Disjointed Memories of Animals

I don't understand people who don't keep animals.  My best friend hates pets, thinks it's disgusting to keep them in the house, and finds it strange that I would do things like take pictures of raccoons and possums.  Excuse me, seeing a possum is a thrill.  I know this can be a cultural thing (Indians think keeping dogs in your house is fucking gross, but have you seen their dogs?), but he's just a white American.  For years, he thought cats are what stink, and not their litter boxes.  The first time he came over to my house years ago, he exclaimed, "I can't smell the cat!"  Yeah bro, because I slavishly empty the box while she watches.

He doesn't even notice animals.  He visited recently and looked surprised and suspicious when my cat jumped onto the couch and sniffed her way over to him.  He leaned away with a vague expression of disgust, then patted her head with his fingers splayed out and said, "I paid tribute to you in your home. You go away now."  Shoo wave.

Something clearly happened to him in childhood.  Something bad.

My dad was the same way.  For years, he endured his partners' pets.  He was neglectful of our dogs, shrieking at them to SHUT THE FACK UP every time they barked more than once, and in his darker moments, he'd hit or kick them for offenses.  I may be lucky that those are the worst memories of my childhood, but they do suck.  He loves to tell a story about how I got bucked off a horse who then primly trotted over to him.  I ran over, crying, kicking up dirt. "Don't hit her!"  "I wasn't going to," he said, shruggingly surprised that I would even think that. "It was your fault."  Then he made me get back on her, because he saw that in a movie.  I shakily endured it for two passes around the pen, then got off authoritatively.  The afternoon at the barn was done.

It's not that he didn't like animals.  He did.  He just didn't treat them well in a consistent manner.  There were always dogs and cats in his house growing up and he and all of his siblings speak wistfully of their black lab, Susie, as though she was a person.  She was the smartest dog of all time, she saved our lives, blah blah blah.  All four of them and my grandma insisted on this, so I believe them, but it was so over the top.  She did apparently save their lives, though.  Two of my grandmother's cats were fighting in the night in the late 60s and knocked over a lamp that had been left on, doutbtless waiting for one of the rotten siblings to come home.  The hot bulb burned into some delicate fabric (likely a doily) and set the couch on fire.  The living room began to go up when Susie ran all through the house, barking, and woke the family up who put out the fire.

She's the only childhood pet he talks about except for the hated cats.  Later, he and my mom had an ugly black poodle named Ty, and I have photos of him putting panties and my toddler t-shirts on Ty and feeding beer to her while he carried her on his hip like a baby.  Ty had just come around one day, so they took her in, but it turned out she was actually someone else's dog, and my mom cried when they had to give her back.

My mom was always picking up stray dogs.  We'd pull over on the way to school or grandma's house and she'd load some dog up and bring it home.  They didn't usually stay long, I don't know why, either she took them to the humane society or found their owners.  She stopped doing that after she picked up a big German Shepherd who was covered in giant green ticks.  I remember them as the size of olives.  My dad came home from work, put his hand over his face when he saw the dog, but immediately named him Rufus.  Rufus would lay on the back patio as I pried the ticks off his body with a butter knife while the neighbor kid winced in horror.  Unfortunately, Rufus attacked the girl down the street while we were playing in the yard one after-school afternoon.  A strange look came over him and he was on her in a second, biting and tearing at her chest.  I just stood there, screaming hysterically.  My mom came running out clutching a cordless phone just as the neighbor kid's dad dashed in through our gate and wrested the dog off her.  She had to have surgery.  I don't know what happened to Rufus and I guess her parents didn't sue us.  After that, my mom had a strict "no screaming unless you are in trouble," rule, and chastised me over and over for shrieking around the yard while playing, because it raised the panic in her throat.  Sorry, Ma.

Sidebar: My dad has come around to loving dogs in his elder state.  Not other animals, but dogs.  He and his common law llorona have had a series of ill-fated pitbulls over the years, the recent best of which was Pinky II (really lazy dog-namers), who died of cancer.  To his credit, he sought formal healthcare for Pinky, but he also did shit like rub her head with olive oil and hang a piece of pink quartz from her collar, because he read it in some mommy blog about treating the spiritual aspect of your dog's cancer.  I mean, whatever makes him feel productive, but this is why the man votes Trump and believes aliens built the pyramids.  He's basically an antivax mama grizzly, but for dogs.  

My grandma's backyard is a literal pet cemetery.  I need to ask my dad who the first animal to be buried there was - it might've been Susie.  [Update: Dad: "I believe that it was a German Shorthaired Pointer in 1969. There were cats that far back also."] My grandma was very pragmatic about animals, as a farm child, so this is surprising.  Then again, farm folk do tend to bury their dead on the property.  To her, cats were for barns, dogs were for passive friendship, but you don't lose much sleep over either one, except in rare cases when they're special.  When I was very young, she had this massive Chesapeake Bay retriever named Arthur.  Arthur was a gross and unfun dog and my cousins and I love to talk about him.  He had lumpy fur in the way of the Chesapeake, and I think he came from the pound.  He was grossly overweight, truly a massive dog, and he would jump on the couch and army crawl into my grandma's lap while she cursed and admonished him for being too big for laps, and certainly old lady laps.  Arthur had various illnesses and a pesky recurrent case of fleas.  She would "dip" him regularly and then slap my hand away when I tried to pet him.  "No honey, he's poisonous right now."  I don't think Arthur was buried in the yard, probably because my dad just said no, it was too damn much.

The reason it was too damn much is because there are two St. Bernards buried back there, and my dad dug both of their graves.  Conductor and Ally.  These psycho dogs were the center of my uncle Mark's heart, even though Conductor hated children (except for Mark's kids) and legitimately rage-charged me more than once when I was under 3.  What did I do?  I've always been hurt and embarrassed that Conductor wanted to kill me.  Mark has continued to buy breeder St. Bernards and they have continued to attack his family, the most recent one nearly tearing his adult son's face off about ten years ago.  They still talk about her lovingly.

Anyway, Conductor apparently had a heart attack and died, perhaps because he lived in Arizona and was a St. Bernard.  Conveniently, he was at over at grandma's at the time.  Mark collapsed, weeping, useless, and grandma called my dad, who sighed and put his shovel in the back of the truck.  He dug a grave for a full sized male St. Bernard where the flower bushes go at the perimeter of the yard.  A while later Ally died, and my dad buried her back there too.  My dad has always been given the manual labor jobs because of his size, always been asked to beat up his siblings' enemies (literally into contemporary times - fyi he won't), and yeah, he does kind of resent it.  Then my cousins started bringing their dead to grandma too, who would point out to the increasingly limited empty spaces in the yard, and they'd bury their cats and dogs and birds and frogs accordingly.  None of my pets are in there because my mom thought their pet cemetery was gross, and there are no places left except for in the middle of the yard anyway.  That would violate the only rule: you don't damage the grass.

My aunt lives there now and I want her to make a map of the graves.

And those are my weirdest pet stories.  Poor old Vaughn died today with his mate Gilby, and it's nice that they got to take that trip together so neither would miss the other.  Vaughn was a little silver runt that I found on Craigslist.  He was living with an Indian family.  When I came over, the mother called out and clapped her ringed hands, "Puppies!  Puppiesss!" and 8 tiny, fat, ear-flapping baby dogs came racing into the room.  I picked Vaughn up and that was the rest of the story.  The first thing my cat Fatima did was slap him in the eye, which squinted for a week.  Despite being treated well (other than by Fatima), he was extremely timid and he was terrified of doors.  I still think my mom or my grandma (it wasn't me) accidentally shut him in a door once, but no one's talking.

Pam and Dean

RIP

Back in the 90s, my dad met someone at work.  He was single after a short and tumultuous marriage with crazy Nancy, the woman who came after my mom.  (I shouldn't be so cavalier with the c-word; she was, but it was "straight up mental illness" as Tracy Jordan would say.)  Nothing to laugh at...

Nancy was a real handful and that's a whole other blog post.  My dad came out of it battered and humbled, but it wasn't long before he met Pam.  Pam was short, beautiful and jovial.  She laughed loud and often.  She was instantly disarming, even to a constantly off-put 14 year old who was no longer interested in being nice to parents' new partners.  Pam was cool, and none of that coolness had burned off as she entered what must have been her early 40s.  How did she retain it?  She just did, because she was just, cool.

Pam was from LA, a big Mexican family with all of the 70s East LA trimmings - brothers who died young from gang-related shootings, other brothers who bought and sold lowriders, an absentee alcoholic dad, allegedly haunted homes where her mom would yell at the spirits to stop turning the lights on because they were driving up the utility bill, and grandmas who practiced santeria behind closed doors with their girlfriends.  She was kind and sympathetic to a silly awkward kid with no allegiances, and she loved David Bowie.  I could listen to her talk for the rest of my life.  And I wish she was still here.

She and I used to stay up late at my dad's house.  Ever the homebody badass, my dad would usually retire to bed before we wanted to on a Saturday night, and Pam and I would sit crosslegged on the couch and watch TCM while she told me about her lively past.  Eventually he'd get up and inform us testily, "I can hear you in the bedroom, you know."  

Pam's ex-husband had dyed his hair blonde-orange after Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth when she met him, but she could never tell her ultra-masculine son about it because he'd be ashamed of his gender-bending dad (it was the 70s! chill, bro).  She told me about record stores in her childhood and how she'd take buses all over LA and then Phoenix to find the elusive European b-sides that she needed to complete her collections, T Rex and the New York Dolls and everything else.  

I still have LPs that she gave me back then, she had range that went somewhere from 70s punk and Euro pre-goth to Fleetwood Mac, and she gave me Thompson Twins and Culture Club albums during my prolonged 80s phase.  She knew something about much of the obscure or "subversive" bands and media I was just discovering and she shared wise or crazy stories with me in a conspiratorial way.  

She never acted like my new discoveries were tiring to her, like I probably would now.  She was an advocate at a time when both of my parents were criticising my new tastes, my appearance, and whatever they thought that would lead to.  She'd roll her eyes and tell me I was fine.



She managed to be a friend and a steadying influence in spite of her quasi-parental status.  When I was most critical of my dad, when I was most critical of the world, she always had something thoughtful to say that I hadn't considered before, and was able to remind me of the inherent goodness of my dumb parents without discounting my feelings.  

And she didn't deny anything - she was critical of the ways of the world too, and confirmed my frustrated kid feelings while reminding me that all manner of life lay beyond.  And she was funny, really funny.  Witty, savage yet still essentially kind, forever irreverent.  I still use some of her old jokes and references.  When my dad tried to make fun of her tastes and life choices, she'd simply say, in a faux deep voice, "Jealous?" I loved her desperately then, and she's still the best person I have ever met.  But she and my dad didn't last, and after that breakup, she met Dean.

Dean died this week.  That's why I'm writing this.

When I first met Dean, I was a little sad.  My dad and Pam had been broken up for a couple years by then, but managed to stay friends as he usually does with the exes.  He was already with La Llorona and I couldn't wait to watch Pam watch her to see what she thought of the new woman.  I disliked LL at that time (want to say "still do" but she ain't the worst person I've ever heard of after this year).  LL was rude and smug and cold, and she didn't want me around.  I was evidence of his past life, which was verboten.  

But I didn't live with him anymore, I was 18 then, and I had to make nice because that's what I was taught to do.  I just wanted Pam back.  What a gracious time his relationship with her seemed after the entrance of the wretched women who followed her.  Couldn't they make amends?  Who wouldn't kill himself to be with someone like Pam?  I would.  We met up with Pam at Dean's house, a tidy, dated 60s ranch-style on the edge of Arcadia.  

I was shocked when I saw him for the first time - tall, robust, like John Wayne if John had been a wall of person.  Dean had a craggy, handsome face, Scottish looking, with a shock of graying hair and icy blue eyes.  He looked like a movie star.  And he was Pam's new boyfriend.  I stopped mourning her breakup with my dad so much because hell, who's gonna compete with that guy.  Dean was one of a kind.  He was old-timey gracious and polite and gentlemanly.  It was hard to look at anyone else in a room where Dean was.

At the time, Dean worked for the Wrigley Mansion.  He was the primary caretaker, maintaining the property year-round, but especially in the summer months when the house was shuttered and the bar, Jeordie's, was more quiet.  The occasion for our gathering was July 4: From the porches of the Wrigley, you could see firework shows from Tempe Town Lake as well as downtown Phoenix.  We went there to enjoy the views, and for the adults to have a few drinks.  I was surprised and pleased to see bats flapping around the upper patios in the dark, because the house was all surrounded by green space, and wondered aloud if they were considered a nuisance to be got rid of at Wrigley.  Dean said they had a place in our ecosystem just like everyone else.  Oh, Dean!  My dad probably would have tried to poison them.

His access to the home and grounds meant we could wander this historic site as we wished, and Pam walked me through the hallways of the former private residence, taking care to point out golden photos of Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis and my other favorites meeting Wrigley family members over the years.  She knew me so well.  She took me through the "crooked hallway" in the master suite, where she believed a haunting existed.  She was pretty superstitious, and believed a ghost lived in my dad's house too.  Well, there was at least one suicide in there, so, yanno maybe.*  La Lorona got drunk and jokingly tried to ally with Pam against my dad and Dean, and Pam just laughed and later told me, "What a party girl."  It was her benign and generous way of dismissing her even though she wanted my dad to be happy with someone, even if it was someone like LL.  Or maybe she just saved her trash talk for other people.  

Dean was a good surrogate dad to Pam's sons, mostly grown but still needing something.  Her youngest boy definitely benefited his traditional-yet-kind-yet-bemused teachings about life.  My dad, by contrast, had challenged them, tried to emasculate them, being jealous of Pam's attention to them.  He was so jealous of her affections that he couldn't understand their importance to her, despite having his own children and knowing they were put in the same situation with people other than their parents.  I'm sorry, and surprised he didn't learn more from her.  

Still, even my dad respected Dean, and he still does.  Still talks about him as an unimpeachable character and general cool guy.  That ain't nothing, as a friend of mine would say.

In later years, when things changed in catastrophic ways, Dean nursed Pam through multiple brutal bouts of cancer.  She moved back in with him after a pre-cancer separation, lost her hair, and he tended her attentively.  I didn't find out about her illness until near the end, and I was devastated.  She was only 50.  FIFTY.  This is no time for Sally O'Malley.  The best person in the world was struck with life-destroying cancer at 50?  What the hell makes sense at that point?  Or any point forward?  We went to her birthday party at her oldest son's house around this time.  She was up and about in a headscarf and I tried to get time with her, but I looked around and quickly realized that the house was filled with people as much or more in love her than I was, and that's a lot to say about a love that starts in adolescence.  I hung back, not wanting to bother her, and she looked tired.

I saw her again in hospice.  Thankfully someone called my dad when she was approaching her last moments, and he called me.  I was in my mid-20s and out with friends when I took his urgent call, when he told me she was dying.  I went home immediately and slept for a few hours before visiting hours at the facility.  When I saw her in her sad hospital bed, it was striking, disturbing, painful and awkward.  She looked small in her hospital bed.  Her close family was all around and I felt like an interloper despite their friendly inquiries.  They had been on watch for hours, days, and finally were bored enough to want to casually engage.  

They kept asking me how I knew her and my explanation sounded so unimportant in the presence of siblings, her mother, her children and the other close people in her life.  I said, "Well, she dated my dad, they met at the city... " Oh, VB's daughter! They tittered among each other.  They remembered him, murkily recalled me as a gangly tween, and how large the relationship had loomed for Pam at the time.  They teased me about how I turned out so nice (lul) with such a dad, and did he force me to lift weights and do push-ups growing up?  I smiled, uncomfortable, while her youngest bantered with her unresponsive body, referring to past personal jokes and massaging her feet.  She was asleep on morphine and I never saw her awake again.

The next night, I drove to her hospice, but instead of going in, I parked by her window and stayed in my car.  I was too embarrassed to trouble the people inside, but wanted to be around.  She had no idea, but it made me feel better.  She was gone soon after, thank god.  That still sounds so sick and wrong, ten years later.  The shock of loss dulls but can occasionally be sharp after a long time, too.  

The funeral in central Phoenix was unreal, her sons so adult looking in their formal dress. The inevitable vulgarity and impersonal nature of the funeral program offended me, of course.  But despite massive effort, I couldn't stop myself from weeping openly in the pew beside my silent dad and La Llorona while she stared googly on, unmoved at the situation. 

The sound of a violent door slam echoed through the church while her brother Manuel spoke at the podium, and he subtly turned his head and said, "Hi Pam," before continuing his speech.  I don't go in for cute "They're with us," shit like that, but then Manuel told a story about how Pam's brothers called her "Slam" in her teen years because she was always pissed at them for something, all these rude gross boys around, punching her or sticking their fingers in her ears or nose in their tiny family home, and she'd go to her room and slam the door as hard as she could, cracking the frame, when she was mad.  How I love her.  How I wish I could have protected her at any stage of her young life.  I would have killed someone.

And now Dean's gone to cancer too soon as well, but at least he lived to his full life expectancy.  I don't know the details.  But I think of his big charming face and smiley light blue eyes, filled with humanity, and I remember what it was like to talk to him. 

Dramatic as it sounds, I don't think there's anyone alive today who remotely approaches the magnitude of Pam or Dean.


--
*I guess I wrote this 10 years ago about the alleged haunting of the house on 10th Ave. Don't even remember writing it. Oh age.

Nature not Nurture

I have a sister.  It's proven now by way of a long story for another time that is private that I'll share.

She's about 5 years older than me.  She is a beautiful blonde ex-military lawyer who competed in beauty pageants in her teens, because this is a tv show.  To say she's a "Type A" could be understating things, but she's still fun, with a dark sense of humor and punishingly dry delivery.

I met her a couple of times as a kid, but I got my first taste of her personality in my mid-twenties.  I hadn't seen her since 1993 and had no contact information for her, so I googled her and emailed her at work.  I have got to go back and find that cold call email - "hi hello I think I'm your sister".  I wanted to reach out to her in general, but I had an excuse: I had just quit a job, and at 4:59 on my last day, I sent a scathing all-staff email, attacking the owner of the business and various of his employees that I had a problem with.  Yes, it was "unprofessional"; no, I didn't need the reference; no, I wouldn't do it now and yes I am still glad I did it.  Every time I see people I worked with then through a Phoenix friend, they mention it.  My bestie Andrea printed it out and tacked it to her cube wall.  And it was justified, they were terrible, it's a very long story but I promise you, it was probably the least unprofessional thing that happened in that office.

And to tell you what kind of guy ran this place, I had the girl in HR delete my address from all of her files.  Because they absolutely would have come to my house.  They were bodybuilding psychopathic frat guy sales dudes who live in a full-on Mad Men world, punching each other across their desks, renting chickens to chase in the office, going out for happy hour and ending up in jail.  Has a work superior ever said, "I want to fuck you," casually, at work, when you pass them?  Call me when you have that job.  I'll write your quit email.

So anyway, that guy threatened to sue me over the email.  Libel.  Stupid, but he kept a lawyer on retainer and lived to harass other people.  I sent the email to my sister and asked if he had a case.  She loved the aggro shittiness of the email, which was my first indication that she was, in fact, my blood.  Her professional opinion?  I was probably fine, but that doesn't mean he couldn't file if he wanted to.

Her true parentage had been called into question by everyone in my family for decades.  They felt that she didn't look like us.  Her mother had been a wild 70s biker bitch, "an alley cat," my dad said.  The alley cat of your choosing, you mean.  The family enabled his total neglect of her with that excuse, so obviously a relationship between us had never been fostered.  By the time I was an adult, I was prepared to err on the side of caution and treat her as though she probably was family.  I was so fucking furious when I realized that the two of us had grown up a handful of miles apart, never knowing each other.  This created a divide between my dad and I that was actually worse than the later one that resulted over Trump.  I didn't call him for nine months, and he never knew why.  By the time I got over it such that I decided to continue our relationship, I didn't want to litigate it.  Why bother with someone who not only shies in terror from visceral interpersonal confrontation with family, but over a situation that no one can fix now?

This little cabbage patch turned into a bad bitch

Many years passed before she reached out to me to ask if I wanted to meet up while she was in Austin on work.  I had no idea what to expect, and was so nervous, like I was on a date/job interview/parole board hearing, but it was instantly easy when she showed up at the restaurant.  We talked for hours, and it felt like talking to myself.  I was shocked and thrilled that we had so much in common, and of course it's the crappy things that are the most endearing.  She shared story after relatable story about her work life, her married life, we compared our behavior during fights with partners and laughed.  She is so much more savage than I am, and I love every second of it.

She's brilliant, reads voraciously, there's nothing she doesn't seem to know about, and she engages in culture high and low.  I can't believe how fast she reads, it's shocking.  She's intimidating yet gracious and kind, full of funny stories, endlessly critical of other people but surrounded by a wide group of close friends, with many fulfilling friendships with women.  I just approve.

She and our brother and I met together for the first time last year on a trip that I facilitated, in Portland.  She and he had never met or talked, ever.  Didn't even know about each other for ages.  I told him about her, and he was incredulous.  Knowing that she does exist in a fairly heteronormative world of kids and PTA meetings and professional work environments, I tried to warn her that our brother could be a little different in his interactions.  He's a wonderful, sweet person, but sometimes he deliberately alienates people to test them.  He tries to shock.  He succeeds, because he is fucking dark too.  I was sort of worried that he'd do those things to her if she read as too establishment for him - she's got money, she vacations in Europe, she's raising children and her husband's family is the definition of midwestern normal.  He was so nervous about meeting her that he kept telling me, "We'll still have fun on our trip if she doesn't like me. Maybe we can hang out without her some days."  He was so concerned.  So I warned her, thinking she and I were the most alike of the three.

Wrong.  They instantly bonded.  They connected thoroughly, mostly over similarly bad experiences had as children.  While they had very different early lives, they were both trapped in situations that were sometimes comically terrible, other times just real terrible.  They laughed and one-upped each other with stories of parents who were neglectful at best, often abusive, and the absurd situations that lands one is as a kid.  I, by comparison, am too normcore for them.  I get it, although that feeling is a new one for me.  I watched their relationship evolve and deepen by the minute, and hanging back felt like the only right thing to do.  I complained wryly to friends that they became the best of friends and forgot all about me, but even then it felt a little much to protest about it.

A month after our visit, she texted me to ask, "Who is Rosemary (lastname)?"  I said, that's our dad's cousin.  She said, oh funny, 23&Me says she's likely my second cousin.

I was right.  She is our goddamn sister and I knew in 2010 after one email.

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain

I'm dead.  This is why I've kept the same gmail account for the last 15 years despite the fact that every letter in the address rhymes and I have to repeat it 48 times any time I need to give it out.  Searching for something mundane, I came across the 500,000 emails and gchats my BFF and I  exchanged nearly a decade ago when that felt like a more acceptable thing to do.

I did not think that I had matured at any point since, ever, but I apparently have.  Or, failing that, I'm just less committed to maintaining my edge.  Now I'm just old and reasonable.*  Also, reading back on the problems and experiences of a person in their 20s is bizarre and hilarious, and sort of alienating.  Who is this person?  Even reading about this life is a bit more than I can take, much less living it, and that's why the changes associated with age are so necessary.  People may dream about being young and attractive and interested in everything forever, but isn't it just exhausting?  Wouldn't you rather just die? (edge activated) So much time spent agonizing over the personal life.  Do elderly people just not care about anything at all?  The amount of concern and baggage that I have dropped in a decade would indicate that there will be nothing left to care about in another one.

me: god i hate when people know i like them.
Laura: I do too but only because as soon as I know someone likes me, I lose interest in them
Laura: and I assume that is universal to some extent.
Laura: I think it depends on the person. I think some people who aren't used to being crushed on are so dazzled by the idea
me: oh probably
me: but i don't want them getting dazzled on my fucking dime.
me: i have to keep up my distance and mystery here.
Laura: LOLOL
Laura: you can't always be that one though.
me: haha. ah, fuck every person.

I'm glad I didn't get "fuck every person" tattooed on myself back then, because it would have been appropriate.

I listened to an interview with one of the oldest women in the US years ago.  She said her happiest years were in her 60s, and her worst were in her 20s.  Why can't we just enjoy ourselves when we are in peak condition and have few responsibilities?  I'm sure some people do.  Old-me would say those people enjoy themselves because they're too stupid to realize what's wrong.  Now-me is just like, I do not care if they're enjoying their lives or not.  Time to complain about how many times I see baby yoda every day.  No, he is not cute.

Improvement?

There are a lot of funny, shocking things in the emails that I had forgotten about.  My new (too late) fixation with privacy on the internet prevents me from pasting anything here, and I should probably go back through this entire blog and delete every identifying thing so that...what?  What's going to happen?  I'm going to get outed for writing ten thousand crappy posts about myself?  Someone's going to tell my dad I made fun of him on the internet?  He knows!  Or if he doesn't, he should.  Do these data mining companies trawl for old information or just current?  Bad things can happen, of course, but will they?  The data I produced back then is largely useless, I think.  You can't tell what I was buying or voting for for the most part.  And what else is data for.  What is a Youtube video of Sylvia Plath reciting "Black rook in rainy weather" paired with a picture of the moon going to tell the Russians about me, other than I was goth-basic and 26 years old.










*Not true, but truer.

Anna, Revisited

The things you find when you log into old accounts.

Setting aside my resentment of Ancestry, which is harder to quit than a gym membership, I logged into an old separate account that I had created to research one Miss Anna Ireland of Detroit, MI, 1936.  I was shocked to see what had developed in the intervening years, data-wise.  Photos upon photos of a woman whose trail had led to a brick wall for me years ago.  I almost couldn't process it - was this really my gal?

I still have to parse through this to make sure it's all correct, but here's Anna, and the things I had wrong.  Many questions still unanswered.

• She married Jack at 27.  In 1936, this was basically past the point of old maidery.  No judgments, obviously, I'm just saying.
• Jack ended up dying in 1954, when their daughter was quite young. Reasons unknown, but Anna fretted about his ill health as early as 1937.
• She remarried a guy named Chick, but I haven't started looking at him.  Chick is an out of fashion nickname for Charles that I enjoy.

Anna and the baby.  1947-48.  Check those super-Forties rolls in her hair.

Jack and Colleen, guess '48-49.  I like this photo of he in his undershirt at home.

Jack, Baby Colleen, Anna.  Late 40s, tinsel tree.

Anna and Colleen already with Stepdad Chick when Colleen was still quite small.

Very much 1950s summer attire for mom and daughter. This would seem to be in Phoenix.

I could write an entire post about the '50s Mexican peasant dress, but I'm overwhelmed and I need to figure out if Colleen is still alive.  We'll see what turns up.

Ethnic Heritage

I did the Ancestry spit test a couple of years ago.  I was fascinated to learn how the genetic past would differ from the oral history, or the documented past by census and passenger lists.  I figured it might be quite a lot.

And it was.  The data is (are? stop) dynamic because of the ever-growing sample size, so at first I was Lagertha: New Scandinavian.  Yes, it said I was almost 1/3 from those upper parts, which was a complete and total shock - it wasn't in the oral or written history, not even a little.  My dad was thrilled, not having done his test yet, because it confirmed all of his masculine bikerly dreams: I'm a fuckin' viking! I knew it!  He sent me a silver Thor's hammer necklace for my birthday, a rare personal gift post-Trump.

From that, I assumed that our German ancestors were partly northerly people who had settled there at some murky point.  A lot of those Germans and other northern Europeans have Scandinavian stock because, well, vikings.  When they weren't conquering, they were at least vacationing around and mingling with the locals.  We had always assumed from our surname(s), including the secret pre-Americanized one, that we were German AF.  And maybe some are, but not me, because genetics are confusing AF.

The results changed a year later.  Sadly for me, I changed from Lagertha to Colleen.  I was, it turned out, just mostly Irish.  Back when I was a northperson, I was fascinated to have to learn about a new culture that I had zero prior identity with.  But the "knowledge" of my true genetics had bred no newfound familiarity or sense of remembrance of my people, probably because they weren't, or not exactly.

When I was a kid, my best friend was Mary Beth, a super Irish kid from Brooklyn.  Her parents were very invested in being Irish: their doorbell played the first seven bars of "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" year-round, their pets were named things like "Irish Cream" and their home decor reflected their generalized hysteria about the island.  They were American Irish, New York Irish, all the way down to the mounted police dad, who had moved his young family to Arizona upon an early retirement from the NYPD.  They even brought the retired horse, ancient and gray-muzzled when I met him.  It didn't help that these two freckled, pale brunettes had birthed an only daughter with the reddest natural hair I or anyone else has ever seen.  This wasn't strawberry blond or even orange hair, it was red.  Crayola crayon red.  A red you can't get in the salon.  That only emboldened them and, even in middle school, I was repelled by their posturing enthusiasm for ethnic identity as status.

I knew my family was Irishish too and identified that way, but I didn't.  My Grammy (great-grandmother) and the people I was closer to were all Italians, and naturally I felt I was Italian too. CMAN!  I'm Milano eyyy!!

Well, not by the numbers on my card.  It's true that both of my Grammy's parents came from their Italian hometowns on boats like proper immigrants, but my DNA hardly recognizes that.  Today I am 65% "England, Wales and Northwestern Europe," which includes France, Switzerland and parts of Germany but is most strongly centered on the UK.  But I'm also 30% just Irish, and 5% "Germanic Europe".  Additional communities for honorable mention are "Southwestern Quebec French Settlers," which I saw in the data when I uncovered the fact that my paternal grandma's people were in Quebec for almost 300 years before they emigrated to the US, making them among the first Euro settlers to Canada.  That's 1. interesting and 2. so sad that they didn't stay.  I could be Quebecois.  Instead I'm from Phoenix.

But all this feels pretty removed.  I feel very unromantic and pragmatic about ethnic origins today. 
Partly because it's kind of hard to not politicize or re-litigate the past and count up all of the things they didn't know (care about) that we do, but mostly because I question the relevance of it overall.

My issue today is with time and how I can't square that with ethnicity and identity.  I read one researcher say that, once an ancestor was far enough back in history, you weren't really related to them anymore.  It's so far back, and so many other apparently less-interesting people have been involved since, that the connection is hardly there mathematically.  Is this true?  I better double check because I just remembered how they found some relatives of Richard III after they finally discovered his bod under that Tesco parking lot.

But my question has always been, what point in history are we basing this on?  Irish as of when.  Certainly not eternity, surely that DNA has evolved around over time.  What about whatever ancient people were there before?  Is there a simple answer I'm missing? (because I went to ASU)

They say people with heavily English ancestry returns are super rare, because of how many people passed through there from way back and diversed it all up from early days.  Well, my dad has that.  Pretty high numbers for someone not even born there.  Mr. Jack Daniels Jack Palance Dennis Hopper biker viking turns out to be an old limey Brit.  At least for now.

#rowlandaroundinthatstuff

Ferry Feverdream

Black No. 1

Copied from antiquity, or 2014.  I'm never writing anything again, I'm just reposting things I still think about.  This one was reaching, but I'm sticking with it for now.  All those special memories...

I want to comment on what I wrote seven years ago.  I do so in bold. Don't @ me.  I'm just a person, dealing with personhood.

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5/30/14

My dead gothic vampire boyfriend was a feminist.

Every year, sometimes more than once per year, I remember that Peter Steele is dead.  This is still pretty hard for me to accept, and I generally mark these occasions by watching a million live shows and interviews on Youtube, and feeling very sad, then feeling ridiculous for feeling sad, while still feeling sad. 

This year, I was joined by my jewelry bff, with whom I spent all of this week's idle hours at work discussing the matter at length.  I think we are probably friends because of Type O Negative.
Soon after meeting in a jewelry class, she showed me a keychain that she had made.  "Looks like the Type O Negative logo," I said, instantly regretting my comment.  My foreverlove for this band isn't something I bring up in mixed company, for obvious reasons.

Worn constantly in the 90s and never again. I keep it with the clothes I wear regularly, though. DGAF

"It is the Type O Negative logo," she said.  I raised one eyebrow.  We were now GOOD. FRIENDS.  It lasted til I left the state, some things are too good to keep alive.

So anyway, in trawling interviews this week, I noted how remarkably without prejudicial hangup Peter seemed to be.  Believe it or not, a 6'8 white guy with a Brooklyn accent who fronts a doom metal band is fed a lot of baiting questions by music journalists, trying to lead him into representing the cliched mentality of many of the genre's fans.  He batted each of these questions away with bored yet witty answers that would have made any one of today's contributors to feministing.com give a reply of, not bad.

Despite insisting that he hated everyone equally, Peter kind of sounds like a third wave feminist to me.  Labels are offensive to everyone, and I wouldn't go around re-casting a dead person's values to better suit my own, but it's true and you should know it.  Oh shit.  I'm gonna get it... should anyone pay attention to this which thank god no one does.

In one early interview, he was asked about the recent national criminalization of marital rape (1993).  Obviously, it was a leading question intended to elicit a controversial reply re: marital rape isn't real rape, that you somehow forfeit sexual sovereignty when you marry (if you're a woman), or whatever insane opinion stupid men were having at the time.  He instantly rejected this position and instead talked at length about consent, the lack of which was completely unacceptable to him, because of his wild opinion that it's not hot to push people who don't want you into sex.  I don't think I can over-emphasize how unusual his approaches to topics concerning women were for his lifestyle and surroundings at the time, not to mention the fact that there was no mainstream outlet for feminist thought at the time that could have influenced him (don't think he was reading Ms Magazine) - instead, he was (I guess!) simply influenced by his lifelong positive, supportive and familial relationships with women.  He may not have described the issue in the way that I would have, but the message was the same.  Certainly not what that two-bit music journalist was expecting to hear.

He was accused of misogyny, and rightly so, in response to the band's first album.  The songs are frantically angry, all written about and immediately following a breakup, and the music sounds like 80s hardcore, and I guess it was.  It was, I just never listened to any of their contemporaries. I know nothing of this genre.  I bought the album as a young teen after I had already absorbed the Bloody Kisses album.  I basically threw it out the window once I had listened to the first four songs.  It was not the band I knew from the baroque and atmospheric Bloody Kisses album.  Peter took a lot of heat for the lyrics on this album, again rightly so, but I believe his explanations when he says he was a very angry, very young and emotionally shattered person at the time of the writing.  Additionally, the songs were not written for an album.  They were demos that he had made for himself which were made into a record in a very questionable move by the record company.

Believe me, I almost never accept the inevitable excuses when a guy is accused of misogyny.  Rarely do these characterizations result from misunderstandings - many men express themselves expecting the support and lauding that they've received all their lives, and when they get busted for crossing the current societal boundary line of acceptability, it's all a big misunderstanding, no one has a sense of humor, it's a witch hunt, they're being discriminated against, and all of the other tearful protestations regular white guys get up to every time they get into trouble.  Pretty good, 7-year-past-self.

But I believe Peter.  And not because I love him.  I believe him because everything he said from the beginning of his career to the painful end was almost confrontationally authentic and consistent.  At the height of his career, he discussed his fear and insecurity, his self-loathing, his suspicious feelings about praise, and all of the other issues that people of his emotional constitution or background feel on a daily basis.  When asked about how he got into bodybuilding, he says flat out, it's vanity and insecurity.  He thought he was unattractive and that his considerable height made him look ridiculous, and he did what many young men do in response: worked the hell out.  People rarely admit that kind of shit, particularly not when someone is writing it down.  When he became a sex symbol among female fans, many of whom rabidly pursued him in person, he said, "What's wrong with you? I'm just another asshole in a band."  He openly discussed his drug addiction and subsequent destruction late in his career, and it is heartbreaking to watch.  Aged beyond his years, these interviews show a frightened and gaunt-faced man discussing the bitter experiences he had in the penal and institutional asylum systems as a result of his addictions.  His eyes were wild, his teeth were rotten, and he could have walked through a crowd of his own fans without being recognized.  That is, if he hadn't still been the size of Andre the Giant, with hair down his back like the metal version of Marius the vampire.  (Anne Rice, fool! It's goth night). 

His bandmates and family say that he was finally clean and reasonably happy or hopeful when he died.  His cause of death was aortic aneurysm, a breach resulting from the weakening of the walls of the aorta - an ironic, fairly common malady among recently rehabilitated long-term addicts.  It's a fast death following a very long one, and it doesn't care if you're no longer using.

If I misrepresented him when talking about his openness about his discomfort with life, it's because I didn't mention that he normally expressed this with a black, rapier wit.  He slipped dark jokes into his conversation constantly, sometimes absurd one-liners, and sometimes subtle, razor-thin remarks that only revealed themselves a moment later. He seemed to enjoy expressing his frustrations and troubles comedically, and he was very, very funny - but then, his brand of bleak wit is just the kind I like, just the kind I am attuned to look for, one that we all possess in some way but that few are able to hone. Find the evidence yourself.

Plus he was hot.  Lame, but I'll allow it.


It's Cahnivore's video!  Peter working on a car to his own band's music in shitty late 80s/early 90s Brooklyn.  Honestly, could you love it more?

Still listen to this regularly.

Still love this, learned nothing, never will, feel ok about it.

Don't know what this was because it's been deleted.

Final thoughts:

I realize that it's a mistake to try to justify Peter for a now time, and a now audience.  I don't know what I'm trying to do, other than continue to love this band in a way that is untenable to public wokeness, although I feel their offenses are pretty minor considering their contemporaries.  I still think we can review and judge things from the time in which they were created, but were I a public figure, I probably couldn't say that safely without having to answer for everything he ever said or did in public or private, which I obviously cannot do and hence the don't @ me.

There are some problematic things about this band and about this person, but it's not nothing that he's been dead about ten years.  I see little point in tearing him apart using a current perspective, particularly when he was already publicly irrelevant at the time of his death, and (knowing little about the current fandom) when I think that mostly no one is actually interested in him anymore.

It's not my goal or job to make him acceptable in perpetuity.  However, I think the interviews I refer to and unfortunately never linked (but do your own damn research, I don't get paid for this), do shed light on a complicated and embattled personality who was struggling with the world he was born into, and who clearly was aware of the fact that the intensely misogynistic world in which he came up and made his living was not the correct way of the world.  And yes, as I mention in the original post, I am aware of the first album and I fucking hate it and always have, as apparently do all of the people responsible for it. 

(I wish I was still in contact with my Type O jewelry BFF, the only other person with whom I have shared in detail my obsession with this band and person.  Tell her to text me.)

Many of their early songs were disgusting, troubling, upsetting and unacceptable to women who listened.  I think that's made obvious but I say it again here.

I believe that, were Peter alive today, he would have addressed his first album, the only release that was problematic, and either disowned it or explained his changed views.  I think people who know him would say the same. 

Rodents: Get over them

I wrote this years ago and just found it in my drafts.  #mammaries #wrats

---

Some rats died in the ceiling at work.

As a teenhood fan of horror fiction, I've read many descriptions of the smell of rotting things, but nothing really prepares you.  I guess I should be thankful that, unlike others, I could not until then automatically identify the smell of rotting death.  When this problem occurred, I felt sure that something had gone wrong with the plumbing, but some sadder, more experienced souls insisted that what we were smelling was putrescence.

I passed our maintenance guy on his way in and he asked me how many bodies I thought there were.  "Um, a hundred?"*  The smell made my eyes weep and my sinuses cringe.  I developed a migraine.  But it was a Friday, and on the following Monday, we were hosting a new trustee who had been nice enough to give us five million dollars recently.  It seemed important that we not make her breathe rat reek upon her visit - we had to find the source.  It happened to be lying on the other side of a ceiling tile in someone's office.

Once the issue was resolved, our management company decided to place traps in the ceiling to evaluate the extent of the rat situation.  This offended me.  All rat traps are cruel, and the ones that aren't don't work.  We live in a world overrun with critters and creatures that we can't control, and we're still doing pretty ok in spite of it here in the first world.  Our building is 130 years old and shares walls with other centenarian structures that are now restaurants: if there are rats on this planet, they're gonna be AROUND.  Get over it, you know?  (as long as they don't die in the walls and burn your brain from the inside out with the green stench of their rotting bodies)

I didn't want them to put the traps in.  If I hear one snap, I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

I kept various rodents as pets as a kid, but they never lived long.  Hamsters always escaped and I grew tired of having to find them.  My mother was not a big disciplinarian, but she didn't mess around on this issue - I was put on OT until the creature was found.  And they were smartish - they'd find their bag of food in the night and nibble holes in it, then carry leftovers back to the rotating nests that they had carved into the carpeted corners of my closet.  Hamsters hate people, btw.  Every time I found them, they'd panic and run as though I had abused them, which I hadn't really.  I went through a phase where I liked to gently toss them in the air and catch them...that wasn't nice, but I stopped when I realized that.

So I started buying cute feeder rats from the commercial pet store and keeping them as pets.  They were only a few dollars and came in lots of unusual colors, soft beige and blue gray, or spotted like a cow.  They usually died of respiratory infections within a couple of weeks, sick from living in a big plastic tray with a thousand other rats during shipping.

I bought my last pet rat from a quirky pet store in north Phoenix around '95.  It's probably gone now.  They had huge angelfish painted on the exterior walls, and carried all manner of snakes, pac man frogs, and screaming cockatoos.  I asked for the rats and the owner shrugged and said they had some ugly feeder pups which they kept in a bin under a shelf of snake food.  That's where I found Mordrid.

He was kind of cute as a baby, but plain brown, and in his adulthood he looked very much like a common sewer rat.  A big one.  He had oily brown fur, googly black eyes, and his tail was thick and flesh-colored, flecked with coarse, translucent hairs.  Most people hated him at first, then warmed to his benign blandness.

The only thing Mordrid cared about in life was the chocolate orange from World Market.  A close second was chewing the buttons off of tv remotes.  He died quietly one weekend when I was out with my high school boyfriend, and it was then that I learned that my conservative, uptight mother had become attached to him after years of protest at my choice in pets.  She had sat vigil by his cage and watched his little chest rattle its last, worried that she should be doing something.

As much as I may not agree with certain people, I have to respect those who love animals and vulnerable creatures.  It doesn't mean you're a good person (Joe Arpaio), but it's usually a decent indicator.  My mother and I have fought all my life, but the way she cared for stray animals during my childhood made an indelible impression on me.  She always stopped for a loose dog running the streets, and I remember several occasions of her loading random dogs into our car with us on her morning commutes to work or my school.  Granted, we kept one who ended up attacking the neighbor kid, but that's another story.  Bad boy, Rufus.

I had a mouse in my house once.  On a nice night in Phoenix, I had left the screen locked and door open and then gone to bed without remembering to shut the inner door.  A few days later, I kept starting up in bed hearing a distinctive rustle rustle in the kitchen.  Every time I rushed out, nothing was there.  I deduced, in some way I can't remember, that it was a field mouse living under the refrigerator.  I bought several kinds of no-kill traps, which the mouse obviously never bothered to go near to matter how may Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels I put in there (I read they are irresistible to mice).  Eventually, Fatima killed it.  I woke up to the tussle, separated them, and then being ridiculous, "saved" the mouse in a container, thinking it could just like...live with us in an aquarium?  Because that's what it would want.  It looked ok, but died hours later from internal injuries.  I felt terrible, and gained a new, surprised respect for her catness.

Rats and mice are just borrowers trying to make their way in our stupid massive footprints.  They're a bit of a scourge, but before they started to die in our ceiling, we never knew about them at work.  I think I may make it a point to stick a pencil in all of the rat traps, if I can find them.

--
*There was one.