fuckin Vanian!

Severance

What ever will it be?!

Hmm...!

Arroyo

Acceptable vs. Unacceptable Failures

Amy Winehouse dies and everyone has something sassy, weary or shrewd to say. A theatrical expression of addiction is celebrated, taunted and voraciously consumed until the death at which point she is dismissed as having been too weak to embrace her gifts, too corrupted and stupid to even live.

People love the overdose death the same way they love a really fucked up accident on the freeway. Disappointment/relief at the absence of detail, no blood or hand dramatically flung out from some folded metal. They have to love it because I can't otherwise explain the flood of expert commentary.

Expert commentary about a failure at life, coming from those salt of the earth average Americans. People who avoid disaster by the grace of their reason and foresight...that is, disasters other than their home foreclosures, strings of epically failed relationships, colossal debts, obese children, and life expectancies hovering somewhere between 56 and heart attack, not to mention the addicts in their own lives that they doubtless enable as it suits their own personal needs and expectations. Yes, life is just one first prize after the next when you're not as stupid as Amy Winehouse.

Call me dramatic, but I think I might prefer to choke on my own fluids at age 27 than to live that confused, filmy life full of coincidences, "fate," unknown aggressors, completely unanalyzed, feeling like a victim to outside influences always, never quite able to figure out why things never work out, not quite self-aware enough to ever implicate my own behaviors. Too stupid to know that I am stupid.

The self-satisfaction people must feel when they say something like "good riddance" must be like a salve to their own wounds. If I say it first, then you can't say it about me - right?

ETA: It was alcohol poisoning, not drugs. Now how foreign are her problems?

My grandfather and his brother, mid 80s.

My grandpa's belt buckle says "BOB". He still wears it. He probably still wears that shirt. I had to laugh out loud a while back when looking at old photos with my mom. There was a photo of he and I at Christmas when I was a small child. I stabbed the photo with my finger - he had just worn the very same shirt in the picture at a family party. Twenty years, still looks new.

This basically applies to everything about his life. He doesn't change anything until it physically breaks down. He is the most pragmatic, frugal, basic human being I have ever met.

Oh,

Would that it weren't so deathful hot in the lowlying deserts. I should like to take a road-trip in my carre.

God I really need to stop even paying attention to the 16th century.

Anyway, I am currently enrolled in a totally lovely class about Arizona history in which I have learned all manner of fascinating things that I did not know. It made me dig out photos of yore as we discuss various monuments and sites, and these photos made me sigh for multiple reasons, firstly that I haven't gone anywhere in a while and secondly, that I never did fix that Olympus.

Montezuma's Castle, patched in like an ancient wasp's nest. Oh I hope that doesn't set the curse on me. I'm pretty sure there's a curse, not unlike the mummy's curse, in the general spirit of "seriously fuck off you guys!" Anyway, it is a large multiple dwelling built by the Sinaguas. This is as close as anyone gets. There is no rear entrance!


Arizona Sequoias looking like a paint-by-number scene.

Oak Creek Canyon, full of slippery rocks and blackberry brambles. Well not full of, but if you're clever, you can find them, and if you're cleverer, you can make blackberry vanilla vodka with them.


Apple trees at Oak Creek, and a downpour.

Achewood

Changed my mind.

Totally love Instagram.




Totally washed out, they remind me of old old snapshots, treated poorly, kept tucked in the side of a mirror, exposed to the light and their own age. Disappearing very slowly.

Also, Instagram enables me to keep up on the status of Anita's yard frog on a day by day or hour by hour basis if necessary. I wish I had a yard frog!

My neighbor saw a sidewinder here last week. Rather have a frog. Especially now that I have googled sidewinders. WTF MATE

I don't know why I thought they were harmless before.

Wuthering Heights

White dress version,


...or red?

I prefer red.

Off to find a scarf to wear around my waist.

Printer bunny, animal totem of the HP Laserjet 3600.

I like this app.

Instagram

Another app I will never use,
except on the days when my work pc gets infected by spyware and I spend 45 minutes scanning and quarantining the shit with absolutely nothing else to do! God I hate Windows.

My coffee cup. It's very "me". My other signature cup has a picture of Barack Obama with MADE IN AMERICA emblazoned over him in a huge font with a picture of his birth certificate on the back. Subtle statements.

Last week my crazy conservative (but still surprisingly lovable, kind of) co-worker snarled, "Oh, GOD!" at the cup just as I was taking a sip. I burst out laughing and had to clamp my hand over my face to avoid spitting all over a bunch of TPS reports.

Dog.

River rock shade at Saguaro Branch library.

Oh, Baby Jags

Just look at that shit. Baby infant child Jagger.

Some fancy family portraits.

My grandma, my dad, my great-grandmother, and I think me.

A remarkably bad photo of my dad and brother. I love this picture of James so much. I should print it out and bring it when I see him next. MAIDEN. This is incongruous with my idea of his tastes but look at me CATEGORIZING PEOPLE. I guess I was about seven, and we had just met for the first time, but didn't have much to say to each other. He was visiting from college.

In the background please note rocking horse collection, valentines made of doilies taped to side of tv stand. It's hard to say when the photo was taken due to the clashing of holidays (also pictured: christmas stocking). It could have been June.

Around this time, James had been included in a poetry collection, maybe with other people from school. All of the pieces were very edgy and his had to do with some sort of Stand By Me type childhood awakening with plenty of cursing and sex. I was still pretty young, probably 10, and I found the book hidden in my mom's closet after hearing her talking on the phone about it, all hushed and scandalized. I read it. It didn't seem so crazy to me but it bothered me when I wondered if the poem was true; it made him seem very untouchable in my mind, intimidating and troubled, but in a Hollywood sort of way. I really hope she still has the book.

Don't mess with Braintree

Abigail Adams on Ben Franklin:

"...A false, insinuating, dissembling wretch, who could best serve the American cause by dropping dead at the first opportunity."

Well, he was kind of a c.