vengeance is mine, sayeth the ell (or: I am your karma, asshole)

I have never claimed to be a mature, fully evolved adult and at this late-stage, I know I never will be. And that's okay by me. I embrace the truth that I'm a bit of a perpetual rebellious teen with an over-developed sense of justice. It's an odd dichotomy, I know, but there you are.

One of the delightful things about living in a warm climate is growing lovely citrus in your yard. I have two orange trees, a grapefruit tree, an avocado tree and my favorite: a Ponderosa lemon tree. The lemon tree was a gift from a dear friend who has since passed away. In fact, one of the last things he and I did together was plant the lemon tree in my yard, situating it so that the aroma of the blossoms wafts into my bedroom window at night, sweet, clean, pure. As we packed the soil, I sang "Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet..." as he sambaed around the yard, ala Carmen Miranda. Sweet memories, indeed. This is the second year the tree has borne fruit since it came to live with me. Last year the two sole pieces of fruit it birthed disappeared one night just as they became fully ripened and almost ready for picking. I consoled myself that this year, I would water and fertilize better, talk to it more and guard it from what I was sure were fruit rats (until the Guy in the Boxers noticed tennis shoe prints in our yard under the tree).

But, still, I figured it was a fluke thing. This year I planned to make lemon squares with Schmoopie and squeeze the lemon juice to store in the freezer to make lemonade this summer. I tended and lovingly watched over my lemon tree, delighted as the fruit grew larger, the yellow hue deepening, the sweet citrus smell intensifying with each passing day, nudging me as I walked by it.

Last Saturday night, after Schmoopie had been tucked into bed with her iPod and a copy of "The Uglies," the Guy in the Boxers and I retired to the deck off of our bedroom to look at the moon, sip some wine and enjoy the crackling fire in the chiminea.

Round about 11:45 PM we heard a ruckus growing louder, approaching from about a block away. It was a cacophony of the loud singing and cussing and talking and shouting of a roving group of teenagers cutting a swath through our neighborhood, led, per usual, by the resident ruffian of our neighborhood, Mike, who lives kitty-corner from us. Our dog raised her head from the planks of the deck and cocked her ear, listening as the din of the approaching marauders grew louder. She stood, her tail at attention. She leapt off the deck and ran to the corner of our fenced yard and let out a ferocious volley of barks.

"Dude, hurry up," I heard a young male voice, which was so close I was startled. They were just on the other side of the fence--a few feet from where we sat, concealed by our fenced, covered deck. The Guy in the Boxers and I stared at one another, silent, straining to hear, not wanting to give away our nearness to the teens who had invaded our yard. Then, to my horror, I saw a yellow missile soaring in a perfect, beautiful arch over the streetlight on the corner, heard the unmistakable splattering of ripe fruit against concrete. I leapt to my feet and stood on the seat of the Adirondack chair I had been lounging in. The little bastards had stripped the fruit from the lemon tree and were pelting one another as they ran down the street, each dense thud and splitting sound more heart-rending to me than the next. A rage filled me as their high-pitched adolescent cackles filled the air. I stepped off the deck and started toward the gate, adrenalin propelling me forward. I wanted to kill the little pricks.

"Don't." the Guy in the Boxers said quietly, "Let it go."

"Those shits just destroyed all my lemons! And for what? For 'fun'?" I choked out. "Those gutless little fuckers!"

My rage grew hotter as their cackles intensified. I crept to the fence and squinted through the slats, watching as two punks jumped on the hood of Mike's car and rode it as if they were in a parade as he drove, zig-zagging down the street toward the beach. The thuds of fruit being whipped at cars as they passed dully audible. I walked out to the yard to survey my tree. Some of it's young branches had been snapped. The ground around it was littered with leaves, trampled green confetti. It looked forlorn and battered. I seethed with anger.

The next day I seethed more. I thought of knocking on Mike's front door and confronting him. I had discarded the idea of calling the police the night before. No sense in getting into it, I decided. And talking to Mike or his parents would be a waste of time. Their ineptness at teaching him respect for the property of others speaks volumes. He's an asshole kid and they have a lot to do with that. No, I thought, I will let it go. But I couldn't. It ate at me.

So last night, I was working late. I decided to take the dog for a quick stroll around our small block before I retired. It was 3 AM. As I pulled a sweatshirt over my head, I found myself in the kitchen. Without any forethought (honest), I opened the fridge and grabbed two eggs. I slipped them into the front of my hoodie and the dog and I headed off. It was unusually dark and windy last night. No moon. Low temperatures have prompted everyone to close up their windows. Lots of leaves and acorns were being blown from the trees as the gusts shook branches and palm fronds shimmied. It was a bit of a raucous night, weather-wise. I walked the dog down the street and back, thinking. I paused in front of Mike's house. It was dark, quiet. I reached into my pocket with my right hand, drew out an egg, and in one neat, overhanded swoop, I lobbed the egg over my head, it arched in a beautiful white streak and landed with a muffled plop and exploded on the rear window of Mike's little shit-box car that was parked in the driveway next to his daddy's Lexus. I was filled with satisfaction. I quickly drew the second egg and repeated the overhanded lob. It was a thing of beauty. I stood and admired my work for a moment. The dog looked, sniffed the air, looked back at me. The wind lifted my hair and tickled the back of my neck. I turned and headed for home, went to bed and slept the deep sleep of the righteous.

This morning over coffee I confessed myself to the Guy in the Boxers. He was quiet for a long moment and said, "You know, honey, sometimes I have NO idea who you are." Then he high-fived me.

Sure, it was a futile gesture, an act of incredible immaturity, pettiness and all that. But I would do it again. It was healing for me. I have moved on. We agreed that Mike is such an asshole, the phantom egger could be any one of at least a dozen people who are pissed off at him. And who, I ask you, is going to suspect a middle-aged, housewife and mother, respected dog-walking member of the community? Hm?

body double

I always secretly and judgementally snicker to myself when anyone I know proclaims that they've been told that they resemble a celebrity. How sad, I think to myself. And then you feel like you're supposed to say: "Oh, yes, I can see that--you DO look like Angelina Jolie!" even when they look more like Dougie Howser. It's just sad. But lately, some of my homies think I could pass for a relative of MLP. And people I don't know (okay and Amber-the-poetess extraordinaire--she too thinks I look like "that chick on 'Weeds'." People I don't know come up to me and say: "Hey! You look like that chick on Weeds!" And for the longest time I was like, WTF? Whom are they talking about? Because I do not get Showtime--I am an HBO girl. And now that I know that they mean MLP, I say: "Maybe she looks like me, asshole." Not really, but I think it. Here's the goofy thing--I was looking at this photo you see here (which was jacked from an I heart MLP site) with a friend of mine the other day when my spouse cruised through the room, glanced at the monitor and asked as he sailed by: "Who Photoshopped your head onto that body?" He can kiss my ass.

Dear MLP, we do look creepily similar in some areas. Between the nose and eyebrows. And I do so love how you say: "Idgie Threadgood, let's wrestle in some raspberry Jell-o and then fry us up some tomatoes once we're done dismembering and bar-b-q-ing my drunken oaf of a husband!" Yum!

oh, no, she di-ent!!!!!!

Oh, yeah, she did. check out the latest installation of the many moods of eb. I personally love the final selection of her musical collage, which I suspect may be a jab at moi due to my tirade last year against this putrid girly anthem. cause it's always about moi.

this cutie is my brother, (the Sammy Hagar-looking wild man, not the fish) the ultimate sports fisherman, he-man and super-cool big brother. He taught me to swim, fish, skimboard, water-ski, surf, tap a keg and all the other super-cool skills I needed to be a Florida girl. I hate fishing but still do all the other stuff on occasion. Love ya, bro!

more than just douchebags...

...so here are my two (and only remotely achievable) resolutions for 2007:

I will identify an individual or entity worthy of the dubious Douchebag-of-the-Month designation (Check. See below.) and I will also, to redeem the former, run a poem once per month.

This month's poem is by one of my favorites, e.e. cummings, who I always pictured (when I was a junior high school girl plowing through every bit of poetry in the library, yes, Amber, it's true, I hope you're happy now) as a short, bespectacled, sadly unattractive bald man. He was actually sort of sexy as you can see here. I'd do him. So here's January's poem of the month:

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

i love you much(most beautiful darling)
more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky
-sunlight and singing welcome your coming
although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess
(except my life)the true time of year-
and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each
nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

Douchebag of the Month: Miss January

nuff said.

the heartbreak kid

my child somehow morphed from a freckle-nosed gangly little muppet to a femme fatale overnight. How did this happen? I know not. But she is light-years ahead of me in sophistication and just knowing stuff at the age of 13.

At 13 I was still trying to figure out how to ride my bike to school without getting the leg of my corn-flower blue Levis cords jammed into the bike's chain, resulting in spending yet another day of 8th grade with the crinkled bottom of my pant leg looking like it was run through a greasy meat grinder as my brother pointed and hooted in the hallway between classes, shouting "Dumbass!" There was not a thing femme nor fatale about me. Nada.

She is pondering existentialism and permanent hair removal, the laws of karma and eye liner and veganism. At 13 I relaxed in the lemon yellow bean bag chair in the avocado green and harvest gold family room reading 'Teen magazine and fantasized about Peter Frampton. She is reading the editorial page of the New York Times and asking me about Art Buchwald, The Nation, abortion, reincarnation. I was rumpled and frizzy, metal braces on my teeth, boyish. She has huge green eyes and perfect skin and beautiful, golden-streaked hair that wanders down her narrow back to her waist. She wears a 34-D for chrissake. Help me.

Last night, after a week of total feces at work and other arena's of my life, I logged off work early, put on my crappiest sweat pants and stained 15-year-old t-shirt and crawled into bed with a copy of Bob Dylan's Chronicles, declaring to all that Mommy was officially offline until Saturday morning, please pretend I am not here. About 10 minutes into my restful bliss (I was in New York with Bob, it was winter, 1957, Bob's lips were in my ear and I listened to his low, mumbling words of incoherent yet poetic memoir..."Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red-lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled up -- salesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes..." when suddenly I realized I was on the schedule to open the theatre (the community theatre two towns away where I volunteer) at 7 PM and serve as house manager for the evening's performance. Shit.

So I leapt out of bed, got dressed and jumped in the car. My daughter accompanied me. She likes to spook around the backstage area, find hiding places in the lofts, hang out with the sound and light guys and forage through the costume room for new finds. On the way there, she got me up to speed on the latest social machinations at school.

"Max asked me to go out with him," she said.

"Go where?" I asked.

"You know, Mommy, be his girlfriend."

"Well, what exactly does that mean?" I asked, and went on to remind her that there is no driving at this age, I will not drop her off at the mall so that she can roam and socialize with her pack of friends, no way. So where, exactly do teens who "go together" "go"?

She rolled her yes and said it was not an issue because she turned him down "but in a nice way." I explained to her for the 100th time that boys have feelings too and it must have been pretty tough for Max to screw up the courage to tell her that he "likes" her and ask her to be his girlfriend. His feelings must be a bit bruised and so she should be aware of that and treat him with kindness. She said it was cool, no problem. Fine.

Halfway through last night's performance, I stood in the lobby chatting with the 70-year-old concession stand volunteer when I saw Schmoopie staggering toward me, a stricken look on her sweet little face. She motioned at me violently to break away from Walter, who was filling me in on his latest Medicare hassles. She grabbed my hand and skittered into the theatre office, dragging me.

"Mommy, he hates me!" She said, pointing at the computer screen on the desk. I took off my glasses and leaned over for a closer look.

"Honey, what am I looking at?" I asked.

"It's his friends list on myspace. I was number one yesterday. Now I'm number 15!" she said, looking at me with disbelief, the pitch of her voice ratcheting up.

I guess this is how kids telegraph their pleasure or displeaure to one another these days.

When I was 13, if a boy didn't like you anymore or wanted to hurt you in some way he ignored you or, worse, did something shitty like knocked your books off your desk, a sort of public rebuke that all the other kids witnessed.

This is sort of the same thing, a public "you broke my heart and therefore you no longer rate with me as a person of importance" kind of thing. Only this seems more intense. What was once a painful but fleeting moment of rejection -- the feelings flying around in spastic trajectories that manifested in a passed note or a dirty look flashed in the hallway, this is much more of a public calling out that the whole world (if they wish to) can see. And it seems to matter so much to her.

Help me.

all in all this week has sucked total ass but at least my homo boyfriends think I look like this (see left).

Thank god for the gay men in our lives who keep us girls going with their delusional yet well-intentioned pumping up of our self images.

PS: my tits have never looked like this. Okay, maybe when I was nine. For about 10 minutes.

And my eyebrows looked like this chick's (the hooker on the half-shell) when I was on a bender in the '80s of plucking the shit out of them until one day Phillip (yes, yet another homo boyfriend) did an intervention by telling me I was careening dangerously close to Lucy Ricardo eyebrows. I stopped immediately. I mean, come on. I did have some taste.

I try to take Schmoopie to New York twice a year whether she needs it or not. It's important to me that she is exposed to as much of the real world as she can. Quiet weekends at the beach exploring tide pools and chasing horseshoe crabs is great, but she needs to walk through Times Square and be one with the steaming sewer grates, the rumble of the trains under her feet, the smell of peanuts roasting mingled with urine and cigarette smoke and the wonders of the Stage Door deli, the gloriously sexy Latina girls clustered around tables of knock-off bags, yadda, yadda, yadda.

She saw her first condom last spring when we were traipsing a little-worn trail in Central Park. It was dangling forlornly from the branch of a shrub, looking like overlooked tinsel from a long-forgotten holiday... we had a giggle over it and I explained the reasons why folks might be copulating among the greenery and anonymity of the park. We exited the path immediately, by the way.

Enywho, here's a photo she snapped as we strolled hand-in-hand the evening before Thanksgiving. I love that she still wants to hold my hand and as we walked I rolled her tiny mittened fingers between mine and wished you knew her and composed a postcard to you that I knew I would never actually write or send. But in my heart, I send you one every day.

I picked my kid up from school wearing slippers

Okay, they're cobalt blue fleecy clogs, but she knows they're slippers. And so do the good folks at Lands End. That's what they call them in the catalogue.

She is 13, therefore she died a thousand deaths when I walked into school to pick her up (it's our one extravagance--a pretentiously expensive private school with uber security--we have to sign kids out) with them on me feet.

She will never forgive me.

I don't care.

losing my shit

Yesterday I had my first-ever melt down at work.

I work from home mostly but am required to attend twice-monthly staff (I like to refer to them as "staph") meetings. These meetings are a 9 a.m. to 12 p.m free-for-all of anxiety, loathing, and various and sundry pathos on parade.

Long story short, my boss, who is a colossal horse's ass and the true definition of the word "clueless" was gyrating as usual but for some reason, his assholish-ness reached new heights of flaming assholishness and I snapped. Lost my shit. I gathered my stack of files and announced "This is fucking ridiculous. I'm out of here." Then I walked out, got on the elevator and made my exit. The number two guy in the organization made haste to run after me and trotted behind me as I sailed through the parking lot, puffing and begging me to allow him to explain, that it was all really his fault. Which it wasn't. He feels responsible for failing to control our asshole boss. It's not his job. He hasn't figured that out yet. He's a nice guy, but too nice.

I told him to fuck off too (but in a nice way) and drove to 7-11 where I purchased cigarettes, then parked at a nearby dog park and smoked and fumed until my co-worker/girlfriend, who knows me too well, pulled up and strolled over to the bench and asked "Wanna talk about it?" I really didn't, so we sat and I smoked and she and I watched a pit bull take a dump and then I went home to find 7 messages on my voicemail. Two from asshole boss. Two from too-nice number two guy and three from co-workers saying "YOU GO, GIRL, THAT WAS FUCKING GREAT!"

My boss called me again and asked me the one question I was most hoping to hear:

"What's wrong? Are you hormonal? Because you acted just like my wife does when she's really feeling hormonal." The rest of the conversation is not fit for even this, my pathetic blog. But I think I'm getting a raise. A big one.

amber!

My boob is sore from where Riley was leaning against it when he sat on the bench to chat with us. I was right there until he mentioned the DUI and having his mama pick him up. Ugh. Bring us some salsa and keep it moving. AND we missed the bar brawl. Damn. Have a safe trip home. Write me a poem that actually rhymes and includes "fuck."

Love ya!

ah, sweet relief

Barb's letter regarding the PET scan:


Allelulia!

I tested clean. My PET scan is clear. I went through a whole day of hell, but at 7:30 the doctor called and said I had a clear scan. What wonderful words. John and I were beside ourselves and Josh was right behind us.

I found out that I now go for radiation in three weeks. It will take that to get the chemo clear and not interfering. Then I start radiation for five weeks. Then it should be over. I think I will have to go through this every six months, but just to be normal again is worth everything.

My peeps, how can I say thank you enough? I was so scared. When he called I was so afraid of what he was going to say.

You have stood by me through it all and I am so very thankful. Thank God for all of you and what your prayers have done. It is amazing.

Love, me.

So we can breathe. Barb is looking forward to being "normal," painting the new French doors in her dining room, lounging with the girls by the pool, growing her hair out. She knows it's a reprieve, one that may not last forever but for the moment, there is nothing but joy.

I feel everything--every part of me--unclench for for the first time in what feels like months.

I am abandoning hearth and home Saturday for the wilds of North Carolina--heading up for my 8-day winter residency at grad school. My manuscript is as polished as it will get, so bring it on, brutal givers of workshopping feedback. I can take it. I revel in the retreat into academia, into reconnecting with my brain and literature and the staggering talent and passion of so many of my schoolmates. I'm looking forward to the next two weeks. Life is good. Hope you're feeling good too.

PS:

Dear Pat Robertson,

Shut your piehole and stop scaring the little old ladies. My poor sweet little 75-year-old neighbor, Bonnie, is now convinced we will soon be nuked into oblivion and she cannot function. Thanks a lot, asshole.

2007...

My fondest wish for the New Year is that the lovely Barb kicks cancer's evil ass. Here's the latest from her (she's doing okay).

Hooray, I am finished. My chemo is over and the next phase begins right away. I will have my PET scan Jan. 2, I will need all of your prayers. Then I set up my radiation on the same day. I then see the doctor and have my blood work read on Friday Jan 5. Mixed in with this are my usual booster shots. But, if things go well, I will be on radiation and Herceptin then back at work in five weeks. I can't wait. I am trying not to get my hopes up, but it is hard not to. We will be holding our breath. Kip went with me today and we enjoyed talking and gossiping. She was a great companion. There is a lot of sickness there though. It is sad.

Well so much for now. Good night everyone, you know I will sleep tight tonight.

Love me.