stop

Tiny sinewy arms wrap around my neck and scruffy boy hair rubs my cheek, our feet intertwined his toe taps mine annoyingly. That boy, that boy I made out of thin air inside my stomach, knitted together legs, arms, eyes, lips, lungs, spleen and fingers that hold my hand tightly and sweatily, just like his father. Nuzzling my neck he kisses me and presses his tiny body to mine absorbed in the movie but pausing to love on me, smelling my neck, kissing my cheek.

I still don’t understand how something so terrifying and complex can be so heavenly.

Walkabout

We go to the familiar and cheap or free places every weekend when we hang out. I love his tiny studio apartment on Biddle Street with the giant working marble fireplace, wood floors, stone courtyard and clawfoot tub. Magical pancakes come out of his tiny closet like kitchen and there is always music playing. My dad plays with me all the time and can also let me do my own thing. I draw lots of pictures at his desk with the green lamp with crayons that he keeps for me in an old tin.

Its chilly in the spring air and we walk through mucky woods of Gun Powder through the back trails he finds when I am not with him. He knows the Park Rangers and finds cool places to look at the river. We walk and not talk much this time. Usually we sing songs he teaches me by The Beatles or The Eagles or he answers my million questions or just tells me a million things even when I don’t ask him. Often we hold hands and are just quiet trying to spot animals and birds, our friends in the forest. We look at the leaves on the ground and try to match them with the trees that tower over our heads. We find berries we can eat and others that would make me sick. We walk around the same spot many, many, many times and I am getting tired of hiking in circles when my father exclaims, “NIC, what is that?”

I look down at my feet and there is this perfect tiny antler, the first one ever shed by some beautiful buck on his way to becoming king of the forest, just like in Bambi. I bend down and examine it, not touching it, just looking at it. My father says, “Pick up honey, pick it up and check it out.” I look at him and ask, “Really is it okay?” In my five year old brain dwells the mantra of “leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but photos and memories…” and I am hesitant to take this treasure of the forest, of the king of animals from the forest floor. My dad nods his head and says, “You can take it because he doesn’t need it anymore. Thats why it fell off. No wild animals will need it or eat it so you can take it. ” He tells me about the Native Americans that roamed these forests and what kinds of objects they would make with the horn. I hold it in my hand and am surprised by its weight and smoothness. It feels cold and hard in my hand,

I am mystified by this treasure I have found and my father makes a big deal out of me finding it all by myself to my grandparents. He tells me I can take it home to show my mom and keep it. I show her and she is not really impressed. Or she is jealous that he can do those things for me. I don’t know but she does not share in my enthusiasm in finding this amazing thing that few out of a creatures head and then fell off to make room for new ones. I have just started losing my baby teeth so I have some concept that you can have body parts fall out/off and they do grow back but it still seems very strange to think that each time his antlers fall off they make room for racks that are bigger and more impressive. My teeth are all pretty much the same size. Well, molars are kind of cool I guess, but not as amazing as antlers and I envy this buck his treasure lost each year in the spring.

Its not until years and years later that my father tells me that he found those antlers the week before and had come and placed them in a remotes spot, walked me past it a hundred times before he grew impatient and just had to point it out, not willing to wait another dozen times around the tree for me to spot it on my own. He wanted me to find it, to discover it all on my own. The world, it opened up like the flowers he was teaching me to name, to fly like the birds whose songs we learned to be still in and see what is all around me, the magic everyday.

who knows me in Wisconsin?

What up, Wisconsin? Someone tried to call us, we did not answer due to likely hood of telemarketing but now, lo and behold, there is someone reading me from Wisconsin?

I don’t know anyone in Wisconsin.

Do I????

love,

blabblahblah

come into the parlor

I invite my mom over and she never comes over because I live in the ghetto. I live in a dump. I live where she is not and I am free and she is not. So she doesn’t come over. She comes over after work and we sit in the communal parlor with the fancy sofa and marble fireplace with the giant pocket doors. I close them and sit down, taking a deep breath and ask for something I have never asked for. I can’t remember the last time I asked for something because I always had my own money since I was fourteen and she wouldn’t give it to me because she wouldn’t have it to give.

But I take a deep breath and ask her anyway. Smiling, I lower my eyes and feel nervous and serious. I think I know what her answer will be  but I ask it anyway because I feel like I don’t have anywhere to go. I ask her for money. I need $200, please and I can pay you back. She smiles at me, crosses her hands on her lap and looks at me calmly and says, “No. I will not lend you money. You can and should just do this on your own.Work it out. I won’t lend it to you. ” I argue, “but you have it, but why not? If you needed it I would give it to you…” I trail off because she interrupts me, all business, “No, I would never ask you for money. And no, I will not give you any.”

I sit there in the ancient parlor and look at the carpet hoping some secret will be revealed in its pile and there isn’t anything. I think I says, smirkingly, “Well, thanks! Thats just great. What a good mom you are, I have never asked you for anything. But thanks.”

She looks at me with menace and says, “Baby girl, I have given you everything.” and she walks out the double doors, down my marble steps, into the ghetto to drive away in her red sports car. I close the door and go back inside, realizing what I knew all along. She made my bed for me and now I lay in it not knowing how to wash the sheets.

It just wasn’t

Its late and I want to go and see my favorite local band and I have the night off. I pester and badger him into going, “Get dressed, come on, lets go, will you dance with me?” He frowns, as he is permanently doing, pauses and tells me, “Stop it. No, I won’t dance. That, would be ridiculous.” Whirling around the apartment like a dragonfly on a pond I land in the bathroom to dry my hair, fuss with my face, back to the bedroom to change into six outfits that MUST center around my new-to-me white straight leg jeans, peeling off tshirt after tshirt like a snake shedding its skin I drop them on the floor, the bed, the dresser. Exhausted and giving up, settling for a light blue lace tshirt I feel vaguely rockin  in, strap on my black high heel sandals and put on my red lipstick. He sits on the couch, smoking, looking bored with it all already.

I feel like  a burden. A burden that I want his friendship and for him to like me. It feels like too much, like when I use to fight with my mom. Its that sick sinking sort of feeling knowing that no matter how hard you try, its never enough. My mind is always all fuzzy and hums with a distracting tone when ever we are together and I blame it on my brain being young and full of drugs mostly. I blame it on my own insecurities. I blame it on my need to be liked, no matter what and by everyone. I blame it on my desire to please, to be pleasing, to be part of a crowd. I never blame it on the truth because I will never know it. I could never say it because its embarrassingly stupid and silly.

Its like looking into a mirror and seeing the back of your head, unexpected and curious and not what  you thought at all.

Walking into the bar the music of the jukebox is loud, people are sweaty and glamorous waiting like only the beautiful can, with oozing indifference. People scan the room for the person who is better looking, thinner, better dressed and I join them in my own search. He walks in oblivious to it all, embarrassed by his companion for the night. Regret across his wan smile breaks through the politeness. Like a hamster on a wheel I perseverate, “We can go, you can go, do you wanna go?” He just shakes his head and looks away, away from me into the crowd.

I dance and sing and drink and smoke, when you could still smoke inside a bar (gosh, I am old) and try not to think about how much I disappoint him and not knowing why or how that could ever come to be. I am not smart enough, not pretty enough, not thin enough, not nearly enough of anything to be considered. Considered for much. Considered very little. My infinitesimal part looms large in my head but when its reflected in his eyes its nothing. Its less than nothing and I feel ashamed and stupid for searching for something that is so clearly never there.

hot tubs in the sand

In my very favorite car my Dad ever owned, the royal blue Austin Heely Sprite with the soft top and little black leather seats, we drive to Mexico, as far as you can go without a passport-about 200 miles to Ensenada to a town called La Bufadora where we camp on the beach for a week. The tiny orange pup tent is really too small for my giant 6′3″ father and I and in the mornings we wake up on the opposite side we fall asleep on and that confuses  me to no end.The waves are huge and the surf sounds like its going to come crashing down on us all night long. In the morning we wake up and give the campground owner’s children two American dollars to dig big holes in the tide line to soak in natural hot springs on the beach. We eat pancakes over the campfire in the morning and giant carnitas filled burritos at dinner at the little restaurant on the hill with the slanted black and white tile floor that a cat wanders around on. I stare fixated on the Mamacita who makes tortillas by hand on her ancient black cast iron griddle. My father orders a fish and it comes whole with the head on and he tells me it was caught right off the cliff we look over out the window at the blow hole. The roads around the town are narrow dirt paved wide enough for only a single car with no guard rail  on the ocean side and the tiny blue convertible squeezes over with just enough room to pass and I close my eyes and try not to think about plummeting off the cliff to my death in Mexico. The beach along where we camp is stirred up with slit and snorkeling is impossible from a distant ocean storm in the Pacific. We find hundreds of baby sharks on the beach, washed up dead and it is creepy in an apocalyptic way. Its sunny and lovely and I get really bad sun-poisoning on my face and shoulders. On the last day we pack up our tent just when I was use to tent living and felt, at 9 years old, that I could just live there on the beach and not go to school. The tiny cardboard and tin shacks that everyone seems to live in bother me and I keep bugging my father to give the people we meet money and he mostly does, smiling at my confliction in my first run in with poverty. Really real  poverty. He tries to explain how things are but trails off knowing that its just something I will come to understand when I am older. We drive home with the top down and get stuck in traffic beside a distant tuna factory processing fish so big that I can see them sticking out of containers a 1/2 mile away. It smells really bad and I am sick from Tourista, must have had ice or somethng freshly washed in Mexican water and just didn’t know. My stomach cramps as I crouch down under the dashboard trying to get away from the smell of rotting fish in the Mexican summer sun.

I remember the sound of the waves crashing over my head, the hot water around my legs in our homemade hot tub, the cat winding its skinny body around my ankles walking on the slanted floor and the blow hole’s powerful spray roaring up through ancient rocks, propelled by the force of the entire ocean like fire works made of water.

ohferchristssakes

How do people work, like, everyday? I worked four days this week and need more than just two days off. I have two days in a row and the last day I worked I cried in the elevator. Is that normal for most jobs? And, that new Intern, the one from Africa whose accent I have trouble with STOP ASKING ME HOW TO PUT ORDERS IN THE COMPUTER CAUSE YOU ARE THE DOCTOR.

I should have stayed a stay at home mama.

I really, literally, have NO fucking idea what I was thinking.

The light comes on and they scatter

One summer, between my junior and senior year my first boyfriend from my freshman year is in college close by and living in the city, calls me up and asks me if I want to come over and hang out. And do some acid. For the first time for me. Ever curious, full-of-danger girl I eagerly accept the invitation. He warns me it might make my stomach feel a little sick because it might be cut with poison but it will pass. As the first hour passes and I don’t think I feel anything, thinking it was a dud he says, lets go sit outside and watch the trees and sky for a while, its better to be outside. We sit on the hill and waves form in front of my eyes, I can see every molecule of green chlorophyll on each leaf of each tree. It flutters and flirts and winks in a lovely and hypnotic way. My stomach does feel like there is a cold lead ball but its strangely not unpleasant because it feels so distant from me, my stomach and body.

Sometime later after laughing and talking we go back inside to his apartment. He puts on mood music, The Cure, The Banshees and Morrisey-whom I loathe and have always thought he should just kill him self and get it over with. The music sounds amazing. Really, but I can’t follow it. Its hot and stuffy and we slowly take off some of our clothes, sit around in our underwear wishing for popciles but too high to go outside or even into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Later its dark, hours have passed slowly as they do when you are high, and we extinguish some candles becuase I am getting paranoid we might set something on fire and we tried having sex but were too high so we just make out, laying around in our underwear.

Driven by thirst and desire to do something, anything than sit still anymore, no longer paralyzed by the force of the drugs on our small minds, we head into the kitchen to get a glass of water. My ex-boyfriend turns on the light and a thousand roaches scatter across his washboard sink, down the cabinets, onto the floor.

I flip the fuck out.

Like, yelling, stamping, crying…freaking the fuck out.

The ex-boyfriend, a genius, simply turns off the light and tells me a stern voice, you know that one, the one you use when you are scared but talking to a mean dog, he says, “Its fine. Look, they are gone. Get a hold of yourself. Stop yelling. Here, have a glass of water. Look the lights are out, lets go up on the roof and look at the sky. Calm down. Come with me, take my hand, its okay….”

We walk up on the roof and I persist with the “FUCK. THAT WAS FUCKED UP, HOLY SHIT…” rap for a minute and he says, “here have a cigarette, stop your yelling, you are bringing me down, look at the sky, its beautiful and that is over.”

I light my smoke and look at the city sky with a few stars shining, purple black sky with hints of dawn at its edge the cool breeze on the roof blows it all away and I look at the boy who changed my life, twice.

I am being mocked in Russain

Я глумлюсь в русском.

Населите иметь sidebar, на моих комментариях, переговоры о моем отсутсвии creativity и bland имя моего blog.

Я некоторо открыт к предложениям не включают личные детали моей жизни, которая я хотел был бы написать о но не может потому что too many людей, котор я знаю читают это теперь.

НО, иметь больше удара с вашими предложениями, мог я предложить вас пишу к мне на английском языке?

gosh, I love free-translator dot com.

Hokey-Pokey

There is nothing like a new job to make you feel like an idiot, especially one that you have studied for, take an exam to get a license and are given a title for. I spend each day learning something new, every single day and feel at times caught up and then in an instant completely overwhelmed and not sure which task to tackle first. Priorities, thats what its all about as I do my nurse hokey-pokey.

You put the IV in, you take one out, throw it in the red box and move all about…You take the pills out, you put the pills in, throw away the wrapper and wonder where else to begin. You take down the dressing, you put another one on, you flip open the red garbage lid and then the gooey one is all gone. You shuffle with the walker to bathroom, you wait outside the door, they tell you they are all done and hope they don’t fall on the floor. You listen to their lungs, you listen to their heart, you ask them to turn over looking at their butt, hoping they don’t fart. You dump the puke out, you give them some drugs, you wait and see if they throw up again and watch them sleep like slugs.

Its musical, its fun, don’t you wish you were a nurse too?

(everyone clap hands!!! yayayayayayayayayay.)

(extra action to wash hands between each verse…try it, you will like it.)