Briar

Same Time, Next Fall

2008-10-07T02:35:00Z

These fucking dreams. Goddamn the dreams, why won't they just stop? It's been ten years, shouldn't I be done with dreams by now? Shouldn't I be able to just sleep in the early fall? I'm so tired of the dreams.

It's better than it used to be. I keep telling myself that, for all the good it does. I got through the spring with only a couple of bad nights, I thought maybe it was over. But here comes October and the dreams again with it, every time my eyes close he's right there.

Every night awake a little later, push back sleep a little longer. Every morning up a little earlier, waking up with my eyes swollen and gritty, get under a hot, hot shower and melt away the sweat and tear-crust and that nasty yeasty smell of panicked sweat.

And it fucks with my perceptions, my reactions. Like perpetually living in the day before your period. Everything makes me cry, sometimes nothing at all makes me cry. Kneading bread dough at the kitchen counter and tears splashing on my wrists, I'm so sick of this.

I can't even call up his face any more, not when I'm awake. Dark hair, coarse and too long for his haircut, flakes of dandruff along the hairline. He was wearing a kelly green polo shirt, that rough texture of cheap doubleknit, I remember it rasping across my inner wrist when I went to shove him away. The smell of beer and whiskey and too many days without a shower, that sour/musty smell of unwashed male.

But his face is gone, I can't remember it even when I try. Only when I'm asleep, and maybe my subconscious doesn't remember it right after all. Maybe the face I see then is just a composite, a placeholder. I'd almost like to believe that, it would help.

The other details stay, though. I was wearing my blue sundress with the daisies, my favorite. High heels, my hair was bright red that year, and fell past my waist. I felt so pretty that morning when I left the house. The burn of that flat afternoon light flashing off the cars, the sound of my head hitting the roof of my Camry. I remember all that just fine, awake or asleep.

I'm so tired. I'm so fucking tired. All the other terror and stress and bullshit of my life right now, and now I've lost sleep. Macbeth has murdered sleep, but I've just misplaced it somewhere. It will wander back when the weather breaks, when autumn chill takes on the colder, wetter feel of winter. Until then, I'll just keep slogging through the world with that haze over everything, eyes slow to focus, air moving too actively over my skin. Claiming allergies I don't have. Thinking and rethinking and re-rethinking every decision because none of my reactions are valid.

Ten autumns I've done this. I can survive one more

A Quiet Announcement

2005-06-08T22:51:37Z

Moira Drew Sweeney
born June 5, 2005 at 8:27 PM
Six pounds, five ounces
Nineteen and one half inches long
Three weeks ahead of schedule, early like her mother never is.

Dreams come true and hydroponic death boobies

2004-10-20T10:47:11Z

For the very few of you out there who aren't already aware of this, I discovered this past weekend that I am finally, finally, finally pregnant. Right now about all we know is that the due date is somewhere around June 25, 2005. More information will, of course, follow as it becomes available.

The odd thing is that already I'm finding that nothing is like I expected it would be. I had assumed that I would be very introspective at this point in things, that I would spend a lot of time wanting to write about what I was thinking and feeling and what I wanted to be sure and remember. But that isn't the case. Instead I find that I've become very external, focusing on the things that need to be done rather than what I feel.

In some ways I think my friend P. is more excited about this pregnancy than I am. She can't wait to go shopping for maternity clothes, see a fuzzy ultrasound picture, throw a baby shower. I'm more interested in how I'm going to clear out the storage unit to make room for all the things I need to move out of the nursery-to-be and whether I'm going to have to rearrange the furniture in the master bedroom to make room for a bassinet. She's talking about eyelet bedding and those microphones that you push up against your belly to hear the baby's heartbeat, I'm thinking about disposable vs. service and whether I can afford to buy a Medela pump or will have to rent.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I expected this stage of pregnancy to be sort of floaty and emotional, to be dwelling on thoughts about the magic of reproduction and crying at long distance commercials. Instead I'm making lists and weighing decisions.

Maybe it's just that I've been waiting for this for so long. Six years trying for a baby, of false starts and not getting my hopes up. Maybe I've just gotten so good at not getting my hopes up that I can't let them rise even when they're justified.

Also possible, I suppose, that this lack of mooning and cooing is caused by the fact that I haven't had a cigarette in...gods help me...46 hours. The physical cravings only last the first 48 hours, right? Or is it 72? Anyway, after that it's all merely psychological withdrawls. Yay.

On a somewhat related note, I am now six weeks and one day pregnant and sometime in the last twenty-four hours the Boob Fairy came and paid me a call. I have gone up a minimum of one and a half cup sizes in the last day. I'm not even kidding. They are huge mutant hydroponic deathboobies. If you want to know what this feels like, it's something like this. Just in case you were wondering.

When I die...

2004-08-31T06:01:56Z

Please let there be someone there to say this to me.

Holy Crap

2004-08-18T02:31:40Z

Have you guys seen this? That's so...creepy and weird and wrong. I mean, leaving aside the rest of it, how do you even find a parrot's heart?

Adoration

2004-08-02T07:12:00Z

I do not have the knack of being adored. I know I promised that the next entry would be the second half of the Vegas trip, but fuck that because I just finished reading Sock and right now I have to talk about this so you'll have to wait for Vegas.

I do not have the knack of being adored. I'm married and someone could make a good argument for my husband adoring me, and maybe that's even true but if he does I am bad at it. At being adored. I get funny and shy and angry when he tries, and maybe the simplest answer as to why is because I don't think I deserve it and maybe (Occam suggests) the simplest answer is correct. But just because I'm bad at it doesn't mean I don't want it. I want to be adored. I think all women do, or most of them at any rate. Probably all. I want men (women too, really) to watch me with hungry eyes and to crave my presence. I want to enter a room and gain the focused attention of those who know me.

But like I say, I'm bad at it. Bad at gaining adoration and bad at dealing with it once I've got it. I know people, mostly women but a few men, who have the knack of it. Who gain would-be Galahads and reverent Griseldas at every turn. How do they do it? More to the point, what is it that I don't do?

Is it something simple, like listening--really listening, not that waiting-to-talk crap that's far more common--to people? I don't think it's that, because I listen too. If we focus down the question to cover only the psychosexual, which I don't want to do but at least it's a starting place, I can point to more things that I don't do that these folks who have the trick of it do. Like flirting. Not that I don't flirt, I flirt shamelessly and effortlessly and at almost every opportunity. But it's that almost that gets me. Because with few exceptions when I meet someone who really interests me, someone who intrigues me and makes me want to know them I drop the flirtation almost at once. I'm not even sure why, I just know that the minute I meet someone that I want to learn I go all hail-fellow-well-met and asexual. Mostly because the sex seems to get in the way when you're learning somebody, it demands obfuscations that I don't want to allow. (I think this is how J. and Cyrs got by my defenses, they didn't really interest me at first in that way. So we flirted and giggled and playing pushmepullyou sexual games for a while before I figured out how interesting they actually are.)

Much as I might like to believe that it's a simple question of appearance I'm honest enough to know that's not it. I know a good handful of people less objectively attractive than me who have the...the knack. Skill. Whatever it is.

What is it I'm missing? What is it I haven't got? I'm doubting it's one thing, one magic trick that if I could only learn I could skip blithely through the world, accepting adoration as no more than my due. Still I wish I could figure it out.

There are two people in this world who I am absolutely sure adore me. And like I said, I'm as bad at being adored as I am at inspiring adoration. It makes me squirm and shy away, and being told that someone wants to be 'just like' me gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. After all, who knows better than I how flawed I am, how fucked up and insecure and uncertain?

But that doesn't stop me wanting it. I bet everyone wants it, to one extent or another. I'm a woman, and there's a line I heard somewhere about what all women secretly want is to be 'all things to all men.' That stuck with me, it had the ring of truth to it. I don't know any woman who doesn't secretly or not-so-secretly speculate on what it would be like to be loved by men other than their husbands/boyfriends/girlfriends/what-have-you. I don't know any woman who hasn't fantasized from time to time on having some wonderful man fall desperately in love with her, and sometimes the fantasy's the sweeter for ending it by virtuously sending her dream-worshiper away.

And what, you may well ask, does all this have to do with a novel about murder and sock monkeys? It's because the protagonist was a man with the knack for adoring, easily and honestly. And as I read about this good, smart, funny, truthful man I wished that I could meet him and talk with him and be adored by him. But sitting there in Denny's turning pages I knew that even if he were real and even if we met he wouldn't adore me. No matter how good he was at it, I am not the kind of woman who inspires adoration.

And that's a bitter thing to know.

Sin City, Part One

2004-07-31T08:43:00Z

It's Monday night and E. and I are in Vegas. It's far more likely than not that this won't get posted until we get back home late Wednesday (or even until Thursday sometime) but I wanted to get it written before I start forgetting things.

The trip didn't start until Sunday morning, but the story of the trip starts on Saturday morning--or even more accurately on Friday night, when E. decided that since he hadn't been going to bed until 3:30 in the morning or so and he had to be up and at our mom's house by 6 AM Saturday to help her set things up for a garage sale, he'd be better off not sleeping at all and just staying up through and getting a good night's sleep before we left for the trip.

What he failed to take into consideration was that Saturday night I was running my D&D game, in which he was making a guest appearance and that the D&D game runs from about 4 in the afternoon until 4 in the morning. Whoops. So he grabbed a nap in the afternoon and we played the game Saturday night, which went pretty well. The D&D campaign, its history and triumphs and tragedies is a subject for its own entry. Not that I'll probably ever write the entry, but still.

The game broke up around three ack emma, and our cab was scheduled to pick us up and take us to the airport at 6:20, so we didn't bother sleeping. Bit of a mistake, but it seemed logical at the time.

The flight itself was actually the most pleasant flight I've been on in ages. Only about two-thirds full and right on time, stewardesses actually cheerful and not just pretending through gritted teeth like they so often seem to be. I can't figure out whether this was just blind luck or maybe had something to do with the fact that I usually fly places like Richmond, VA and Denver, CO and so on where nobody in their right mind would want to go and so there are only one or two flights a day as opposed to the several dozen flights per day to Vegas that every single airline runs out of SJC.

We got off the plane, picked up our bags (well, bag--I'd packed a big duffel that I planned to carry on and thus save the hassle of baggage claim but decided at the last minute that it was too heavy and I was too lazy to carry it.) and stepped out of the arctically-chill airport into the 90-degree desert air to wait for the shuttle to our hotel.

First Lesson of the Trip: Take a damn taxi.

Forty-five minutes of standing in the hot, still, and exhaust-reeking air later the shuttle finally turned up. While standing there we counted literally hundreds of other modes of transport shooting merrily away and heading toward their destinations. By this time the lack of sleep was starting to kick in and we were feeling distinctly cranky about the whole thing. Happily there was a couple in line with us who were equally disgruntled and we entertained one another by making horrifyingly rude observations about the wait, the shuttle company and the other travelers to pass the time. But finally our ride showed up. A cramped and creaking mini-bus with a surly driver and no a/c. Only good luck was that the Luxor was its third stop so at least we didn't have to sit on it for long.

Out of sequence aside: I'm writing this on the Clio, sitting in a bar on the casino level (The Luxor Steakhouse if anyone cares) and a trio of girls in their early twenties just walked by on their way back out to the slots, but one of them stopped and asked me, "Excuse me, do you live in San Jose?" I admitted it, while searching my memory desperately for her face. "Do you go to the Starbucks at Bascom and Hamilton?" Cross-referencing 'Barista' against 'Dyed Hair and Lots of Piercings' I admitted that as well and finally came up with her--the afternoon girl, the one who makes great chai and awful lattes. We grinned at one another and promised to see the other soon and she wandered off with her friends. Small world, or whatever.

We got to the hotel at about 11:00 AM and were immediately informed that check-in wasn't until 1:30 and that no amount of whining, sweet-talking, and/or bribery was going to get us into our room early. We did manage to request a room in the pyramid on an upper floor and get our bags stored in their luggage locker but that still left us with two and a half hours to kill.

Starving, we started off by having lunch in the 24 hour cafe.

Second lesson of the trip: The Pyramid Cafe? Don't.

Food was mediocre, service was awful, atmosphere was loud, and we were cranky. Redeeming features were the smoking section (ahhhhh...it's been so long...), watching the old men a few tables over playing Keno with great seriousness, and the conversation about what tattoos one should get if one ever became paraplegic (Superman logo on one arm).

Fed, we decided we might as well hit the casino and look around. As a quick aside, I got reservations in the Luxor because I was told that it was the quietest of the big hotel/casinos, and so I was expecting a sort of understated area with lots of tables and a few dozen slots with the volumes turned low. Okay, naive, but I'd never in my life been closer to a casino than James Bond movies and a few church or school-sponsored 'casino nights'.

What I got was this: Thousands upon thousands of whirrs, jungles, bleep-bloops and blinkenlights, all surrounding the tiny island of relative quiet that is the blackjack and Pai-Gow tables. Mmmphm.

We did a loop around the area and ended up on the 'attractions level' where there are only slot machines in all the hallways and not littering the open spaces on every square inch of floor and watched the 'Pirates 4D' movie (I got wet and then got laughed at when I ducked away from the foot-long 3D wasp that tried to sting my face) and rode a comically bad motion-and-movie ride. Having thus exhausted the non-gambling entertainment options, we decided that hell, maybe we'd try some slots. I found a machine whose blinkenlights amused me and which had nifty sound effects and we happily blew about fifteen bucks between us doing that. We checked the registration area and found it packed to the faux-stone walls with people in line for early registration, so returned to the slots, where E. actually managed to win about forty bucks. Much giggling and rejoicing, and then we went ahead and braved the registration lines.

Twenty-five check-in windows to choose from and we got the one manned by a sweet-faced blonde lady from Alabama who felt the need to welcome the new guests by telling each of them amusing little anecdotes and eliciting tales in return. By the time we got up close enough to figure this out and E. heard her chatting up a German family whose English was clearly limited to 'Yes', 'Thank you', and 'Blackjack, please' I had to make E. promise to hang back while I checked in for fear he would spit in her keyboard.

But all things end in time and eventually we managed to get our key and take the Inclinator up to our room. We're on the thirtieth floor--the top floor that actually contains any rooms, as everything above it is the light--with a big window that commands a magnificent view of the parking lot and freeway. Later we learned that there are only a handful of regular rooms on the 30th, the rest being high-roller suites which quite naturally get the good views but right then all we cared about was the presence of two big, beautiful beds.

We lay there for awhile and stared at the ceiling, then E. decided to take a little nap ('decided' may be a misleading term, actually. 'Was compelled' is probably closer) and I called home to talk to J., in the course of which conversation he informed me that a passenger plane had crashed in a residential area of the city where my darling H. and F. live. His attempts to reassure me that there were no injuries only caused me to become morbidly certain that the plane had crashed directly into their living room and that they were currently huddled on a street corner somewhere, wrapping themselves in tin foil in an attempt to keep warm. This was exacerbated by the fact that I had idiotically left my phone list at home and had no way to reach them barring ordering J. to send them an email and hoping it made it through their email filters.

After this happy moment I went back down to the main levels and wandered around for a while, eventually settling in to my favorite blinkenlight machine and actually winning two hundred dollars over the course of a couple of hours.

When I finally went upstairs to wake E. (a little earlier than he'd requested but I wanted to brag), we got on the phone and got Penn and Teller tickets for the next night, Zumanity tickets for the night after, and made reservations at the Luxor Steakhouse for dinner that night. We lolled for a while, then got dressed up all pretty and headed down for what was quite seriously one of the best meals of my entire life.

Understand, I don't eat steak. Know why? Because in my heart of hearts I know that steak can taste like that, and it hardly ever does. I had a petit filet, lobster tail, a glass of Syrah and Bananas Foster and black coffee for dessert. (Yes, Syrah doesn't go with seafood, I know. Bite me, it was delicious.) E. had French onion soup, the filet, and a snifter of cognac and coffee for dessert. Afterward we both just sort of sat there at the table sipping coffee and purring in abjectly satisfied sensuality.

A little more time playing the blinkenlights and we turned in early where I at least slept like the dead for ten hours.

This morning E. woke up before me and went downstairs where he eschewed the slots and instead spent 25 dollars playing a video game about horse racing. No, I don't understand it either but it's probably because I'm a girl. When I finally dragged myself up and got dressed we walked over to the Mandalay Bay for breakfast.

Third Lesson of the Trip: If you're looking for quiet and elegance, you want the Mandalay.

We spent the first few minutes of the meal discussing what to do with our day, then proceeded to the far more important topics of me trying to explain why it was so bloody funny that the Mandalay Bay hotel was located on a street named 'The Road to Mandalay', why women are more visually appealing than men, speculations as to which idiot had decided that Eggs Benedict should inevitably have slices of black olive sprinkled over the top (I mean, really? Who on earth was it who sat up in bed out of a sound sleep one night and exclaimed 'Eggs Benedict is salty, rich, buttery, and contains crisp, gelid, and creamy textures. What it really needs is something slick and mushy with a briny tastes-like-last-week's-iced-tea flavor to make it complete!' Freak.) and gloating over our Penn and Teller tickets.

After breakfast we tried to get into the shark-walk at the Mandalay, but there was an hour-long line (y'all, Vegas is crowded in July) and so we gave up and E. headed out to the Excalibur to check out the midway games and I bummed around the hotel room and took another stab at the blinkenlights, though they were already starting to pall. He turned back up around two and we went out to Red, White, and Blue for lunch where we had perfectly inoffensive sandwiches and very uncomfortable chairs.

Aside: Since coming here, that was the only meal eaten in a non-smoking environment. Not that I needed any reinforcement on the subject, but cigarette smoke just does not go with food. But that wasn't the point of the aside, it was more an aside-within-the-aside. The real aside is that you can smoke everywhere here. In the casino, in the bars, in the restaurants, in the bathrooms. It's a culture shock thing I guess, coming from California where you can't smoke unless you're in your house with all the windows shut and the blinds down and wet towels shoved under the door jamb and have a notarized document proving that there are no minors, pregnant women, or elderly people within a half-mile radius. A couple of times while here I've run into apologetic-looking signs informing you that you can't smoke in, like, the theater auditorium (you can smoke in the lobby, of course) or enclosure where they keep live lions. And it keeps coming as a shock because it wouldn't even occur to me to smoke in those places, but apparently it would occur to folks here since they have to tell people they can't do it. Dunno why, it just keeps striking me as weird.

After lunch it was E.'s turn to veg in the room (and nap again, it turned out) and my turn to wander about aimlessly. A few more rounds on the slots convinced me that I was pretty much over the whole whirl-and-bloop phenomenon so I started meandering around in search of the weirdest-looking slots I could find. I played a game that I never did figure out properly which involved rows of cards and Hallowe'en symbols, something that was sort of like video poker except with funny rules and the face cards kissed one another when you won, and a bingo-esque game that played Borodin dances when you won.

Once my designated twenty bucks was gone I went and woke E. up and we got dressed for dinner, lamenting the way that both of us seem to have less tolerance for noise and crowd and bad lighting than we feel we ought. We grabbed a taxi and headed to the MGM Grand and the Rainforest Cafe.

The MGM Grand is bloody enormous. I thought the Luxor and Mandalay bay were ridiculously big but I swear we walked half a mile each direction to get from the entrance to the restaurant. I was tempted to sit down right in the middle of the casino floor and attempt to lead a rally of the other customers to demand that they install trams. On the good side, we got to walk by the lion enclosure, which contained two soundly-sleeping lionesses.

The wait for dinner wasn't too bad, the decor was entertaining, the food was fine. As always the appeal of the Rainforest cafe is mostly in looking at the decorations (huge papier-mâché macaws hanging from fishing wire with I-would-eat-your-face-if-I-could-get-my-beak-open-wide-enough expressions, fake Spanish moss everywhere, and ugly tropical fish in enormous aquariums, and that's not even getting into the animatronic gorillas).

Fourth Lesson of the Trip: Moms, if your toddler is afraid of lightning storms, don't take her to a restaurant that has scheduled faux-thunderstorms every fifteen minutes, as she will have shrieking hysterics each time, then take ten minutes to calm down afterward, which leaves only five minutes to shovel food into your mouth as quickly as humanly possible before the next round of storm-shriek-soothe begins. You might think that this advice is unnecessary, that any fool would know it. You would, sad to say, be wrong.

Then it was off to the Rio to see Penn and Teller! After walking the half-mile back to the entrance of the Grand (the lionesses were now awake but looking unimpressed) we grabbed another taxi and got to the theater in plenty of time to find our seats and listen to the pre-show music by Mike Jones and the mysterious hatted fellow playing the standing bass. (For those of you who don't read Penn and Teller's weblogs, it was Penn. He denies it but don't let anyone bullshit you, it's him.)

Another Aside: Skill and Talent, Talent and Skill. I meant to write a journal entry about it but like most entries I mean to write it never actually happened. Time for an abridged version, I guess. Given a choice between skill and talent, I prefer skill nine times out of ten. Talent is inborn, talent is virtueless. You either have it or you don't and either way it's no good reflection on you. Any idiot can have talent...fuck, I have talent. But skill is something impressive. There are few pleasures in life more wholesome and satisfying than watching someone do something that they're good at and like to do. Watching Jacques Pepin chop up vegetables, watching a glassblower create a rose with a few twists of his pliers and a handful of heated glass rods, even watching a good gardener cut weeds with smooth, even sweeps of the Weed Whacker. These things are worth seeing. These things are worth notice. I remember going to a concert once where I was standing right up against the stage directly in front of the bass player (Justin from Automatic Hotel if you're curious) and being so fascinated watching his hands move sure and graceful through the chord progressions that I barely even heard the music even though it was blasting out of a ginormous speaker two feet from my face. Penn plays the bass with skill, though without particular talent. He doesn't make the thing soar, he hasn't the knack of wrenching emotion and laughter from the instrument. But he's skillful, the sound is confident and playful and clean. Watching him play was a great pleasure.

The show itself was...awesome. As if it would be anything else, but it was wholly and totally awesome. They did the Honor System bit, and the pulp-shredder bit, and of course the Magic Bullet trick, plus a couple I'd never seen before including (greatly to my delight) the thing with the goldfish and pennies that I'd read about but never seen. And after the show E. got both Penn and Teller to sign his newly-acquired box DVD set of the first season of Bullshit and I got Penn to sign my new copy of his novel Sock. (I have this charitable impulse that I ought to give it to S., who collects first editions and especially signed ones, but I'm not sure I'm quite that altruistic.)

After the show we went to The Tilted Kilt for coffee and dessert (fresh doughnuts with a whiskey-chocolate dipping sauce...I would have bathed in the stuff if the ramekin had been big enough), then came back to the Luxor and have spent the last two hours sitting in the bar at The Steakhouse sipping wine (cognac in his case) while I write this and E. reads Sock.

And this entry is already over 3000 words long and I've left all kinds of stuff out, like peering over the interior balcony into the pyramid and trying to give ourselves vertigo and the lady who gave me the Luxor keychain with the little light on the top and actually seeing the light on top of the real Luxor for the first time tonight and the taxi cab that was actively in the process of rattling itself into small metallic chunks even as we rode in it and the pufferfish at the Rainforest Cafe that was so ugly it kept putting us off our feed and the pool/golf hybrid game in the arcade and the waiter who kept telling us stories of the all the restaurants he had ever worked at in his entire life and actually getting ahold of F. and being told that they didn't even hear the plane had crashed until the next morning and the woman with the three-foot wig and and and...and this is quite long enough and I should release you, Gentle Reader, to go back to whatever it was you were doing with your actual life before you made the mistake of checking up on my Vegas trip. Next entry: Cirque de Soleil, the fascinating story of whether we actually manage to make it to see the pirates at Treasure Island, how well or poorly E.'s blackjack 'system' will fare, plus anything else that happens between now and when we get home Wednesday night. But for now, sleep.

That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French

2004-07-19T06:18:23Z

I suppose there's a remote chance that some of you haven't seen the article about the mythology that sprung up among the homeless children in Miami--the Blue Lady, Bloody Mary, the angels eating neon light and so on. If so, read it here before continuing?

So earlier today I'm talking to gotr_groupie's four year old son G., who (for them as don't know) is mildly autistic and has lived his whole life in California and Nevada. We were playing make-believe and after declaring himself as the cop who locked me in jail G. informed me that I was going to be set free but first I had several tasks to complete.

The first thing I had to do was to sink several boats using a big gun. I obligingly did so, with appropriate bangs and whooshes and gurgles. He seemed pleased with my work.

Then I was informed that God was dead and it was my job to save him. I'm thinking Four years old and a nihilist already?, but set off to run to save God. No no, I was told. I must save him using my water magic. This is when that article first came to mind.

Using my mighty water powers I built a column of swirling sea water that raised all the way to heaven, then bore God down on it and woke him from his deathlike sleep. This was good, I was informed, but now I'd made the devils angry and was going to be trapped in a mirror and could only come out when the cop (G. again) called me by splashing water on the mirror, and even then I had to wear a blue mask.

Rather seriously creeped out now, I became the masked lady in the mirror and answered several questions for the cop, enabling him to go out and save children who were in danger. After that, the game changed to something about ninjas and superheroes, but man...maybe there's something to that idea of a collective conciousness after all.

I usually refrain...

2004-07-16T20:19:19Z

but this was just too funny.

Drownin'

2004-06-03T10:39:39Z

I ain’t waving babe, I’m drowning
Going down in a cold lonely sea
I ain’t waving babe, I’m drowning
So babe quit waving at me

I ain’t waving babe, I’m crying
I’m crying, oh why can’t you see?
I ain’t fooling babe, I ain’t fooling
So babe quit fooling with me

This ain’t singing babe, it’s screaming
I’m screaming that I’m going down
And you’re smiling babe, and you’re waving
Just like you don’t hear a sound

I ain’t waving babe, I’m drowning
Going down right here in front of you
And you’re waving babe, you keep waving
Hey babe, are you drowning too?
Oh.

--Ric Masten

Hoolie, are you out there? It's been a long time and I've been being a really bad friend but I need you. Hoolie, I'm sorry. Honey, I'm drowning. Please email me.

And Now for something Completely Different

2004-05-28T11:47:22Z

Anyone who thinks that pornography should be banned is missing out on a whole lot of the fun in life. Do you have any idea how funny porn (especially softcore) is? Case in point, a conversation I had on a MOO while watching that great classic of the genre, ‘Lord of the G-strings.’ Reproduced here for those who find bad Tolkein/porn puns funny, and because reading this log still makes me giggle.

CAST:

BRIAR: Me, of course
VICTIM: The poor man upon whom I inflicted a blow-by-blow narration.

Briar gapes as 'Lord of the G-Strings' comes on Showtime.
Briar says, "It takes place in Diddle Earth."
Briar says, "Dildo Saggins, Smirnoff, and Throbbiton."
Victim says, "wooo!"
Briar gapes harder. "They're having the special Throbbiton festival right now. With bagpipe music."
Briar says, "Synthesized bagpipe. Dildo is seducing the hapless Bolwin in the woods."
Briar says, "To Lord of the Dance music."
Briar chokes. "Smirnoff the wizard just met Dildo's best friends--Horny and Spam."
Victim says, "......."
Briar says, "’This is the legendary G-String, that Whorespank wielded before she fell in glorious battle...’"
Victim says, "...................."
Briar says, "Flashback scene. Two nudie lesbian Elves in the woods are being descended upon by a ravening horde of dwarves (men in ren faire costumes running around on their knees)."
Victim says, "..................................................."
Briar says, "Now the dwarves are abusing themselves to the sight of the nudie lesbian elves necking."
Victim says, "............................................................................................................"
Briar says, "Should I stop narrating? You're going to run out of .... room soon."
Victim says, "!!!"
Briar says, "All right. Then the orcs (men in light blue face paint) just ran out of the woods screaming and are fighting the dwarves in the worst LARP-style combat you ever saw. Oooh...Whorespank herself just showed up."
Briar says, "She's wearing about nine inches of steel chain and a black leather G-string. Also she has badly-dyed black hair, so you know she's evil."
Victim says, "........................................................................................................................................................................................................"
Briar cackles, "Whorespank has been defeated by the Dwarven king, he stripped the G-string from her dead body. One of the nudie Elven girls wants him to destroy it, but he thinks he wants to wear it instead."
Briar says, "Flashback over. Smirnoff is explaining that the G-string is the most powerful erotic weapon in all of Diddle Earth."
Victim says, "MY EARS"
Briar giggles wildly. "She must take the G-String to the dark side of the realm and toss it into the Party Pooper Volcano, but she must beware the seductive power of the G-string, because if she gives in to the temptation of the G-String, she will summon Whorespank's minions and they will try to rip her purity from her."
Briar says, "'Fear not, that is only Ball'em, he's harmless enough but he will snatch the G-string from you in an instant if you are unwary.'"
Briar says, "A blonde chick in a brown leather bikini and a Roundhead's helmet is fighting a pair of orcs in blue face paint in the woods."
Briar giggles. "She's Drucilla, queen of the Nymphomaniacs of Nymphland."
Briar says, "She just saved a pure and innocent boy from the horrible orcs. Now she's going to take it out in trade. Cue the bagpipe music."
Briar says, "Dildo, Horny, and Spam are watching from the bushes. They seem repelled yet oddly fascinated."
Briar says, "Pipe organ music..."
Briar says, "Hey, where did her helmet come from? She wasn't wearing it a second ago."
Victim says, "seriously, please :)"
Briar says, "I'll stop."
Victim says, "heh"
Briar says, "Feel better? You're missing some good horrible softcore here, though."
Victim says, "definatly :)"
Briar says, "Your loss, buddy."
Victim says, "uh huh"
Briar giggles wildly. "This is one of the great classics of bad softcore. Ever. This is better than Intercourse with a Vampire by like, a power of fifty."
Victim says, "....."
Briar giggles.
Briar mentions one more thing, then shuts up about it: "They just arrived in Lothlesbian."
Victim facepalms
Briar laughs and hugs you.

Either you know or you don't

2004-05-28T10:30:54Z

Not a big linkblogger, but sometimes you have to make exceptions. Either this means something to you or it doesn't, but it means a hell of a lot to me. Thanks to Loren at Civilization Calls for the heads-up.

Addendum

2004-05-26T14:57:08Z

Sitting here, feeling like Tommy.

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.

And if that's who I am, why do I work so hard to hide?

Sick of You

2004-05-26T12:21:22Z

How bad? How bad would it have to be to justify how much it hurts? Worse than this, and well you know it. Worse than it was, worse than a few minutes on a suburban street and a few chilly hospital hours, worse than the blandly formal courtroom with everyone being so very civil, no real trial even, just the D.A. and a public defender talking to the judge for a few minutes and you being asked, "Is this what you want?" and nodding, yes sir, feeling like a child in a costume of a suit and heels, pretending to be a grownup.

So stop it already, because it wasn't that bad. Not bad enough for this, not bad enough to still be doing this to yourself, night after night. Not bad enough for the nightmares and the flashing panic that comes on like being hit full in the face with a spotlight and you just freeze and forget how to breathe while you tell yourself that it was a long time ago and that it wasn't even that bad.

It gets way worse, you damned well know it. Some women have it way worse, and they don't do this. Or if they do they have the sense and courtesy to keep their damned mouths shut about it. So shut up already, shut up and stop crying over a few stupid dreams, the occasional little anxiety flare. It could have been worse, and you fucking know it. Bound, gagged, beaten, stabbed, buried, cut, taken, hidden, kept and killed. It happens, happens all the time. It's happened to people you know. And you, ten minutes in a driveway and you go all trembling and big-eyed because you can't sleep.

You don't get that, you didn't earn it. Your time is up, your statute of limitations has run out. It's time to be over it now, time to move on, let it go, knock it off, get the hell over yourself and go back to being normal again. Sleep at night, smile during the day, act like the adult you're supposed to be. No more sitting shivering on the couch at three in the morning, no more flinching at 4:09 when the rain begins. No more stumbling into bed at seven-thirty and crying until the pillow smells like wet feathers because you're afraid of the dreams.

They're just dreams anyway. Who cares about the smell of sweat and beer and tequila and drugstore cologne? Who cares about the texture of a blue dress, the sting of a thumbnail digging into your shoulder? So what if you can hear the sound of your skull against the roof of the car, so what if you wake with the feel of that trail of blood-warm fluid trickling down your thigh? Get over it, you've used up your share of white nights and gritty-eyed dawns.

No more, not for you. No more staring at the laptop screen and hating your friends because they have the sense to sleep and aren't around to keep you company. No more musicals on DVD, the ones you don't even watch but only set to playing because they sound like courage. No more lying to your husband and brother about how badly you're doing and then resenting them because they don't guess. No more games of Freecell, no more sitting and brushing your hair over and over, stroke after stroke until your clean hair goes greasy from it just to have something to do with your hands.

You don't get to grieve any more. You are not entitled. You have not earned it. Pain this large must be bought and you have not paid the price. You are stealing grief from those who earned it. No more.

Things I Must Remember

2004-05-22T23:00:33Z

Several times these last few weeks I've thought of something I wanted to write a journal entry about, and then for some reason or another never gotten around to it. So (for my benefit not yours) a quick list of things I want to remember to journal about.

Taking pictures and having pictures taken
Searching for a wavelength
Talent vs. Skill
Heroes
Alpha, Beta, and Omega
Softcore porn
Afrikola

Sorry about turning this into a scratch pad, but if I don't remind myself, these entries will never get written.

Really quick

2004-05-17T21:35:30Z

If there are any of you out there who read this but don't read lakos, check this out? Sometimes these little bits of research make me so very, very happy.

That is all.

Road Trip Report, part 2

2004-05-11T08:05:36Z

And now, the continuing stooooory of two girls traveling California's highways and byways in a slightly battered Mustang convertible...

DAY THREE

Late Friday night, C. and I decided that we'd thoroughly conquered San Diego already and were ready for new vistas and new challenges. So after waking up Saturday morning (late), we checked out of the motel and got on the road northbound toward Solvang. Solvang's a little town about halfway between L.A. and San Francisco that was originally settled by Danish immigrants and so took on a sort of Danish-village feel that was cultivated lovingly by a very clever mayor in the mid-sixties who turned the whole town into a model village and tourist trap.

Driving, driving, driving. There's just not much interesting about driving, since it's not really possible to explain the coolness of the conversations which happen while whizzing down the road and skimming through your entire CD collection looking for this or that song that the other person just has to hear.

However, there was an event which really must be mentioned here. Somewhere around Hollywood, we were driving along innocently when all of a sudden we heard horns and screaming and became instant rubbernecking idiots, craning our necks to see what was going on.

What we saw was this (pixelated to protect the innocent, picturelinked to satisfy the debauched). Oh yeah, these guys were cool. So we did what anyone would do in the same place--chased them for five miles and then harassed them until they posed for more pictures. It's really a shame that our angle prevented getting truly anatomical photographs as one fellow in particular was eager to show off the full range of his...flexibility.

Fifth Lesson of the Trip: Contrary to what you might expect, L.A. drivers are surprisingly forgiving of those who engage in wild lane-changing in order to take digital pictures of people's butts.

Once we lost track of our extroverted friends in the white truck, we had a long conversation about the reappearance of butts in our road trip, and decided that as leitmotifs go it was probably pretty appropriate.

The drive to Solvang took longer than we had hoped, so we got there just about in time to check into a motel, have dinner, and settle in for an evening of hanging out and watching T.V. Any readers currently thinking that these activities sound fairly boring obviously don't know us very well.

Having stayed in a perfectly respectable Best Western in San Diego, we decided to raise the tone of the trip by putting up Saturday night in the extra-posh Viking Motel. We were especially impressed by the rosemaled flowers on our door, not to mention the actual Ming vase turned into a lamp on the nightstand.

Once we'd settled in to our room (this process involved me making sure I could get dialup connection on the laptop and C. jumping on the bed and giggling), we went out to dinner at Pea Soup Andersen's. For non-Californians, PSA's is a freeway chain specializing in...well, I'll bet you can guess. Like all good tourist traps, it has a gimmick. It's not just a place to get delicious, filling food. You can also learn Danish History! Plus, a plywood cutout you can stick your head through and look like an enormous fat homicidal Danish chef! (Yes, of course C. stuck her head through the cutout. And of course I got pictures.)

On our way out of the restaurant, we debated whether we would end up getting hungry in the middle of the night given that we'd had 'breakfast' at one in the afternoon and 'lunch' at six-thirty. Prudent, sensible girls that we are, we bought some cheese and crackers and a bottle of Pomegranate wine from the PSA's gift shop. We even had the foresight to get the girl in the gift shop to open the bottle of wine for us so that we wouldn't have to do the car-key-as-corkscrew trick later.

I can almost hear you wondering aloud what pomegranate wine tastes like. Wonder no longer, I am here to tell you. In fact, I'll even tell you how to reproduce the flavor experience in the comfort of your own home. Ready?

Homemade Pomegranate Wine

Ingredients:
1 350 mL bottle Chardonnay (any label)
4 oz. Pomegranate Juice
6 ½ lbs. refined white sugar
Instructions:
Pour all ingredients into pitcher and stir vigorously until sugar dissolves. Sweeten to taste.

So now you know.

Back in the motel room we drank our delicious wine, watched some terrifyingly bad television (to give you an idea, the most high-toned show we watched all night was the second half of G.I. Jane) and listened to the weird Japanese businessmen chatter away outside our window. Then we tucked ourselves into bed nice and early for a virtuous eight hours sleep so that we could get a fresh start in the morning.

No, seriously, we did. Well, we tried. At about two AM C. got an extra bonus experience for her trip--a genoowine California earthquake. Despite originally thinking that one of the Japanese businessmen was trying to bust through our door and kick our butts (!), C. definitely seemed to feel that earthquakes are fun and really no big deal.

After a bit of discussion of natural disasters and the attendant parties and funny stories, we really did get some sleep.

DAY FOUR

The next morning, I awakened to the dulcet tones of the man in the next room singing Love Groove in the shower. What he lacked in tone, talent, or skill he more than made up for in enthusiasm. Never has a such a bad song been sung so very off-key and with such boundless joy.

I tried to wake C. so that she could also enjoy the show, but alas he finished showering before she was fully awake. To console her, we packed up the car and checked out of the motel then went in search of pastries and strong coffee.

Now, the first thing you have to understand about Solvang is that it all looks like this. All of it. Even the gas station. A person can get kitsch poisoning just walking half a block. However, Danish pastries and strong coffee can make up for a lot, so we spent a happy half-hour on a shady bench, munching away and marveling at the cheesiness of it all.

Actual Conversational Snippet:"I'll bet the teenagers in this town rebel by wearing Swedish flag pins." "Yeah. They're all, 'Ha ha, I am a Swede now, fuck you all!'"

We really could only handle a few hours of it, but we bought lots and lots of nummy butter cookies to bring home with us, some cloudberry jam for my mom, a few other little odds and ends, and then hopped into the car and fled before the kitsch infected us and we started wearing bunads and saying 'Uff da!' when we meant 'Motherfucking cocksucker sonuvabitch asshole!'

More driving, more conversation. I keep running up against this...all the really important stuff on the trip happened in the car, or sitting around in the shade somewhere, or over meals. Talking about everything and nothing, something important happens there that can't be adequately expressed in a journal entry. You either know what I'm trying to convey or you don't, and I could write thousands of words about these conversations without ever capturing the flavor of them. I tried keeping a mental list of the topics of conversation over a three hour period on Sunday, and here's what I came up with:

Tarot Cards
What kinds of men we are attracted to
The myth of the First and Last Man, the Comte de Sainte-Germaine
Drunken debauchery stories
Themes of psychosexual dominance in the Phantom of the Opera
Fanfiction
Great concerts we have attended
Creepy teachers we had in high school
Whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays
Cats
Dogs
Evidence to support the possibility that dragons evolved into horses
Fast food
Urban legends
Broken hearts, receiving
Broken hearts, inflicting
Diabetes
Lipstick

That's a partial list at best, and still doesn't begin to express the way topics roam to and fro, what's said and unsaid and how that differs from what is expressed and understood.

All I can do is say that we drove, and talked, and listened to music. We stopped in some random little town for lunch and had yummy fried seafood for lunch and C. drew a mermaid on her placemat. We listened to Phantom of the Opera, and then switched immediately to Nina Simone and I was privately much amused by the contrast between the histrionics of the Weber CD and the almost painfully raw intimacy of Nina and her piano, singing about loss and love in that voice like bruises and whiskey and honey-scented smoke.

We hit the Bay Area in time to go out to dinner with my Mom and E., and to stop by her house to see her new gazebo and pulled into the carport at home around eight o'clock, tired but happy and bearing many new stories to tell.

And now I've told some of them.

Road Trip Report, part 1

2004-05-08T06:33:04Z

Time for the first of what will probably be a two-part series (can it be a series with only two parts?) of entries describing my road trip to San Diego. While I'm making an attempt to explain things and make these entries moderately entertaining (or at least comprehensible) to others, they're really for my benefit and so will probably contain all sorts of odd but unnecessary details meant more to jog my memory later than to educate or elucidate any readers. You have been warned.

BACKGROUND

So C. is here visiting from North Carolina for two weeks and I got it into my head that we should take a mini road trip to San Diego. The idea wasn't so much to see San Diego, but to get away for a few days, ride around in a car and chat and do the sorts of foolish things that you can only do on a road trip.

My car needed to go into the shop for several days, so I had this bright idea to rent a car for the trip. Only, as long as you're going to rent a car anyway, you might as well rent a cool car, so I decided to splurge on a convertible. When C. and I went to pick up the car on Wednesday, the cute boy at the Hertz place didn't really want to give it up. He kept talking about how he always used it when he needed to shuttle folks around, it was his favorite. He seemed especially nervous when learning that we were going to take his baby on a trip, though was soothed a little when I opted to pay the exorbitant Loss Damage Wavier insurance, which basically boils down to the promise that I could deliberately smash the car repeatedly into a concrete pylon and I still wouldn't end up paying any out-of-pocket repair costs.

We acquired pretty silky scarves to wrap around our heads, and swoopy sunglasses, and promised our respective boys many, many times that we were not going to live out any Thelma and Louise fantasies we might have been harboring.

We were ready.

DAY ONE

Got up after far too little sleep and on the road in our cherry-red Mustang convertible. Top down, of course.

First Lesson of the Trip: Driving down the freeway at seven AM in a convertible with the top down is COLD.

Stopped to gas up in Gilroy and to attempt to fingercomb some of the tangles out of our hair.

Second Lesson of the Trip: Driving down the freeway at seven AM in a convertible with the top down will cause your hair to turn into a single massive hair-knot which cannot be detangled save by soaking it for an hour in conditioner and then combing it painfully. Also, wrapping a silky scarf around your head and tossing the ends over your shoulders in a carefree manner will result only in the scarf slipping off your head, pulling taut, and attempting to strangle you.

Tied our hair out of our eyes and made the rest of the drive with the top up.

Despite the lack of sleep, the drive was pretty much uneventful. We took turns picking CDs, made jokes at the expense of the other motorists, laughed about things that weren't really all that funny, and told a few of those stories that only ever seem to get told on road trips. Something about the intimacy of the car and the world whizzing by too fast to impact you seems to bring out these confessional tales, small secrets that don't really matter much in the long run but are an integral part of the closeness of a good trip.

Along the way I tried to point out points of interest. Not that there's really much to see along Interstate 5, but I tried. (Look, cows! Look, the town of Arvin! [Tangent: Explaining why Arvin is a point of interest would take a whole 'nother journal entry.]) And then, inevitably, it was time to drive through L.A.

Third Lesson of the Trip: Carpool lanes in L.A. are put there to punish carpoolers, not reward them.

Like all good Northern Californians, I hate L.A. I could go on for hours about how filthy it is, how full of pretty but uninteresting people, how smug and smoggy and self-righteous. I think what it really boils down to is that we're jealous. We've got beaches, and beautiful mountains, and fascinating places to poke your nose into, plus San Francisco which really is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and yet whenever anyone visits from out of state, they always want to see L.A. Still, being a good hostess I attempted to point out the high points as we drove. (Look, palm trees! Look, smog! Look, the offramp for Disneyland!)

Eight hours after we left the house (pretty good time, really) we reached the College Ave. exit from Interstate 8. San Diego State University, my beloved alma mater. Immediately I began acting like the world's most idiot tour guide. I pointed out the intersection where you exit the dorms. I pointed out the footbridge over College Ave. where you cross onto the campus. I was trying to point out the semi-hidden shadow of my sophomore year dorm when I happened to, y'know, glance at the road itself and see the black Saturn with the brake lights on. The one that was about ten feet in front of my bumper and getting closer all the time.

"Shit!" Screeeeeeeeeeee! Thud. C. and I looked at one another and in unison declared, "We paid the wavier!"

Pull over to the side of the road, and the door of the Saturn pops open, disgorging a terrified eighteen year old coed. Before even checking the damage to either car, asking if anyone was hurt, she's already got a cell phone open and is dialing. Thought flashes through my head: She's calling a lawyer. We hop out of the car and walk around to assess damages and the coed whimpers into her cell phone, "Daddy?"

This sets C. and I laughing, and as we gauge the damages on both cars (A busted headlight and scratched front fender on the Mustang, a dented rear fender and trunk on the Saturn) the girl's still wibbling to Daddy on the phone. She must have thought we were the most utterly unsympathetic hagbitches in the history of time, since we were both inclined to treat the entire thing as funny, while it was her first accident ever and in her brand-new college car and she kept telling us how her heart was going tha-thump, tha-thump.

Having established that both cars were driveable, we all pulled into the nearest parking lot and started exchanging information. While C. pulled the busted chunks of fender and headlight cover off the car and dropped them on the sidewalk, I called the Hertz roadside assistance. They were fairly sympathetic, and told me that I needed to call the police and file and accident report (besides the usual exchanging of information and so on.) So I get the non-emergency number for the police and call.

Dispatcher: San Diego Police Department, is this an emergency?

Me: No, not an--

Dispatcher: (ignoring me completely) In the event that this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911.

Me: No, it's not an emergency.

Dispatcher: What can I do for you, ma'am?

Me: I just had a fender-bender and was told by my insurer that I need to file a police report, and--

Dispatcher: (interrupting) Was anyone hurt?

Me: No, I told you, it was just a fenderbender.

Dispatcher: Were drugs, alcohol, or intentional violence involved?

Me: No. It was a fenderbender.

Dispatcher: (exasperated) Ma'am, we handle real problems here. If you want to make a report, drive down to a police station and file a report there.

Me: ..... Seriously?

Dispatcher: Yes.

Me: Um. Okay.

Dispatcher: Was there anything else?

Me: Nope.

Dispatcher: Goodbye.

We finished exchanging information with the still-panicky coed, then drove off to find a motel. While waiting in line for registration, C. and I both had the giggles from adrenaline and driving-induced foolishness, and kept looking at one another and mouthing 'We paid for the wavier!'

Got into the motel room, took turns showering, then went out to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant I remembered from my college days. While we were parking the car, this guy walked by, looked at the damaged headlight, looked at the two of us, and then walking off, shaking his heads. You could almost see the thought bubble forming over his head. . o O ((Women Drivers.))

Over dinner, there was much giggling about the painting of the demonic-looking cow standing over the body of its fallen foe, and we constructed an elaborate fantasy about the broken-antlered yet pudgy gazelle statuette and its relationship with the evil cow. ("Still milking disability for that antler thing?", "Yep. Still the unrealized spawn of the Devil of Cows?", "Yep.") Also, the food was pretty good.

Came back to the motel, swam in the pool and told stories about men, then crashed out before midnight, sleeping the sleep of the just.

DAY TWO

Woke up after almost twelve hours of sleep, stiff and starving. Puttered around the motel room getting ready, then headed out to get some breakfast. Well, okay, lunch. We were tired, okay?

Stopped and took a few pictures of the banged-up car, then drove around for half an hour while I tried to find the now-defunct diner I used to eat at when I was in college. Ended up having a quite nummy meal at the coffee shop half a block from the motel.

Fourth Lesson of the Trip: Believe it or not, if you leave a city and then return eight years later, some things will change.

Called Hertz again and established that I could just keep the car for now and fill out the accident report and so on when I returned it to the same branch I rented it from. This made us very happy, since even a banged-up Mustang is better than a pristine Dodge Neon.

We decided to head to the SDSU campus and wander around it for a while. I pointed out every single tiny thing that was different or the same on the entire campus. C., as you can imagine, was enthralled. Still, she put up with my rambling nostalgia very patiently, even when I almost threw a fit on discovering that they'd changed the East Commons and built a library extension over the place where my favorite bit of shady lawn had once been.

We hit the campus bookstore, where my fury at finding that things had had the utter gall to change while I was off having a life for eight years was somewhat mitigated on finding that there was still a big rack of Dover Thrift Editions hiding in a corner. I bought many of them, as well as a Gashlycrumb Tinies lunchbox, and was soothed. After that we found a spot between the Administration building and the library which hadn't changed appreciably and we sat in the shade and talked for a while.

What is it about traveling that makes it possible to say things that you couldn't possibly say at home? Not big things, necessarily, but little things, little stories you've never told before and small confessions you've never made. It was a really good talk.

After that we wandered around randomly until we found a park which had nice shady tables under the trees, but someone had very cruelly roped off the playground, so we couldn't play on it. We talked some more, instead, then headed off in search of diner food.

We finally found a place called Shirley's, notable for their pot-pies and for the butt pennant hanging on the wall near our table. I am so serious here, a butt pennant.

C. built creamer castles, jelly-packet palaces, and a weapon. On discovering that I wasn't planning to eat the steamed carrots which came with my meal, she started using her straw to poke out little carrot-plugs and then spitting them across the table. I much admire her restraint for not shooting any of them at me, but we had to leave an extra-large tip to make up for the little orange splortches all over the table and the bowl of what looked like termite-chewed carrots.

Then back to the motel where C. has thus far gone swimming and discovered the joy that is the Devil's Dictionary while I wrote this journal entry.

More to come as more occurs...

notamos @ 2004-04-24T01:28:00

2004-04-24T08:30:17Z

I want to write about it tonight. And, inevitably, I don't want to. I've written and written about it, and each time it bled off a little bit of poison but there's not much left to say. Details I could fill in, I suppose. A few little vignettes that might help explain what it was like. The four yards of dark green velvet that started it all. The time I ran into SS in the Safeway parking lot eight months later. Maybe the night at S.'s house when I finally told him about it and then he drove me fifty miles in the middle of the night so that I could tell B. about it too.

But none of that will really help me any, and pretending that it could help anyone else understand a damn thing is pretty much asinine.

What I don't want to write about is my disgust with myself, how sickening I find it that this still affects me so much. Six and a half years later and still not over it. Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations? I mean, it's such a small story, really. I've heard the horror stories other women tell, how much worse it could have been. It wasn't. As rapes go, it was practically inoffensive. Against the spectrum of could-have-been I mean. The whole thing was over in less than twenty minutes, no pregnancy, no marks that lasted longer than it took for a few bruises to fade. He wasn't my boyfriend, my father, my husband, my friend. Just some asshole who had once dated a friend of mine. (Aside: They're married now. Can you believe that? She married him.)

I want this to be over. I want to be finished with it, to be able to set it behind me where it belongs and no longer view so many aspects of my life through the prism of one twenty-minute tragedy. I want to be healed from this.

How much of my life is altered by this? The tight nervousness in my chest when I walk across a parking lot at night, that was never there before. And the way that sometimes the smell of beer and sweat will hit me like a wall and make me dizzy and panicky, even when I know perfectly well that whoever it is wouldn't hurt a fly. The dreams and attendant insomnia, obviously.

But worse than that, much worse, how much of my life isn't altered by this but I think it is? How many perfectly normal small hurts do I view through the lens of that afternoon and magnify into something worse than they ought to be? I know I do it, blame the rape for overreactions and little fits of pain that really have nothing at all to do with it.

One tiny tragedy in my past and I still can't let it go. It's so small in the grander scheme of things. There are so many good things that ought to tip the scale firmly the other direction. Why should this one thing bear so much more weight? Can't I just let go?

I had a bad thought today. I was driving to pick up P.'s kids from the babysitter, talking vaguely to J. about all this and it crossed my mind that it's like an addiction. A crutch, a lazy way to move through life without taking responsibility for my own actions. Can't sleep? It's not my fault, I was raped. Can't trust other people to see me weak? Nope, rape's fault again. Lie about when I'm upset or angry or hurting? Blame the rape, not me.

Do I do that? The hell of it is that I can't tell. Right now I'm so muddled and sick with it all that I have no objectivity, I cannot see myself from the outside. I hope I don't but dearly fear that I do.

I don't know what to do next.

notamos @ 2004-04-22T20:25:00

2004-04-23T03:26:29Z

A stupid accident. Kid playing with a soccer goalpost manages to pull it down on top of his head and kills himself. Sort of story that wouldn't even be a blip on my radar, most days. Tiny tragedy, one of those small losses that surround everybody all the time.

Except this kid was a student at my mom's school. One of her favorites. He played double seconds in her steel pan band. He was pretty good at it, too. Wanted to move to six bass, but Mom wasn't sure she wanted to let him because it's easy to find someone who can handle the basses but a good double second player is rare.

And my mom called, I could hear the shaking in her voice and she just said "I need somebody. I need somebody to come down here and be here." And so I sent E., feeling guilty because I didn't go myself but knowing he'd do better than I would, he'd be there more fully than I can be right now. Right now I'm barely managing to be there for J. while his father scares the hell out of us by being so sick, I couldn't be there wholly for Mom right now, not the way she needs.

E.'s friend's grandmother is dying. J.'s grandmother died earlier in the month. J.'s dad isn't dying, he's not, but he's scaring the hell out of all of us. And now this kid who I barely knew, whose name my mom had to tell me but as soon as she did I remembered gold-rimmed glasses and baby-fine black hair spiked up with absurd quantities of gel and the faintest imaginable fuzz on his top lip as he grinned.

And me good for nothing in all of it. Not able to comfort J., or E. and his friend, or even my own mother. Barely able to stand, let alone prop anybody else up for a little while. Failing them. If I can't even be the one who holds everyone else upright, what else am I?

Note: I'm not fond of the tone and tenor of these past couple of entries. I'm aware that they are whining, and self-involved, and just the kind of angsty masturbatory writing that generally I try to avoid reading, let alone writing. But I've got to find some way to dig myself out of this hole, and maybe this will work. Or, y'know, not.

Second Note: Despite a long tradition of swearing that I'm never going to use my LJ account for anything, I'm going to give a shot at double-posting entries for a while, once in my LiveJournal and once in my Diary-X. Not sure how long this will last, but we'll see how it goes. As of now, I'm not moving over my archives to LiveJournal, because who wants to repost four years worth of entries?

notamos @ 2004-04-22T04:10:00

2004-04-22T11:10:56Z

Another white night and I'm not sure I can do this again. The sound of the fan and the laptop keys and the almost-silence of the outside world at three thirty AM. At four oh six the sprinklers will come on, and there will be eighteen minutes of rain on the window at my back. Between five-ten and five-twenty Bill from upstairs will walk down the concrete steps and get in his car to go to work. He drives an old Camry, it stutters three times before it catches vr-vr-vr-vrrrrrrrrmmmm. At six o' clock sharp the outside lights will all snap off, and there will be a moment of surprise just like always while I try to figure out what just changed. The man at the 7-11 who makes the good coffee doesn't come into work until six thirty.

Another white night and Tel just logged off Arcana and I wanted to scream and beg and cry for him to stay, not to leave me alone. Stay and talk to me, don't leave me alone with the keyboard and the eighteen-minute rain shower. I'll talk about anything, anything you want as long as you don't go. Not that I did, of course. Not that I told him what it's like. Not that I even could. You can't describe the white nights, not to anyone who hasn't lived them a time or two, maybe not to anyone who isn't living them right now.

You can say that your eyes get gritty and they feel sore, like there's not enough fluid in them and just looking up or to the side makes the muscles around them ache. You can talk about the way sound magnifies and takes on meaning it doesn't earn, and the way that air moves wrongly over your skin, leaving goosebumps in odd patches on your legs and arms. You can try to describe the logy, aching lure of bed, of just closing your eyes for a few minutes and letting it all drift off and the creeping dread that tells you that if you do you will be awake again in moments with a spike-in-the-brain headache and bone-deep shakes from the dreams. And it still doesn't matter, because they won't understand unless they already knew.

Damn the dreams. Damn them and my own cowardice besides. Damn the way they break me down, scrub and scratch and pick at the walls until I'm nothing but a little trembling thing, screaming and trying to hide under a bit of leaf or a blade of grass. Until I want to cry but can't, want to scream but daren't, want to wrap myself around someone and sob and cling and beg them to make it all right, but I Have My Pride and content myself with clinging to that instead.

Play it down, play it down. Don't let them see how near you come to breaking every night. Laugh about it, make jokes about coffee and insomnia and how you only stay up to keep Asmo company. Don't talk about it, don't let them see how close you walk the edge. Above all, don't cling. Don't plead with them to stay, to talk to you, to drown out the night sounds with keystrokes and imaginary laughter. When they want to go, open your hands freely. Say, "G'night, babe," and give a little snuggle and tease them about their sleeping habits. Leave 'em smiling, just like a singer on a stage. End on an up note.

He doesn't dream about me, I can guarantee you that much. He doesn't sit in the living room and learn all the sounds of the middle of the night, afraid to sleep for fear he'll live it over again. He doesn't dream about the way the light reflected off the hood of my car, the hollow sound of my head against the roof, the sticky nastiness of blue cotton gauze where it bunched above my knees.

He sleeps, I'm sure of it. The 'sleep of the just', or at least the sleep of one who has put the past behind him. Somewhere, right now, he sleeps on dirty sheets or clean, alone or with a girl pressing up against his back all warm and pliant, maybe with his arms wrapped around his pillow and a cat or dog at his feet. He sleeps, and I listen for the click-hiss-click that signals the beginning of the rain.

How is that fair? How is that right? No, I don't suppose the universe is under any obligation to be fair or right, but I want to know why he gets to sleep.

It was my favorite sundress. Why does that bother me so much? Dark blue with white and yellow daisies on it and when I wore it with my tall sandals and my hair falling down my back I felt like a girl in a 1940s romantic comedy. The fabric was light and a little rough and used to carry the scent of fabric softener in its weave for weeks. I loved that dress, and he ruined it. Is that some sort of symbol--do I think he ruined me? Or is it just that I could never let myself forget the way the skirt stuck to my legs as I walked up the driveway? Memory is so tactile sometimes, even now I can call up the feel of it there, the way the fluids dried and pulled at the fine hairs on my thighs.

Awake, the memories are fragmented. That twice-burned afternoon light reflecting on the smooth white hood of my car. The smell of tequila and beer and sour days-old sweat. Cheap brass belt buckle digging in above my knee, and the indented red line it left behind. Only when I sleep are they whole, do I live it again in perfect detail. Moment by moment, nothing lost, no second allowed to blur into the next but condemned to exist perfect and whole in and of itself.

Stay awake. Stay awake and let it be shards and pieces. Another cup of coffee, still warm and comforting, kept from going bitter by the expensive thermos carafe coffeemaker that sits on my counter like a yuppie toy, but is really my lifeline and protector, standing sentry through the white nights.

Click-hiss-click. Rain.

What it's all about

2003-05-04T21:36:19Z

Why are you here? There's nothing here, guys. I have this account for one purpose and one purpose alone--to keep up with all my friends too stubborn to move to the OTS (One True Service) of diary-x.

You know, it used to be that everything was just fine. I had my d-x, all my friends were there, and it was easy. But then otherwise sane and lovely people started getting LiveJournals instead and then, adding insult to injury, stubbornly refused to recognize the obvious superiority of d-x and insisted on staying at LJ.

So fine. Fine. I got an LJ, and I use it solely for the Friends page. I hope you're all proud of yourselves.

If you're still reading, and actually want to know what's going on with me, you'll have to head to my real diary. So there.

Your LJ RPG Team
LJ Username
Sex
Favorite Color
Weapon of Choice
Your Partner	ms_merriweather
Your Warrior	ryken
The Giggly, Flirtatious Magic User with Big Breasts	ayradyss
The Talking Animal	covielle
Main Archenemy	wasted_euphoria
Evil Incarnate	lessian1

This cool quiz by ass_ - Taken 18099 Times. </a>