Strange dreams and the Master Mechanic

Strange dreams, nightmares. I pull my molars out one by one, from front to back. Clean to the root, strings of blood and yellow puss. I dream the interpretation given by all the books: oh, this is about fearing loss of attraction. I fight the dream, I try to shout and wake myself and when I wake I tell myself I won't go back to nightmares.

But there I am, a child bride. Who am I marrying? Why am I marrying? I'm going through the rituals. I brush long hair I've never had. Make-up. I'm about to put on a heavy sateen dress, a beautiful baptismal childlike dress. And he calls; my ex, my nightmare betrothed.

Why aren't you here? I say.

I'm moving in with so-and-so tomorrow, he says.

You can't, we're getting married, we have to live together after today, I say.

Fuck you, he says, I don't care. Exactly as it was.

But, you can't live with so-and-so, we have to get married today, we have to live together.

I don't give a fuck. Fuck you, he says.



I sat on my couch in the morning sun making googly eyes at my dog and theorizing about his deep love for Thom Yorke and The Postal Service. I sat outside in the morning sun and saw my dog looking at me through the window and thought how funny it would be if he jumped out.



I drove to the mechanics to get a quote on the Jeep. Half an hour into the quote he tells me his friend died this week of Hep-C. He was a real bastard. It's funny, they went to Wilson High School together, and they were both voted least likely to live past age 17. And his friend, he was 56. A fucking waste. No one cared but his mother. He lived fast. They raced cars together when they were younger. And he had such physical prowess, you know? He'd drive up to the track and hop out of the car with his shirt off, he should've gone to Athens, made something of himself. He had so much potential, and the mechanic, he says he waited his whole life for his friend to make good on it. His family owned a furniture company. The building on the waterfront. Yeah, I know it. His family gave him a job. And he'd go visit his friend and he'd just blow it off, go have lunch with him for the rest of the day. His family had over 100 employees. And they reached the point when they had to decide whether to keep the company going, and they shut it down because, you know, he just wasn't interested.



I stayed for at least an hour. Said take care and good luck with the details on the new race track.



Got home and someone had tied my dog to my front porch. My neighbor left a post-it note, found Dylan in her front yard. The bastard, he did it. He jumped out the fucking window. Jesus.



Thought about the mechanic. How in another decade I would pull him to my breast and kiss him telling him the things I can't say with words. How every time he cursed his friend I felt like crying I know how much he loved him how he waited his whole life for this guy who had it all to wake up and take life by the balls how he busted his ass to overcome that least likely to live past age 17 to have this cluttered little shop all lined with pictures from 1972 memories of back when he raced and the whole time he watched his friend, this guy with all the charisma in the world, the world on his plate, and no hunger just fuck it up and he loved him he fucking loved him so much he hated him and he died, he died without making good on any of it and the hope and the waiting and the memories it was such a waste and he'll never know what to do with that, you just don't get over that, I know, I know.

a debacle of leaves and stones in its own way

Tolstoy wrote (depending on the translation) "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." My family's unhappiness is so typical that though it may make a good novel I cannot imagine it would interest anyone in real life.



The heat drained the trees to an extent they unseasonably shed their leaves this week. I feel betrayed by deciduous trees. They lend a false sense of security in the summer then leave you bare and exposed in the winter. The North has more evergreens, quiet evergreens that bend in the winter wind but also tend to snap in the cold. I like the way you see the seasons change here. Nonetheless, the trees betray me.



Last Sunday I thought I got food poisoning from a package of Buitoni ravioli but a week of nausea confirmed I had some flu. The sickness seemed to coincide with my willful desire to flip off my professor's mandatory attendance policy. I truly felt so nauseous I couldn't sleep half the week, just pass out on the couch to the sound of the news and hope I'd learn all about the Israeli crises through some strange process of osmosis (I think I did). All the same, goddamn Catholic guilt.



I'm terribly disappointed to report that debacle has an Old French rather than Germanic root. I'd desperately hoped for a Germanic root because, debacle, say it aloud, just sounds so wickedly guttural. On the upside, did you know it also means "the breaking up of ice in a river"? Reminds me of a fabulous passage from Mr. Sammler's Planet about dilapidate (from the Latin lapis or lapid) and how you really shouldn't use it except in reference to the falling apart of stones. Jesus this shit gets me hot.

Notice of Abandoned Property

Opened a NOTICE OF ABANDONED PROPERTY today from the old abode, complete with printed pictures with each piece of abandoned property circled. The full inventory, I shit you not:

(1) an ashtray

(2) a plug in air freshener

(3) a bag

(4) a toilet plunger and bowl cleaner

(5) a pink sponge and porcelain cleaning product

(6) a green sponge

(7) a pink sponge and spray cleaning product

(8) two hair ties

(9) a black head band

(10) mr. clean cleaner

(11) soft scrub cleaner and one green, one pink sponge

(12) a wine glass

(13) a plastic bag

(14) rice

(15) a mechanical pencil

(16) a plastic baggie

(17) a paper bag

(18) a roll of masking tape

(19) Murphy oil soap and Simple Green cleaner

(20) cardboard shoe box

(21) paper bag

(22) empty garbage can next to the washer and dryer

(23) empty cat food bag

(24) Bounce dryer sheets

(25) cardboard tube

(26) shoe box

(27) garbage and recycling

(28) Fertilizer, potting soil and a gasoline can

(29) window heating unit that came with the house

(30) carton of coolant

(31) Garden pruners

Fucking call me

My mother and I exchanged eight emails today. Emails because she refuses to talk to me on the phone. She refuses to talk to me on the phone, she tells my aunt, because she doesn't trust she won't say something hurtful she'll regret. So she emails me. A day of emails all over fixing my goddamn car. And now my poor aunt plays peacemaker from Oakland, CA; hardly an enviable position.



Emails say so much and so little. Words become loaded with too many meanings because they lack the help of any intonation.



Used to be, for instance, you talked to men on the phone. You stayed up late, under the covers, talking nonsense on the phone. Supposedly most men don't talk on the phone. They sure seemed to before the whole email thing though. I miss that.



Now I have a record of everything. Everything's so damn permanent, pertinent, contrived even. The thing about emailing people is so much thought goes into it all. You can't mutter or twist your words with sarcasm or silliness. Words scream once sent and you can't explain or take them back.



Not a breath, not a shuffle not a sigh. Not a quiver or a doubt or a question.



Not even the personality of handwriting, the smudge of ink from a drop of rain or a spot of grease.



Immediate gratification. A week for a single conversation at the same time.



Fucking call me.

Saudade

I found the other word I was looking for (in the frenzy of wonderful things Next Stop Wonderland talked about or made me think about). I love this...I'm just going to drop quote the entire Wikipedia entry:

Saudade in European Portuguese and Galician and in Brazilian Portuguese is a word for a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really return. E.g., the sentence "Eu sinto muitas saudades tuas" directly translates into "I miss you so much". "Eu sinto muito a tua falta" also has the same meaning in English ("falta" and "saudades" both are translated for missing), but it is different in Portuguese. It also relates to feelings of melancholy and fond memories of days gone by, lost, love and a rush of sadness coupled with a paradoxical joy. Saudade is generally considered one of the hardest words to translate. It originated from the Latin word solitatem (loneliness, solitude), but with a different meaning. Loneliness in Portuguese is solidão from Latin solitudo. Few other languages in the world have a word with such meaning, making saudade a distinct mark of Portuguese culture. Saudade is different from nostalgia. In nostalgia, one has a mixed happy and sad feeling, a memory of happiness but a sadness for its impossible return and sole existence in the past. Saudade is like nostalgia but with the hope that what is being longed for might return, even if that return is unlikely or so distant in the future to be almost of no consequence to the present. . .Nostalgia is located in the past and is somewhat conformist while saudade is very present, anguishing, anxious and extends into the future

The 1700 Club

Jesus Christ. I spent over 28 hours on the phone last billing period? How is that possible? OK, I guess if I spent about an hour a day on the phone that's possible. But I think of my plan (which I went over last month) and I think there's no way I could reach the gabbing of the teenaged cheerleader in the commercial. I don't talk on my phone in the car, in fact I'm adamantly against it. I hate people who talk on the phone while they're out with friends: I usually leave my phone at home when I go out.

And yet here I am: over 1700 minutes in one month. Jesus fucking Christ.

Possible justifications:

(1) I was moving, so I was on hold with a bunch of utility companies trying to transfer and disconnect services.

(2) I've been going through this health mess, so I've often been on hold trying to get biopsy results.

(3) I've been on the phone with friends quite a bit talking about one and two.

OK, I'll take solace in the fact that this has never happened before and it will never happen again.

Jesus. Mary. And. Joseph.

if you find her sane, they died in vain?!?

Andrea Yates defense closing argument:

"If you find her sane, those children will have died in vain."

What the fuck? So, if you find her insane, the children will not have died in vain?

I'm not advocating a verdict, but I think this is a real lousy argument.

Yes, if she's legally insane, put her in a mental hospital. I'm all for that, even passionately for that.

Insanity may excuse (in the legal sense) murder, but I just don't believe it gives reason to murder. It's not a justification, or a justification defense.

It's all in vain. She should've been on her medication, she had a well documented history of mental illness. Don't make these kids martyrs to the plight for mental health advocacy.

Bull shit.

Give Us a Shot!

No, how you feel about us really isn’t that clear. Perhaps it’s clear as a shot of Sapphire to you but it’s fuckin’ Drambuie to us.
We speak in layers of meaning so we assume you do too. Rationally, we know you don’t. But we can’t help dissecting your every word. That’s what we do.
So when you give us a twig, we try to build a house. Frankly, most the time it’s hard to tell the twigs from the rose stems.
Further, our inability to decode you doesn't mean we're in denial about your interest level. It just means (see above)your cryptic little indicators are far too, well, cryptic.
Don’t be afraid to hit us over the head with it already! We’re sure as hell not. We’re just sitting around, giving you 15% of what we feel because we know immediately and usually you don’t.

ED and HY through KY

The acronym E.D. needs to stop. Do men with limp dicks feel better walking around calling it E.D. than erectile dysfunction? I'd really like to see the market research that went into this ad campaign.



Not a commercial I hate, just a product: who the fuck wants a personal lubricant they can also use as a massage lotion? Seriously. Things like that should be reserved for one and one purpose only. If the stuff was flavored I'd get it, but this is just K-Y wetness;disgusting.



Have you seen the new H3 commercial? A woman and her kid get snubbed in the playground so she realizes she should get a hummer. The problem I have with this one is that I feel like I might befriend the woman in the commercial, she looks nice. The middle aged bitches who tend to commandeer Hummers dont look or act this nice.



And another thing. I'm sure someone else has thought of this. Why not manufacture cars people have to fuel from their own food scraps or compost? Kill two birds with one stone. Not to mention there are some drivers I'd like to subject to shoveling compost into their own cars in order to drive. Particularly the ones who buy totally generic BMWs or Hummers when, if they really feel compelled to spend the money, they could buy a bitchin' classic Porsche or something like that.

a hot wind

The sun swelters and a hot wind blows the heat about. Breeze usually helps the matter but not today. Every driver seems propelled by blundering self-absorption; a good day for a parking lot collision.



I drink some Limeade tasting pleasantly of those push-up popsicles of younger days. Still, I wish for a splash of cranberry to cut the sweetness, a shot of vodka to burn. It's a good day to drink and too hot for anything but gin or vodka but all I have is beer.



A good day for a long walk under the stars. I don't want to talk and I miss having a large dog so I could do these things alone. If I were up North, I'd go for a midnight skinny-dip. The moon will hit the water just right tonight. But that's about the only thing I miss about up North right now.



I'm thinking about a friend with the same last name, the other last name, who visited me from a state where the sun shines all night this time of year and you can ski till dawn. He'd say "I luf you" with a star hanging 'round his neck for the girl with the same name as the pendant and it's true, we luffed but we didn't love. My picture of him always had an amber tinge, from another era even then.



When the end's in sight perhaps you do lose your reserve. Those summers we lived as though immersed in a revolving first love free from fear or accountability or boundaries. We had snow in the summer and bacon cheeseburgers in the afternoon and swam before dinner. The stars were our television, kisses our sex.



A good day to sit on the porch and avoid the sun. A good day not to question things the hot wind irritates. The sun pulls me into myself and I'm better off away from the road for now.

two for twenty-two hours

Afternoon I'm already exhausted I can tell how class will drag on like the longest moment non-coherent and I'm already imagining the six pack I will pick up on the way home (but just the one I'll pull on all night).



Took four hours at least to read 50 damn pages because summer hours inspire little to no inspiration to do a damn thing and here just past 4 pm I haven't a clue where the time goes.



Spent at least an hour on the phone practically like going to coffee without the motivation and we learn that yes the suffix -ship may have the same Old English root as ship (as in a boat).



Really that is all I want to do on days like this.



Determine the common root of -ship and ship, sit on the porch, and drink the inevitable beer.



So I walk the dog and I'll head over to the old house to switch the laundry, two more days of laundry, and go from there to school stopping at the convenience store on the way. And I'll put in my two hours like the longest moment non-coherent and drive back smiling with the already imagined six pack (but just the one I'll pull on all night).

J.U.G.

A man walks down my street approaching my neighbors asking for three dollars to go pick up his family. I fear he will approach me, he does not. I spent my last three dollars in change at the drive through coffee shop down the street. But I always feel like I'm lying when I tell the homeless I have no cash. The perennial guilt.



I miss Catholic School because they'd tell me what to feel guilty for and they'd absolve me of my sins. Making out with the boyfriend in the halls? That'll be one day of J.U.G. (that would be Justice Under God, the Catholic School equivalent of detention). J.U.G seemed so much more satisfying than detention. You're not only in trouble, you're a sinner, and god is watching.



Now I don't know why I feel guilty all the time. I just apologize profusely and honestly feel sorry but I do it so often I must just annoy every one. I really have nothing to feel sorry for, I know this rationally. The irrational part is another story.



I apologize for being so direct and the truth is I delete the really honest parts. I delete the part about how every time I watch American Beauty my eyes well up at the part where he says sometimes there's so much beauty in this world that my heart feels like it will cave in and do you feel this way too? And what's left is less than emotive. What's left is the artichoke a friend and I used to refer to me as. Spiny tough outsides, you get the rest.



I used to enjoy sin, I want that back. Now I feel ambivalent. Not truly sorry, but sort of joyless towards it. I think it may help to have lots of religious idols around. I don't know. Does anyone want to go to church? I feel a wicked streak setting in.

the note is the word

I find so many moments in life marked not by words but rather songs. I learned to read and play music the same year I learned to write my name. I know that linking songs to memories is not unique to me or musicians as a class: it is only unique in that a musician not only hears the memory, a musician expresses or speaks the language that way as well. The same applies to other fields, no doubt. For me, music is a second language. Sometimes I want to communicate something to someone and words seem terribly insufficient. Afterwards, I wish I could have said, or sent them or played them a certain song.



How am I? How do I feel about you? How was my day? I can try to describe it, but really what I meant was Shumann's Davidsbundler Op.6, No. 2.



Or certain moments, I hear something, and I have to run to my sheet music and find it, that perfect way of describing what I feel. There is no word. The note is the word.



Somehow this all comes back to the whole Benjamin/Pure Language thing. Translation...the true meaning emerging from multiple translations. I find the pitfalls of communication and language fascinating, maddening, damn near tragic and yet absolutely delightful. Moments of complete understanding are so rare. Getting there? Damn. I guess that's the stuff.

more than breathing

I dropped off my Jeep at the mechanic this morning. The mechanic greeted me with such a sunny demeanor I told him "You have an amazingly positive attitude for such an early hour." He smiled and replied, "I figure if I wake up and I'm breathing it's a good day!" I like that, a lot.



I love my new house. I have just enough here. Just enough storage space. Just enough room to fit my furniture (and not an inch more). And yet more. More trees to blow in the wind at night in front of my porch. More dark outside my window and less street lights. More quiet and more birds chirping. More peace.



Comcast won't arrive to hook up the cable for a week. So, I imagine I'll play lots of Tetris, Packman and Mario Brothers. Lots of piano. Spend way too much time on the Internet (god bless the neighbors with an open connection). And maybe even study.



A lot of my memories of Portland as a child consist of day care walks. I went to a daycare in Sellwood, down the street, actually. And so, for the longest time, I thought that Sellwood had abnormally high sidewalks. And then I realized how short I was when I lived here. At night when I walk my dog down new streets, everything feels eerily familiar and I know perhaps, about 20 years ago, I've walked these streets before.



A strange thing has happened this week. Alone, I have caught my default facial expression changing. Suddenly, I find myself smiling.

pretty much, pretty fast, pretty o.k.

Fresh out of the shower in a dress to go to class yesterday I get the test results of my biopsy and they immediately scheduled me to remove the tissue this morning. As I listen a man parks in front of my driveway and simultaneously thanks me for lending rags to the contractors next door after a pipe burst.



I call Shelley sobbing and within in an hour we are drinking beer at three'o'clock on my porch trying to talk about anything but (per my request) except of course my increasingly urgent desire for a dancing cervix cartoon.



My car knock, knock, knocks when I drive. So we get on our knees and laugh because of course we would not know if anything's loose.



Sleep and up and on the way to the clinic. We're fucking hilarious in the waiting room. There is no one I'd rather go have precancerous tissue removed with than Shelley. Seriously. It was like going to camp.



The tool sounds like a vacuum cleaner and the electric burn emits a horrible smell. Yet somehow I think we will have hilarious memories of this.



Then home to pack because I'm moving tomorrow. And I do the horrible thing, I let my Mom come to help, because we're talking since last night when I called to give her the latest cervix news.



So, that was a bad idea. Live and learn though, I guess. I think we have the best intentions. We're just chemically incompatible. Or something.



Last night in this house. Really no nostalgia or saudade or sadness or anything. This place feels like a hotel. No complaints, a bit over priced. I'm ready to go home.



And the best part, I had a legitimate "health emergency" exempting me from two days of classes. Pretty cool, huh?



Yeah, I'm silly. But c'mon. I'm really fine. Look at the world. I could be an Iraqi. Or watching my house burn in California. Or on some totally lame show like Big Brother. I think I'll live.

awkward

Mark, Caitlin and I ate at the Goose Hollow Inn last night and managed to sit right next to the most awkward, painful date ever. You know how sometimes you start listening into someone's conversation and you just can't stop? Yeah. By the time our dinner came we all lapsed into utter muteness.

Contrary to gender stereotypes, the male did most of the talking. Actually, he pretty much never shut up about himself. And he sold himself, hard. He kept summing up how great he was with points like I've got a steady paycheck, a great place to live, great friends, my dogs and running. Relationships bring a lot of negative energy. Those things are really important.

I found myself wondering if one day they will invent a Date Simulator. Dates are so ridiculous anyway. Why not meet, hook yourselves up to some machine, and get a chemical mapping color read out as you answer a series of computer-generated questions?

Awkward.

punto para pure language

My mother keeps calling on her cell phone and after the first few words I hear nothing but dead air. I think, perhaps, she can hear everything I say. And so I feel strange when after repeating I can't hear you, I can't hear anything I keep hanging up.



I receive this text message: are you Margaret?



The new neighbors' contractors leave their baseball caps and gloves on my front yard. I go to return them and ask if they can leave the parking clear in front of my house next Thursday for my move. The man says well they're Mexican, you know how the Mexicans are, they just sort of leave things everywhere. I can't acquiesce and yet I can't piss off my neighbor. I tell him to have a good day and go home.



A man keeps calling asking for Becca. I keep telling him there's no Becca here.



Almost everyday I get a voice message entirely in Spanish: presionar uno para ayuda. Do I need help? What do I need help for?



I call my credit card company to cancel my credit protection service. They don't believe I am me. They have protected me so well that I can't verify that I am me. They say they will call me back. But they don't.