the phrases holy shit, motherfucker, Jesus Christ, What the hell? and I'll be damned.

Please just stop. For all that was good and holy in Mrs. Johnson's 7th grade language class, please. Stop.

And finally Fred Armisen on Alec Baldwin's Here's the Thing. Via the incomparable Bob Lefsetz. If you've been asking if you should keep chasing your dream, you must listen to this.

What's making you click these days?

This is Tara, Mr. Steinbeck

Mice, men, getting laid, having plans. Schemes on rye toast.

Want to guess what did and did not happen Sunday?

You don't need to guess. You know.

MathMan suggested that my book choice is the problem. It isn't compelling enough for me. Bless his heart. That is not the problem. I am the problem. I can't make myself focus. One thing turns into another. Wiping down the kitchen counter ends with me cleaning out a closet while phoning my father to find out what year he got his first pair of roller skates.

Things derailed quickly. Sophie announced she was hungry. I referred her to my blog post.

A few minutes later, she returned to my room sporting an expression I couldn't quite make out. Maybe it was  resolve. She was going to make pancakes. Pancakes sounded good to me, too, but without providing some level of sanitation supervision, I wouldn't want to eat them. I'd help if only to avoid taking a bite of pancake only to find a long hair in it, I told my inner control freak.

Okay, so pancakes. That was it. After that, I'd read.

But first I had to play Words with Friends with Sarah W. (she's kicking my butt!) and four other people (so are they!) because it would be rude to leave them hanging.

A great wailing from the kitchen alerted me to the absence of milk with which to douse the cereal the children would be having for three meals apparently. Such carrying on.

Okay. A trip to the grocery because we needed more than milk and no one else can be trusted to do the coupons correctly. Must make that list and remember the reusable bags.

After the store, I told myself, I'd read. There was still time.

The girls and I returned from the store. MathMan had made dinner so we had a meal together followed by a brief celebration of National Ice Cream Day. Oh, Ben & Jerry, we hardly knew ye.

I waddled upstairs, back into reaching distance of the novel. In a minute, I whispered to the stonyfaced dust jacket. I had to wash my face and apply an anti-aging mask. Oh, and tidy up my nails, fix the cuticles, file them, buff them.

And, oh for heaven's sake, can no one else ever scrub the damn toilet and sink? Better do that before my nails.

More Words with Friends, a quick check of Facebook and Twitter told me that everyone was retroactively having fun at Mitt Romney's expense and that would be Breaking Bad. See! That didn't take long. No celebrity deaths to clutter up the feeds with RIPs, no sports happening. I enjoyed a sense of smugness. I was all caught up even if I couldn't find a way to use that dang Z in my game with Sarah.

I returned to the bathroom to rinse the mask from my face. MathMan joined me upstairs. I thought he must not be feeling well. Turned out he was playing with his Atomic Fart app on his phone. Again.

I sat down with the novel and began flicking the pages. That would fix him for providing a long, squishy soundtrack to my trip to the WC. He and his phone could turn a quick tinkle into a severe gastrointestinal event.

MathMan doesn't like it when I flick the pages of any book. He says it's because it's bad for the book and the ghost of his mother the Librarian will haunt me if I don't stop. I know it's because he can't tune out the sound of it like he can tune out the sound of my voice.

He grabbed the spray bottle he keeps on hand to discourage the cats from getting onto our bed and aimed it in my direction. He is a crack shot. I stared at him hard and gave the pages a definitive flick.

This would not end well.

We called a truce. If I read now without flicking the pages, it would appear he won. If I read and flicked the pages, I was breaking the truce. I put the book on the night stand and sighed. We watched a third of an episode of Downton Abbey, one Foyle's War episode, and the new Inspector Lewis - Generation of Vipers (I have the worst crush on Sergeant Hathaway) before finally falling asleep.

Despite the fact that I read zero pages of the intended novel, the day was not wasted. I even managed to do somethings just for me. I ran an hour on the elliptical and finished off my manicure with a lovely shade of purple. I can live with that.

Taking the Scarlet O'Hara approach helps, too. It is another day. I have another chance to read to my heart's content.

I have the day off.

Are you a rifle or a shotgun?

Abdication

Dear Children:

Today I shall read a book. All day. Go ahead and laugh. You don't believe I will or can do it, but my goal is to do what my friends do - read a book in a day.

Let this serve as notice. This will be me doing something for me. All that is required of you is to entertain yourselves and leave me alone. Forbidden activities include, but are not limited to:  Finding me wherever I may be and staring at me. Screaming matches outside my closed door. Text messages and/or phone calls.

There are a limited number of reasons for which you may approach me. They are:

1. Fire that you cannot put out on your own.
2. Arterial blood.
3. Someone ringing the doorbell while holding an enlarged check with lots of zeros at the end. 


Note:  You should involve me only if your father is unavailable. Unavailable is defined as: 1) Away from the house; 2) Comatose; 3) The person gushing arterial blood or; 4) What is on fire.


If this warning is not enough, let me be clear. I don't want to hear from you. At all. I know that our views on what constitutes a legitimate need differ so here is a short list of what I do not consider worthy of my attention.


Hunger. Boredom. Exasperation with another sibling. Exasperation with your father. Exasperation with me.  Flea bites. Hungry cats. Lack of clean laundry. Lack of  "food" (read: junk food). The weather. The parsimonious thermostat setting The fact that summer is coming to a swift end and we still haven't done anything fun. The lack of money.


Take a good look at that list. You are all old enough to handle these issues. Telling me about them instead of simply dealing with them in a positive manner reminds me that I've been a failure as a mother and that is not conducive to happy reading. I will become angry at myself which will transform into angry at you which will manifest as slammed doors and shouting of things a mother should never say to a child.


Let's prevent that because it always ends in tears and I look like hell after I've cried.


If you don't think you can comply with my request, I recommend you leave the house. And no, I won't give you a ride anywhere. Look down. See those projections at the end of your legs? They're feet. Use them.


And don't forget to text your father to let him know where you've gone.


Love,
Mom

But who is going to hold me to it?

Normally, I eschew things like New Years resolutions. A resolution is nothing more than another opportunity to fail.

Because I'm more than a little tired of who I am naturally, I've decided to try some new things. Push myself a bit. Don't worry. I'm setting the bar pretty low and I've brought a paper bag in case any of this causes hyperventilation.

1. Drink my coffee black. Like the midwife who delivered all three kids once said "it takes a whole lotta sugar to keep me sweet." Hell yeah. But it's time to acknowledge the wafer thin wall between bad eating habits and future ill health. There is no reason to ruin a perfectly good cup of coffee by adding enough sugar and cream to make a dessert. A spoon should not be required to consume coffee.

2. Read more. Anita mentioned that 2012 is the Year of Reading the Books You Own. Yes! I purchased a ridiculous number of books last year from a used book store that was going out of business and at the Friends of  the Library book sales. While I can't guarantee that I won't be lured by the siren song of the library's new releases shelves, I am setting a goal of reading at least one of the books I own once a month.

3. Stop making fun of the sound the oldest cat makes when she crunches the dry cat food. She probably isn't that amused by it anyway.

4. Stop projecting my shit onto other people, especially those closest to me. Just because I'm feeling all balled up about something doesn't mean that MathMan has to be. A true challenge. Misery often does love company. Especially if company comes bearing cheap chocolate.

5. Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. Feel free to project your own shit on me here to get the meaning.

6. Annoy one celebrity a day on Twitter. Hey, it's a branding strategy, okay?

7. Ignore the cesspool of American politics. It's like attempting to ignore an itch on your butt when you're in standing in line at the DMV. You don't want to scratch in front of the people behind you and you can't leave your place in line.

8. Wii Just Dance. No matter who is around to mock me.

9. Stop looking for a job. Is it like love? When you stop looking, that's when it finds you? And if not, why not?

10. Stop censoring myself out of fear that potential employers will see my blog, facebook, twitter, pinterest, etc. and decide that I am not "their kind of people." Maybe my blog and social media is what I should be doing while I finish working on the novel and a couple of other projects I've added to my To Do list. After nearly 500 job applications, it's clear I'm going to have to make my own way.

P.S. If you're a potential employer, I'm kidding! I'm a rule follower. A hard worker. A team player. Versatile, appropriately innovative and I possess strong communications skills. And I come cheaply. See! I use adverbs!

P.S.S. Some of you might be surprised to learn that I censor myself. I know!

11. Stop judging people by the inane stuff they post on Facebook. Being a judgmental asshole says more about me than about the people doing the cut and paste I bet you won't do this statuses, the TGIF posts, the Monday complaints, the weather reports and the questions about which new, expensive phone to buy. It says I'm easily bored, snobbish, pretentious, sanctimonious and jealous. It says they lack creativity. See what I mean?

12. Acquire new skills. I can't really afford to go back to school right now, but my friend Christine posted online a list of free educational opportunities and more than one of them appeal to me. Learning for the sake of learning? Why not?

Twelve for 2012 seems hokey enough, right?

Have you used this arbitrary date to promise yourself anything?

It's not a message written in the dark or some truth that no one sees

This is the book I'm reading right now and the description from the author's website:

Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O’Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia.  Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.

Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies’ organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancée, Melvin Whiteson. 

Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good, hard look at the choices he has made.  Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.

Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by.  Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home.  As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to truly live, and she seizes it with both hands

Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses in life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery’s observation that the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Some lines that I would highlight were this not a library book:

 Melvin liked the idea that something he told Flannery might appear in a book. His life was a messy compilation of moments that didn't fit together. If Flannery wove them into a narrative, they would have cohesion and significance. He would be able to read about himself and all that was inexplicable in real life would be explained.

The music that has my attention this morning.

 

What does one have to do with the other?

Please feel free to discuss. There are no right or wrong answers.

Care and Feeding

Photo: Lisa Golden

Thanks to those of you who have donated toward the care and feeding of Kitty Noir. You're wonderful. So far KN has no new home, but he has found a place on top of the antique radio where he likes to sleep. His presences is still causing a stir, but we've been through this before. Eventually, everyone settles into a timeshare routine and we move on.

I'm taking the day off from writing here so that I can work on my manuscript and catch up on some reading. Now I have to decide which book to read today because I've started two at the same time. Bad habit, I know.

Source

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury or The Beginners by Rebecca Wolff.

Source

What are you reading?

Hesitation is a hole in the head

I love you, Mr. Gorey.

Okay, so before I get back to work typing my stockpile inventory into its shiny new Excel spreadsheet, I thought I'd take a break from all this saving and organizing to tell you about why all writing except for the occasional blog post has ceased. I'm frozen, inert, stuck, blocked, constipated and jammed up.

Lies. It's a snarl of lies. Or worse. It's excuses.

I'm cranky is what I am. Cranky. CRANKY. And it's not so much about what I'm writing, but what I'm reading. See, I started working on a nonfiction piece because having two fiction manuscripts in progress wasn't enough fun for this chick. So I decided I'd better check out a few books in the genre or at least related to see if I was doing it right because I'm so tired of doing things half-assed and half-cocked. Man, imagine that guy. Half-assed and half-cocked. Hang on, I've got to go gaze lovingly at my inventory for a second to get my mind to focus. BRB.

Back!

Okay - so I'm reading this stack of books and I'm getting cranky because I'm feeling:

A) Shallow, insensitive and unobservant
B) Talentless with the written word and/or simply talentless
C) Provincial and frowsy
D) All of the above

Soooo easy, right?

Indications That I'm Reading Too Much Neil Gaiman?

MathMan's alarm sounded at 5:45a.m.  I'm part relieved, part not. But not for the reasons you might think.

I was dreaming.

It was early morning.  We were just stirring.  Chloe was here instead of at school.  The first up.  She'd had a shower.  I could smell the cocoa butter scent of her body wash when I went into the hallway.  She was just finishing dressing in the living room when the doorbell rang.

I stood at the top of the short flight of stairs that leads to the top floor of our rented split level.  My eyes met Chloe's.  She must have still been dancing because she wore a red leotard and black tights with black shorts over them.

"I'll get the door," I said before descending the stairs.  I looked down at myself to see if I was dressed, but I don't remember what I was wearing.

As I turned the doorknob to the heavy-looking, but quite cheap hollow metal front door, the door pushed in and three women and a young, fat man stood just inside the living room.  We have no foyer or hallway entrance.  The front door opens right into the living room.

I craned my neck to look around the women and man and saw that the wooden stairs leading from the sidewalk up to the house was lined with people and a crowd had formed on the lawn.  More people streamed off a tour bus.  It wasn't a fancy charter bus.  It was a yellow school bus.

"Whoa!  Hang on!"  I shouted at the woman in the lead.  She was taller than me, pretty of face.  Her makeup was nicely done and she wore her dark blond hair in a stylish cut.  When I was a kid, we called her hair color dishwater blond, but I'm not sure that's such  a complimentary term anymore.  You don't hear it much.  And what with so many people having dishwashers, would anyone really know what that means these days?

"I used to live here!" The woman was speaking to the crowd as much as to me.

I put my hands up as if to push the crowd back or to at least ward them off.  "Yes, but it's early.  There are people just waking and getting dressed."  I glanced up the stairs and saw MathMan, his hair still damp from his shower, in the hallway looking annoyed and confused behind his glasses.

"I want to show them the basement.  The walled-off room." The dishwater blond woman was saying.

I looked at her and her large hazel eyes and red sweater.  Someone snapped a photo.

She was talking again.  "There were murders here.  You did know that, right?  People were killed in this house."

Time stopped for just a second.  Over the noises of the crowd, I thought I heard Chloe gasp, but maybe the gasp came from me.

"Yes, of course, we knew about the murders," I lied.  "But you really must wait outside.  My family..." I looked at the crowd.  All the women had dishwater blond hair, nice makeup, stylish haircuts and pretty faces. They all wore red sweaters.  Some had windbreakers on over their sweaters, but they wore them unzipped so that the red of their sweaters showed through.  Like their chests had been sliced open and were bleeding.

I thought about what Nathan had said about the basement creeping him out when he used to have his bedroom down there.  I thought about the occasional strange noises that came from the laundry room. I thought about how our cats pawed at the wall that separated the laundry room from the garage and the storage area beneath the stairs.  I looked at the woman in the lead.

"Murders, you say?"

Her chest heaved with excitement.  "Yes.  Downstairs.  In the room that's been walled off."

I looked again toward the stairs.  MathMan was still there.  He shrugged.  Behind him, Nate was coming out of the bathroom.  He must have showered.  A towel was wrapped around his waist, his chest was bare and he wore a towel like a turban wound around his head.  I thought of Ferris Bueller.

I turned back to the woman.  Chloe was right behind me now.  She pinched my elbow and said, "Mom? Murders?"

"Okay, but you'll have to go around to the back," I pointed out the door that was now jammed with people.

"That's fine.  I'll lead the way." The woman who was just stating the obvious pushed through the people toward the door.

The crowd turned in unison and followed her down the wooden steps.  I could see her in the yard waving her arms and speaking to the crowd of red sweaters.

MathMan's alarm went off.  It's on his phone and has a kind of Eastern tone to it.  Like Bollywood telling to you to get a move on.

I rolled over to see MathMan checking messages on his phone.  The dream was gone.

I was feeling sensations in no dictionary

A couple of days away from the computer can enlighten a person.  When I look inside, I wish I'd forgotten my flashlight.  I want to tell you about the dark moods, the depression that had me pinned to a chair or the bed.
A book was involved.  Not one I wrote, but one written by Patti Smith.  It wasn't the book's fault.  It was merely an instrument.  A tool.

I started to read Fight Club right after finishing - I mean the same day, the same hour - Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.  (Read my review here, she screamed).  That might not have been such a hot idea.  It caused literary whiplash.  From the English countryside with a dash of curry to Marla Singer and the Brain Parasite Support Group.  It made me want to smoke a pack of cigarettes and kill myself.

I opted for something less smelly and permanent.

I tossed Fight Club aside and picked up Just Kids which had, earlier in the week, passed all those Is This Book Worth of My Time tests and so I took it home from the library and placed it on top of my stack.  Which is more like a tower, but so what?

I'm still reading it.  I am a slow reader, apparently.  MathMan accused me of being devastated by drink.  "One beer," I sighed and accused him of prudery and prohibition-like qualities.  It's not my fault that he's not allowed to drink while taking his Zocor or whatever it is.

I fixed him. I watched a bunch of dvds without him. They were our bedtime dvds borrowed from the library.   British mysteries. After I did that, I told him the ending of an episode of one of the Touch of Frosts.  He said it was okay to tell him.  He could see that I was anxious to spill the beans and emotionally fragile so he gave me that small gift of concession.  I bet he'll hit me with it later - my inability to keep something to myself.  That's the way things go here.

When she is bad, she is really unpleasant.  Somewhat hateful.  Thirty percent bitch.  Easily. I spread the hate around passively and aggressively.

I mocked my friends of Facebook.  Ranted and raved and wished they'd shut the hell up with their posts about what they'd had to eat, what foods they'd prepared, how hot or rainy or whatever the weather was doing.  And those fucking to do lists people post. Really?  The world needs to know that you're doing laundry?  Listen, tell us when you haven't done laundry for six whole months.  That would be interesting.  In fact, I want pictures of that.  Get to it.  Filth it up and free yourselves.  Make being unkempt your gift to the world.

Create dust a la Pigpen.  Please.

This abuse of social media is a scurge. I know.  I'm the person who posts a Smiths song every day.  Or did.
"I'm going to put up a status that says something like "I am judging you and not so silently," I harrumphed at MathMan as we made our way back from the grocery store.  I was checking Facebook from my phone since the desktop computer decided to be all prissy and difficult and we'd run out of things to talk about on our drive. Plus, I could tell his mind had wandered back to its comfort zone of school and mathy stuff.  I can't compete with that.

"Or maybe I'll write something like 'Spare me the details.' and mean it."

Our modern woes are ridiculous.  I would have turned into a quivering mass of jelly right before I keeled over and died if I'd had to live in Victorian England.  I wouldn't have lasted twenty minutes as a homesteader.
My bee phobia keeps me from carrying out the compost, for goodness sake.

Weak as water.  Okay, maybe not the poison water around here.  The stuff loaded with mercury and lead and arsenic.  You could walk across that stuff without being someone's savior.  But weak.  Like me standing in the line at Dairy Queen..  A small blizzard is a triumph over evil.  I'll harbor anger while I eat my small treat while wishing for a large.  With lots of M&Ms and chocolate sauce.  Want to see me get pissy?  Let the DQ skimp on the chocolate sauce swirled into my blizzard and I'll turn thirty shades of purple, but will I ask for more?  Of course not.  They might spit in it.

Things I hope to never see on Facebook again:

1.  Hubby.  Does he not have a name?And oh my word, the noise we'd all make if men started referring to their wives not by their names but by the term wifey.
2.  Woot.
3.  Bilgewater.  Okay, I made that up.  Someone please use it.
4.  Hot.  Cold.  Windy.  Humid.  I know you mean well.  You're just making conversation.  It's an ice breaker.  But please.  Times are tough.  Let's not put our meteorologists out of work, too.  The last thing we need are those folks competing with the rest of us for jobs at McDonalds.
5.  Whoo Hooo!  See #2.  I'd rather see you saying something new like Ta Da!
6.  Referring to your family with the same label every damn time.  I get it.  Your son or daughter isn't a kid anymore, isn't quite a teen. 

You guys stop and I promise you - no more Smiths songs (except for those I put right on La Belette Rouge's and Kirie's walls) and no more cat photos.  I'll even stop posting pix of my favorite beverage of the day.

That book. That bloody book.  The good thing is I don't flinch anymore when Brooklyn is mentioned.  Small victories of memory.  Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom Patti Smith had an affair in the late sixties, was so beautiful. Their affair morphed into a lifelong friendship.  Back when his art was causing a stir, I didn't pay much attention to the artist.  The fisting, the crucifix submerged in piss.   (Thanks for clearing that up, Nan!  I got my avant gardes mixed up.  I do like your take on it, though.)  That was salaciously interesting enough without letting my eyes slide over to any photos of the artist himself.  But there was so much more to that guy who, like so many of his contemporaries, died young.

"Pioneers without a future."  That's a quote of a quote. From the book.  It may have been Allen Ginsberg who said that.  MathMan tells me that the Beat Generation stuff was not his favorite time period for art.  It mystifies me that he even thinks about poetry or words.  That would be like me saying I stop thinking about writing and reading long enough to consider the curve of a slope of sign or co-sign and Pi or all that other stuff he tries to talk to me about and my eyes glaze over and he pushes his finger into the fleshiest part of my arm and says "Hey, are you in there?"

Actually, no, I'm not. 

I don't know enough to declare about poetry, much less Beat poetry, but I would like to see the movie Howl which is about Allen Ginsberg and stars that delectable James Franco.

Someone just recently introduced me to Peter Orlovsky.  Who is mentioned in passing in the book.

The truth is - I don't know that I "get" poetry. I like what I like.  A lot of the meaning is lost on me and my shallow self.  I read poetry with reference books by my side.  If I bother at all.

Anyway - back to my new friends Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.  It's hard to believe that he was resistant to photography at first.  He preferred mixed media and collages made from found objects.  But then, there you are.  I still remember when MathMan suggested I use his Tandy 1000 to write a paper for some French class and I delivered those now infamous words "No, thanks.  I'll stick to the typewriter."

Their lives were full of art and The Scene of the Hotel Chelsea and all those artsy types in poetry, music, art, homosexual hustling, the book business, movies.  Andy Warhol, blah, blah, Silver Factory, blah.  I haven't gotten to the part where Patti breaks into the music scene.  It's coming. That's the thing about reading nonfiction about the lives of celebrities.  I know what's happened, in very general terms, up to this point.  The rest of the story is a mystery, of course.  Everyone's future is a mystery. Thank goodness.

And I'm interrupting that interesting retelling of an art-filled life to read a text telling me that someone has moved on from laundry to dusting their downspouts?  And it's not even a clever euphemism.  They really are telling the world about their Saturday chores.

Help. Me. Rhonda.

Here's how I know it may have been a visit from the Black Dog - I couldn't even pull myself out of the stupor? torpor? enough to shut off the sms messages that were annoying me.  Lazy or depressed or just meh meh meh.  Does it matter?  A mood. Cranky.  Not devastated by drink.  Not manic.  Not quite depressive.  People overload perhaps.  Being drunk would have been infinitely more fun.  For a while.

"I'm going to stay in our bedroom and not inflict myself on you guys.  I'd appreciate the same small courtesy."
Compliance is nice.  Safe.  Scream free.

All this meh-ness.  It's a build up to something.

A lovely stay in a padded room?  The cognitive dissonance of Snoop Dogg featured in a Katy Perry song?

The fact that I'm not really that fascinated by the whole seventies art scene, but Patti Smith's recounting of her life with Mapplethorpe is well-written, straightforward the way I like them, and a great reminder that one can go from feeling lucky to be able to afford a grilled cheese sandwich to being a household name in the cooler of households.

Imagine if Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe had Facebook pages circa 1969.

Patti Smith is leaving her favorite spot in the Hotel Chelsea lobby and going down to the El Quixote for a tequila shot with @Jim Carroll.  May watch him shoot smack later.  Maybe not.  Have some laundry to do.
Patti Smith hanging out in our small room, waiting for @Robert Mapplethorp to get dressed so we can go to Max's for another night at the Roundtable.  He's worse than a girl or some of our favorite drag queens.
Patti Smith at the laundromat washing @Robert Mapplethorp's black mesh t-shirt and wondering what he's making us on the hot plate.  Hope it's not beans and weenies again.
Robert Mapplethorpe finished washing the walls of our new studio, wonder if I can find any good mags at the bookstall down on 42nd.
Robert Mapplethorpe tired and bored.  Wish @Andy Warhol would notice me already.
Robert Mapplethorpe found a crucifix in the trash as I walked home from hustling down at Times Square.  Wonder what I could do with this?  But first I have to pee.

I love posts where people wonder what famous dead people might have done with the tools of our time.  Have you read those?  You know, for example:  Dorothy Parker would have used Twitter, not facebook.  Those kinds of posts.  However, now I can't find one to save my Google.  Plus my stomach is growling so my attention span for searching wanes.

But you get the idea.

Two kids, one adult down.  One to go.  A couple of more weeks of Chloe.  Now if I can figure out what to do with that cats, life will be perfect.  The house will be all mine again.  From 7:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. all mine.

I just posted a photo of Sophie on her first day of middle school and now friends are leaving nice comments.  How dare they?  Don't they know I'm fed up with all this?

This heat is making my brain melt.  There, I said. it.  Now I have to go fold clothes and make some startlingly fabulous baked good so I can post about it on Facebook, me thinks.  I'm sick of posting pix of my kids and cats. Or maybe I'll just write about the day of the week.  How will people know it's Monday if I don't add my voice to that cacophony trumpeting the day of the fucking week? 

I'm thinking of a live webcam of me ironing.....

Your assignment, you may choose, but you can't choose not to choose:  (1)  Imagine you're a famous person - dead or otherwise (alive, I guess).  What would you post on Facebook or Twitter?  OR (2) What do  you mock on FB or Twitter?  And if you say Smiths songs, I'll hunt you down to administer a titty twister.  Your titties, not mine.

Going to School. The Down Home Writing School.

As Dr. Zaius says, no time for blogging today. I'm attending my first ever writers' workshop with The Cracker Queen Lauretta Hannon.

People of the internets, I've been looking forward to this since August. I can barely contain myself.

When I get back, maybe I'll tell you about the awful way I fell off the food wagon last night.....oh shoot, here it is in code:

Let's just say if I were a Republican politician, y'all would be scheudenfreud city over my anti-chocolate ice cream agenda.

And dang, I'd been doing so well. Thank goodness for my elliptical who loves me, even though I won't give him the reverse Olivia Newton John.....not even on his birthday.

Here's your assignment for comments. Tell us your favorite type of thing to read - a sports column, a magazine, what genre of novel, non-fiction, graphic novels, the back of a cereal box? Let's have it.

Until next time,

Lisa