You only moved the headstones!

I was concerned about buying a new house because it's not my aesthetic.  I don't hate all new architecture, but I'm definitely not a fan of anything I can afford.  I rued this situation for months, literally troubled by the thought of living in a tidy modern house.  Nobody understands.  "Oh, you're mad that it's not...old and shitty?" unsympathetic friends ask.  Yes, bro.  Jesus christ.

I joked that this "setback" would inevitably result in my overcompensating by moving to Providence to live in a 250 year old house in a few years.  If Abigail Adams wasn't alive when it was built, then I don't want it! ...is what I'd tell my local realtor, who would then roll their eyes and mentally note this for their real estate tik tok about asshole clients.  

Surprisingly, I am amused by my new hood after all, because it reminds me of the suburban neighborhood from Edward Scissorhands.  Pathologically uniform, tidy and simple, with houses only distinguished from each other by colors or subtle variations in size.  The house colors here are kind of jazzy, as they are in the movie, and you can see six other neighbors' yards from over the fence from your own.  Starter house, as I still expect to die in a mouldering Queen Anne.

It also made me think of the neighborhood from Poltergeist, and I thought it was funny that this freshly scrubbed, manufactured bit of new Americana just reminded me of horror movies.  I hope I won't need Tangina.  I'm getting the impression that this association is not usual or expected when I share it, but this is one place where I have experience: If you didn't grow up in a psychotically-landscaped new build community, then you won't get it.

I have 1980s photos of my parents standing on the vast concrete foundation that eventually became our house in north Phoenix.  When I look at later photos, inevitably taken during family parties, I can't believe how perfectly manicured and deep green our lawn is, or how tidy the house in its peach color scheme.  How tall the piles of birthday presents, how round the grandmas' bouffants.  

The parallels between this house and our old new house of the 80s are something I hadn't realized before.  Having grown up in new construction is why I dislike it, and why I can feel comfortable in it.  I remember the feeling of living in a place where no one had lived before, of being the first to make the door dent in the wall, the first to make a mess, a permanent stain.  The first to infuse their petty human foibles and thoughts into the air, even though I was too young to appreciate a place with no "vibes" until we had created plenty of our own.  After an adulthood of living in the mustiest, oldest, least updated places I could find, filled with weird traces of peoples' lives, I had forgotten about that.  

Anyway, this little Cuesta Verde is in an area that's still half country, and driving around, I see old farmhouses partially shrouded in stands of trees, led to by dirt roads with tall grass between the tracks.  These were once the most remote homes in the county, unimaginably isolated even 5 years ago, and now they're slowly becoming surrounded on all sides.  I'm sad for it, sad to see wide open slopes of native grass as far as the eye can see and know they're going to turn into stupid houses, everyone building and then frantically buying to fill the rooms.  I'm surrounded by wild empty land on three sides and I love it.  It's that strange, hybrid hill country, dry and yellow in some areas and tangled and green with big, ancient oaks in others, viney thickets where the creeks are, full of fish and screaming birds.  

There are no birds in my fake neighborhood, because all the trees are short and spindly and held up by stakes.  I put my feeders up and looked at the horizon, squinting quizzically under my shielding hand, where are those dang bluejays anyway?  They're raising hell all over central Austin right now but there's not one here.  Also: not a squirrel.  Unbelievable. 

The dirt roads and rolling grass around here make it feel like no surprise that this particular swath of east-of-35 was once cut through by the Chisholm Trail, one of the big cattle trails of the late 19th century, that stretched from the Rio Grande to Kansas City.  Naturally, local podcasts say (ok the ghost podcast says) the trail is haunted by native and settler ghosts.  Guys out walking around looking like humans and then disappearing, the sound of invisible hooves, and other fodder from the elementary school book fair.



It's haunting, at least, to think that all this land stayed raw up until right about now.  There's a place not far away that's been converted to a living history community, full of 500 year old legacy oaks, old green trails first tramped by native feet and a pristine creek where those same bluejays like to wing around like crazy, because this preserve, continually occupied by different people for hundreds of years, is now in the middle of a neighborhood.  Some of the city's earliest cabins have been moved there to create a walking tour.  House after empty house, staged for the 1840s, 60s, 80s.  Disturbing places in their emptiness, depicting activity halted over 150 years ago.  I thought about the occupants of those places, before they were moved.  Looking out of rare glass windows over Congress, Red River, forever transferred to different views.

So I'm saying I probably will need Tangina when I accidentally dig up some artifact while installing my pocket prairie and set loose an ancient curse etc. 

Here I was trying to write about liking something new and I'm back on my bullshit.

Cranberries Song

I had a dream about my grandma.  

We know that dreams are just the brain working its own shit out in weird, surreal, misfiring ways.  Like the brain is throwing anything from paint to mustard at a canvas and then pinching its chin like, Is this art?  If that's not an accurate summary of dreams, it's because I haven't researched it since 2009 and/or I never fucking knew in the first place, but that's what I think.  I've often had "problem" dreams about things I'm dealing with at the time.  Sometimes they're resolved tidily and I wake up disappointed that the tidy resolution wasn't real, and other times, situations go entirely out of control and I wake relieved by reality.  Usually, though, my dreams feel relevant to nothing, just a series of images foreign and familiar, soon forgotten.  

But ever since my grandma died in 2003, I've dreamt she's alive.  It used to be all the time, but now it's once or twice a year.  Infrequent but reliable, and never gone even this many years later.  Some losses never dull, never stop being shocking.  She was 82 and I still feel like she was torn away unexpectedly. It happened so fast with her, in exactly the way we all want it to happen after a long life.  

In the dreams, I'll be at her house, in the now-times, and she'll appear in the picture with no fanfare.  I'll puzzle, wondering how the hell she's alive and if she has been this whole time and I just didn't know, and each time she blows me off like, "What, honey?" quizzical look while she does something else.  This isn't interesting, but the last one was.

She was swimming in a pool with some girlfriends, and they were all drinking tequila cocktails.  Laughing and splashing around, with their hair tied up, arcing their heads like cantering ponies, trying to keep their hair out of the water.  She got out of the pool, and I went to her and hugged her.  She was younger than I ever knew her in life, looked like late 50s, the age she was when I was born.  When I wrapped my arms around her, she felt firm and strong and her body was deeply warm the way people feel when they've been lying in the sun all day.  It was such a full body physical experience, to feel the warmth of her back and sides through my arms, and to hug her, both of us adult women, like friends.  Something I never experienced with her.  She was happy and social and busy.  She always was.  Such an outgoing woman, so different from me. 

I joked with her that I heard she'd been drinking and she laughed a little, looked off over the crowd, listening to something someone else was saying.  The house was full of people.  "I always liked a crowd," she used to say in life, child #9 out of 11.  I walked back to her kitchen sink where my mom was talking to my dead uncle and his wife and we resumed chatting about nothing.

Other peoples' dreams aren't interesting, so yanno, suck it up.

It's all a script, man

It's disorienting when you realize that you like the things you like not because they are inherently compatible with your soul (if you're under 30, read: vibe), but because they were fed to you or shown to you during your most impressionable years.

It's no coincidence that many people identify the music of their youth as the best of whatever that genre is.  Especially dumb people, who don't know/care that better things probably came earlier - but there I go!  Why do I think that?  When I was in late grade school, my mom's then-boyfriend tried a few times to draw me into arguments, saying that the music of his youth (he claimed the Beatles, but he was born in '62 or something so it's not like he was "there") was better than mine.  I liked the Beatles too, so I remember shrugging like, yeah, you're probably right, but more importantly, no one here cares what you think Joel.  

You get this from boomers all the time, the obsession with their youth and the way the world was then.  Just being 60 or older is a part time job in itself because you're obliged to wax poetic about your home and school and the country and the food and the music and cars and what the girls looked like and how tough the men were and how great the movies were.  Even if your home life sucked and you're not lying around sucking your thumb about how unwholesome everyone is now, there's definitely a major part of midcentury culture that you're unhealthily obsessed with.  If you're over 60.

And here's the problem: US, TOO.  

I finally, finally realized that the only reason I think that time was such a big deal, other than being a remarkably prosperous time in US history (which boomers can stop taking credit for because you don't influence the economy when you're fucking five, Jerry) is because all the boomers were in maximum creative mode when I was a kid.  All of these nostalgic period movies from the 80s and 90s, anything from Stand by Me to My Girl reinforced to me over and over that those days were the golden hour of the United States and life in general.  

This is an unfair thing to do to kids, because by implying that there was a time that was better, you begin to take away THEIR ability to be annoying in the future by moaning about their own childhoods.  And, ironically, so much of the quirky uniqueness that I recall from the early 90s of my childhood is because it was retro.  Pee Wee's Playhouse, the B52s (yes I realize they were cool in the 70s but I'm talking Love Shack on MTV 65 times per weekend), the clothes, the stylization was all some kind of distorted day-glo homage to the 50s and 60s.  Edward Scissorhands, Hairspray, even mainstream weird was all over it.  My fashion inspiration in middle school was Hayley Mills in the Parent Trap.  Do you see why it's unkind to make children live in the daydreams of middle aged people?  Do you realize that none of the other kids thought that look was cool?

Realizing that many of my aesthetic preferences and interests were only due to my environment as a child was interesting.  What would I have liked if I had grown up somewhere else?  Truly, who even am I?  Is this the root of my incompatibility with mainstream culture?  Because I didn't just get it from my dad bitching about what he paid for his first house or how actresses don't look anything like they used to, I was also raised by old women.  Multiple old women.  So not only am I part Ron Howard, I'm part Nana.

How DARE they do this to me.

In which I rebel:

Once, I dated someone briefly who, upon coming to my house, arrived at the slow realization that everything was "old".  "The furniture," he said.  "The pictures."  He shrugged awkwardly and pointed.  "Even the blanket on your bed! It's weird!"  I looked around and was like, "Literally what are you talking about/what is wrong with you."  At the time, I was still so entangled in my own tastes that I felt like the only reason other people didn't have the sort of belongings I did was because they just had no style or ability to source things.  Because who wouldn't have a Joan Crawford Hollywood Regency bedroom if they could?  Like what's your preference, Sears?  TJ Maxx?  Fucking dead souls, bro.  You want a blanket that's made of plastic and an art piece over the bed that looks like it was mass produced for hotels?  Cheap hotels?  If that's what people want, then their very lives are their punishment and I don't need to say a word.  That was my view then, anyway.

But realizing that so many of my tastes were prescribed to me has punctured the spell a bit.  Or my tastes have changed, at least such that I'm no longer obsessive about them.  I no longer want everything in my house to be from the same time period.  I don't want my living room to look like a display in an antique store.  Perhaps my tastes are adjusting to what they would have been organically.  That doesn't mean I want contemporary stuff, which is still just garbage. My interests are in the process of reorienting, all just because I realized that a bunch of other people had too much hand in forging my tastes.  I say that, then spend 30 minutes browsing the Instagram entitled "Vintage Wilton Cakes".  And I still unironically listen to the Hollies and Chad & Jeremy, so I guess I'm still a weird old boomer and fine with that.  I say boomer because I'm mad when my friends don't agree.

I used to be so interested in 19th century American Victoriana that I was convinced that I had lived a past life then.  While I thought midcentury America was a template to aspire to (and I think we can still agree that the objet are better and more attractive and made to last), I felt a deep longing when it came to thinking about the prior century.  I was fascinated, truly ga-ga about 19th century homes and clothes and things and cemeteries.  What the fuck was that about?  I still feel that way.  There was a lot of history in my house growing up, artifacts, photos, talk.  It was shared with me in an almost reverential way, but is that enough to make a 12 year old sit around drawing Gibson girls all night and collect hundred year old toys and tchotchkes?  I still have so much of that stuff and I don't know what to do with it, but I have to keep it.  Old black walnut hand mirrors and tea sets and art and portraits and clothes.  Much of this was given to me, but still.  Like talk about Nana.  I need a black scarf for my head so I can finally achieve my dream of dressing like a 75 year old rural Italian peasant.  Think widow, but make it Sofia Loren.  

I have a deep cynicism about things that are supposed to be cool, and also now about things I used to think were cool, so that I'm essentially Rob from High Fidelity now.  Brooding and bitchy but still into it.  The only things I enjoy are things that people must, ironically, be uncynical about.  Selena, Lil Nas X, British doom metal written by dads about medieval agricultural superstition.  If it's not any of that, then get it away from me.  Like, the fuck away.  Because extremes forever.

Yeah, but what are we actually doing here?

Over time, my desire to record my observations has waxed and waned.  I've come to a point where I genuinely wonder what the point is, and I have an increasing sense that exposing my opinions is actually somewhat hazardous.  The feverish appetite for bad faith takes is epidemic in our culture, and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.  It's also just a sad fact that unfamiliar people receive hostile opinions (you know, good-naturedly hostile opinions) in ways that are worse than one would typically imagine.  In fact, the number of people who appreciate good-natured hostility are almost definitely lower than I thought they were earlier in life.  Is everyone just inappropriately sincere, "goofy" and possessed of an unnuanced and uncreative sense of humor?  Pretty much!  

Still, writing things out is how I like to process information, and it's my preferred method of communication.  Verbal communication is something I only like to do with people inside my world, at which point the situation usually inverts and the higher quality is found in the verbal while the written gets reduced to familiar shorthand.  I don't like talking to people I don't know well or trust, and that is probably apparent from my silence, halting sentences or unfortunate word choices.  I'd rather avoid it, for everyone's benefit.  The only bad part is that written things last for a long time.  Long after you've changed.

There are lots of places this exploration can go: the social contagion of bad faith "gotcha" interactions, the mistrust between extroverts and introverts, the intentional concealment of one's true personality from certain types of people, and the originating causes for that.  

The bad faith thing is such a serious problem, and it needs to be argued like a legal case (apparently).  I can't tell you how many people pooh-pooh the existence of this, like it's only being perpetuated by a few bad actors.  That's how it spreads, my friend.  Even my closest ideological allies take this view right now, creating recurrent arguments between us.  The description of this phenomenon requires the compilation of thousands of literal, real-life examples that happen every year, and that is just not my job.  Even though I have all the capacity for such a painful passion project, the brain-atrophying effects of (I guess) social media and our anti-intellectual culture, plus the unending quantity of information to process, have made me apathetic and lazy when it comes to info gathering.  Plus, better people are already on the job.  A smart friend with mutual interests recently suggested we start a podcast together, and I stopped him immediately: "Do you realize the amount of research and vetting we'd have to do about every single thing we said?"  When you're creating an artifact like that, you can't just bullshit, especially if you're talking about something like the topics we were discussing, which are all enmeshed with culture and history.  I can't just talk about things the way I remember them, the way we do for fun in person.  "Oh, shit, that's true..." he said.  Hasn't come up again.  Unfortunate, but that's the way it's gotta be.  I wouldn't have said that five or ten years ago, but I also would have been more willing to wing facts and manipulate information to make my points, and after seeing what happens when journalists do that, I just can't.  I'm not a journalist and no one is informing their choices by what I say, but the disingenuous ones have ruined everything for everyone.  Like I said: bad faith.  I can't stand myself if I misrepresent facts even if all we're talking about is Ann Richards' favorite restaurant.  Or maybe that is something I could talk about...

The mistrust between introverts/extroverts is a flawed conversation too, because these descriptions are now being used with such authority, like either group is a known quantity with all of the same characteristics.  They're not, but you know what I mean when I describe that poor communication.  Everyone does, on both sides of the coin.  I've experienced it many times in my life, and I usually feel totally disconnected from the unfolding situation, watching like an observer.  Before I learned to pantomime a kind of breezy good-naturedness in unknown situations, like a psychopath, my demeanor was usually interpreted as a rude attempt at superiority.  This shocked me, shocked me, because it happened when I was a kid, a teen at my first job even, and often it was grown adults who interpreted my behavior that way.  That says more about them than anything, because I was just shy and awkward and they were seeing all of their prior negative experiences with other people in our innocuous exchanges.  And although I am much more comfortable with people now, and the fake sophisticated good-natured presentation is often even sincere, I am so tired of this type of conflict now.  For a long time, I've seen it as something that can't be helped.  If I care, I'll try to fix it if I've been misinterpreted, but I usually just leave it.

There are so many reasons why communicating thoughts and opinions is risky.  I've come to accept and believe that I'll be misunderstood at least as much as I'm understood, and that is something that matters less and less to me with each year.  The only part of that dynamic that I'm interested in is how differently the same person can interpret you before they know you, and after they know you.  In my experience, I've been treated with so much suspicion followed with overwhelming enthusiasm after someone has accepted my personality that I've stopped overthinking it all.  If it takes, it does, and if it doesn't, who can care?  There's a risk inherent in all interactions that will always exist.  Let it go is the mantra of life. 

The real challenge is letting go with people who are inextricably in your life, like family.  I used to require that my extended family didn't misinterpret or judge me, because they actually are superior assholes, and predisposed to seeing other people in remarkably uncharitable ways.  This goes for the sweetest aunt all the way down to the drug addict cousin.  Once upon a time, I couldn't have that - couldn't have it recorded in anyone's social family memory that I wasn't as smart or formidable as they were.  Of course, now that I've experienced them all on the flattened playing field of adulthood, I'm no longer worried about it.  As time passes and dynamics change, I'm finding myself transferred to a more authoritative role, which feels weird yet appropriate.  I see the old family bosses defer decisions to me, even the scariest non-parental members, and I'm finally old enough to accept that.  It is the way of time.  Plus I do know more.

And in work situations, I've learned to handle this scenario down when it comes to direct reports who have to deal with me whether they want to or not.  I've tried to make those interactions as transparent and pleasurable as they can be, knowing that the true opinions of people subject to my decisions are likely to be forever unknown to me.  Managing other people is the hardest part of any job and despite my initial  protestations, I've found myself to be surprisingly up to the task.  The best thing you can do in that role is to allow people to manage up, and influence you by creating a, dare I say it, safe space for them to be honest with you.  "Let me be frank." "No, I want to be Frank."  Terrible 90s goth joke.  

One of the few ways I've been able to remain on good terms with people in my life who have radically differing views is by identifying the things we agree on.  It's so simple, but feels like a revelation every time it happens.  Usually those things are totally apolitical, which is fine, but it's felt something like a cop out on my part.  It's the only option, though.  And I can feel closer to those people than I do with the ideologically-aligned who happen to live their lives in ways that I don't understand.  I'm capable of resenting those people in ways I never could a similar person with wildly different views.  What did Chaucer say?

Any opportunity to share Rowland.

Ultimately, I'd prefer to create a well resourced and fenced enough status for myself in which the honest transmission of hot takes and opinions is safe, no matter how evolving or formative (antisocial) those views are.  We're not there yet, though, and in the meantime, I'll keep deciding if the sharing of any opinions continues to be valuable.  It's going to be a while before that feels fruitful again.  I feel like I'm perceiving this society's next storm before/as it hits, and as much as I'd hate to be right, I think there's a good chance of it. 

The internet is weird

It keeps you linked to people who would naturally pass off and be forgotten with time, or mostly.  But now, you remain eternally acquainted whether you want to or not, and you continue to be aware of intimate aspects of their lives despite not really being friends.  

I still talk to my tweenhood best friend, someone I never would have talked to again after our "final" adult falling out.  Yet there she is.  It's impossible to relate to her now, and I can tell she feels the same way, but we still kind of try.  

We became friends in middle school, which lasted through high school and the first few years after.  As kids, we were impossibly close, having created a siblinglike relationship in which we would talk for hours, paint each others' nails and go to the mall incessantly.  That may sound basic, but we were goth so it's fine.  She was outgoing and I was introverted and we jealously disliked each others' friends once we started going to separate high schools.  Ending our summer that year and starting high school in different places felt like a big loss, or a breakup.  We were both so trepidatious of what was to come.

Her mom was a Texan southern belle, all big hair and short skirts, tottering around in tall heels and tons of makeup.  She was the opposite of my frazzled workaday mom, who had no capacity for frippery or meaningless dates with spray-tanned men.  An intensely self-centered person, Jessica's mom would drive us around if it suited her, and I remember she almost got into a car accident once because she kept raising the backs of her hands up from the steering wheel to look at her rings, admiring how well they went with her long red nails.  Her mom could never understand why (at 13), we two girls would only hang out with each other and never with boys.  We used to ride together in the back seat of her Honda Civic when she drove us to the mall, and one day she pulled into a spot and craned around to us asking, out of the blue, "Are y'all gay?"  Except it sounded like, "Are Y'ALL GAY!!!!?"  Drawl in full effect.  Jessica and I looked at each other and back at her and at each other again.  "No?!?" we cried in unison.  (not that it's a bad thing!)

Jessica and I went on to live together after high school.  My dad had already met his current witch friend, and upon moving in with her, allowed me to take over his cute little ranch style on 10th Ave with all of the furniture intact, charging only the cost of utilities.  I moved Jessica in, and our relationship instantly changed.  She was never able to make "rent," which was probably like $200 each, and was forever pissing me off by bringing home random animals and men, never caring that I had to answer to my dad about the state of the house because he was liable to drive by or pop in at any time.  He wasn't much of a jerk about it, but needless to say he didn't like that she brought everything from ferrets to the guy who worked at the gas station home, and those are just the ones he found out about.  Eventually we were robbed, but the burglar somehow seemed to know to beeline to Jessica's room and steal her not insignificant weed stash.  I kicked her out soon after, and she's ready to litigate that to this day.  We don't talk about it.

I was a pretty straitlaced kid back then, and it was only during those days with Jessica that I first tried smoking weed.  It broke my brain and I used to sit in my bedroom, swearing I could hear people talking and radios playing when the house was quiet and empty.  My dad thought (thinks) the house is haunted and used to tell me, "Don't use substances here! It makes you vulnerable to spirits!"

Christ.  But maybe it did.  After I kicked Jessica out, I used to lay in bed alone in the house at night, freaking out about the 50 year old windows that trembled in the wind and how easy it would be for someone to get into the house.  I had nightmares all the time and used to wake up at 2 AM, scared out of my mind after fighting with ghosts and demons in my dreams, and drive across town to my boyfriend's house to get away.  I'd back out of the driveway consciously refusing to look ahead, frightened that I'd see a gaunt face watching me from between the blinds at the big bay window.  I told that story to my dad years later and he said, "And you're still skeptical? Have you ever acted like that in any other place where you've lived?"  Well, no.  I can remember every supernatural nightmare I've had since then on one hand.  

We still regret that he sold the house, both he and I, not least because it's probably worth three times what it sold for in 2004.  The one thing he and I can agree upon without reservation is that we both still think about, and dream about that house on a regular basis 15 years hence.

Speaking of never learning, Jessica and I moved in together about 6 years after I kicked her out of our house on 10th ave.  This time we were in our mid 20s, living in a falling-down bungalow in the Maple-Ash neighborhood of Tempe.  What a strange little house that was, painted and repainted, rented to broke kids for decades, ages, eternity.  The front porch would have fallen down if you bumped into it.  I just looked at it on Google street view and it's still the same.  It looks like cold weather to me, because we only lived there in winter.  Looks like the house is still a kid-shithole with a dresser on the front porch.  I thought about driving by it when I passed through Tempe this year for what felt like the first time in decades and certainly the first time in seven years, University looking somehow the same and somehow impossibly different, but decided against it.  What's to see.  So many weird memories in that square mile area.  What a fucking weird place and city and state.

But back then, I was forced into the role of motherly scold, chastising Jessica for the sink full of food-encrusted dishes or when I would wake up in the middle of the night to find strange men in our living room.  Always someone different, always someone sketchy as hell.  I would keep my cat in my room and lived in that tiny space almost exclusively after a while, to avoid.  Also because she was known to leave the door open when she left for work.  I may be persnickety about how I want my house to be, but that was a literal issue that left me wondering if she was trying to be awful.  She still couldn't pay rent and we had to break our lease when she lost her job.  I remembered all of this recently when I broke into an old Livejournal I kept during that period, in which I bitched about her incessantly, and aired our grievances to my strange group of internet and real friends.  

Here's a sample.  Shittiness preserved for honesty,  Regrets include never capitalizing, which is sort of hard to understand now.  I can't believe how many friends I used to share this kind of private stuff with.  Anyway, from Feb 6, 2009:

MY ROOMMATE.  LOST HER JOB.

i won't go into the 250 ways she has utterly fucked me just since november.  i'm all talked out on this subject.  i am both shocked and unsurprised by this, though, as i have been awaiting her latest shenanigan more and more each day.  it's been almost two weeks since the last.  that would be a record amount of quiet time from her, but clearly she was just saving it up for something really spectacular.

she has no plan.  she has no savings.  she has no severance package.  she is in debt.  she has not paid me for the last 2-3 various bills.  i have very little cushion to support "us" (UGH THERE IS NO US) against this due to having covered 70% of her bills for 2.5 months.  it's a strange place to be in, as i both do this without hesitation owing to the fact that all utilities are open on my credit, and without excessive anger or freakouts, both because i expect it and because i now have anxiety anyway and won't stop once i let myself start.  so i feel quite like a doormat.  a doormat who has to cover herself by supporting the dirtbaggiest, most irresponsible fool ever.  

so i'm hiring ken volk to break my lease, and i am counting the moments until i can eject this malignancy from my life forever.  i get frantic emails from her about how she wished she could tell me face to face, at which i scoff, and how she "loves" me and so on and so forth.  what is with this shifty stupid obsession with DIRECT COMMUNIQUE.  how direct is it that i get a phone call at work 48 hours after an event has gone down informing me that there is SRS BUSINESS to conduct and don't get mad, but that she does not want to discuss it until we are together in approximately six hours.  i don't accept this.  that forewarning.  absurd!  additionally, i am not concerned with someone's approach, tone or buildup.  i'm concerned with the facts.   "i wish i could have told you in person," she says.  biiiiiiitch i would conduct all of our interactions via txt msg if only i could.  

so anyway.  it's all very problematic, but ridding my life of her in a permanent manner in a much shorter amount of time than i was expecting (march 1!) is so relieving that i almost don't mind at all.

Regarding the writing, there are so many early tells in there that I'd never do now.  The words "shenanigan" and "dirtbag" were heavily in my rotation back then.  There are a lot of really specific numbers in here, too.  Unnecessary.  

And yikes! in general.  But she was actively ruining my life at the time, and this isn't shit when it comes to a bad review from me.  I feel for that girl back then, and I don't mean myself, I mean Jessica.  She was so chaotic!  She was used to it, but I wasn't.  And while she was bitchy and defiant as hell then, I see now that she was in a strange pattern of disorder that doesn't reflect her true character, which does seem to crave stability.  She was just too damned wild, and raised without a real center.  I was definitely not able to be sympathetic about it then and I still wouldn't be if she were my roommate today, but I still feel kind of bad.  Sorry, bro.  We kind of hated each other for a while.  If only our now-selves could send money back to our younger selves, for security when there was none.  I wish I could go back to those days and TCB.

Ah youth.  RIP, kidness ours.  

This song was never a favorite but I listened to it incessantly then.  I much prefer his mom, Molly Drake.  

Rude Opinions about Entire Decades

I used to hate the 70s.  Just the whole decade.  Everything about it.  The clothes, the music, something about its being a big time for my parents kind of turned me off.  I particularly thought the way men looked in the 70s was kind of vulgar.  

I assume a lot of these opinions came out of my childhood habit of flipping through my mom's photo albums.  There were quite a few of them, each with a different floral theme printed on a faux leather cover with thick interior pages, already yellowed, definitely not acid-free, each encased in a loud, crackling plastic cover.  

Each photo was inevitably either washed out or blurry, with weird textures and rounded corners.  They showed pale blue, almost white Arizona skies punctured by ranch style homes backing up to craggy sparse mountains.  I saw so many familiar faces living in a world where I didn't exist, my gangly-legged mom with long hair, surprisingly handsome uncle in a shearling jacket, and grandma with her Vidal pixie cut and a miniskirt, all captured in shots with dogs I didn't know, cars I didn't know, entire houses I didn't know yet where my whole family lived.  I think I felt left out.  My mom's small family is such a unit now, particularly the grandma-mom-me trine that it felt shocking to see a history they shared that didn't include me.  

I saw photos of my mom's frumpy friends as 18 year olds, lying by water in Mexico in a beach towel tangle of long brown legs and sunbleached hair.  I recognized Teri, Sally and Janeane because I played with their kids, and they sure didn't look like that anymore.  Furthermore, all of my mom's old boyfriends looked like Greg Allman.  I remember feeling suspicious, stabbing my finger at a picture of some shirtless bearded blonde guy, leaning on a car and smoking with my giggling mom next to him, "Who is this?"  "No one you know," she said.  I remember meeting that guy in person years later, shortly before he died.  I watched my mom interact with him, easy familiarity mixed with awkward change, and the way she still called him Kimmer (Kim) while he and my uncle helped us install her dishwasher.  Somehow the same, somehow so old.

A lot of my mom's old friends really clung to their 70s vibes for years, even to the present.  They kept their shaggy hair when it wasn't ok, and their clothes, though contemporary (I assume) still somehow reflected their high school days.  I didn't like them as a kid, particularly the in-laws from my uncle's common law marriage to my mom's best school friend.  I realize now that that was probably at least partly from my dad's shit talking them, calling them "Slopehead" trash, his nickname for anyone from Sunnyslope.  Yanno, like my mom was.  I didn't realize til years later how snide and snooty my dad was about her friends.  In childhood, they had inhabited different social classes, and I didn't realize how much my dad had (likely unconsciously) clung to his.

My aunt-in-law's brother had some decades-long "joke" with my mom about how he was her husband, though they'd never really dated.  He was a sleazy guy with a smoky jackal laugh who'd stand around in the street in front of his mother's house on holidays, drinking beer and getting in fights with passing cars, and I remember rolling my eyes to the point of damage any time he crowded my mom to laugh about their HILARIOUS old joke.  I saw him a few years ago at my cousin's Christmas party and walked off in the middle of a conversation after about two minutes, leaving my mom to deal with him.  "Thanks," she said later. 

"He's your husband."  

This song always felt emblematic of the old days that I felt skeptical of.  I found it cheesy, embarrassing to even hear.  I couldn't stand it.  Many years later, while watching the British show Back in Time for Dinner, I heard a snippet of it and suddenly it felt familiar, charming and very sentimental.  I've liked it ever since in one of the more remarkable about-faces of my life, but it always somehow reminds me of those old times, belonging to others.  I still love Todd Rundgren.

After that, the photo albums just transitioned to the same pictures over and over, me naked in a bathtub or lying walleyed in a crib.  My dad grinning and flexing a giant bicep in front of a Winnie the Pooh wall hanging while I dangled headfirst from the other arm.  

It's funny to me now how much I disliked all of my mom's friends.  Heidi, my mom's post-Slope best friend, lived in Phoenix back then, and she seemed to clock my attitude before I was old enough to even show it.  She'd stalk around her pool in a bikini and a deep brown tan, her perfect blonde hair gleaming with sun-in, and made me learn to dive at 7 or 8, telling me it was a life skill.  It was for her, a trust fund kid whose goals included beaches and suntans and dogs and little else.  I didn't want to dive and she'd call me out each time I hesitated, asking if I was a chicken or what, forcing me to line up beside her while my mom would shrug with a smile from a pool towel and look away when I glanced to her for support.  Heidi would show me where to put my feet and how to put my arms up and arch my body forward before awkwardly splashing into the water following her perfectly smooth dives.  I didn't realize til years later what a dream queen she was, and is - beautiful, strong, opinionated, a little scary.  Her husband still says the way to get good at things like tennis is to "play up," which means play against Heidi.  Bougie dynamics.

In the following years, after they moved, I would hear Heidi say, "Oh tell her to get out of here," through the receiver when I'd go tugging on my mom's arm while they were on the phone, whining or asking for something.  Heidi has no kids and no chill for them, and I learned to be quiet and act right around her on our visits to California because her adult-style ribbing shocked me, and I tried to stay off her radar.  Now she's my other mother and we spend all of our holidays together in Texas.  Heidi's the bouncing baby girl from Austria.

Conversely, and for no rational reason, I always liked my dad's friends, a motley group of former 70s coolguys who transformed into dads in white sneakers, but each of whom retained some legacy chopper or truck from or similar to the ones they had in their younger days.  These old guys would inevitably roll some bikes out to their driveways while friends were over, so that they could stand around and talk interminably while I played in the yard or eventually grew tired and fell asleep somewhere.  But, they didn't seem committed to reliving the past or particularly sentimental about it, and most of them simply embraced their new normcore lives instead of clinging to past selves.  Perhaps they didn't feel that they had peaked in high school, unlike my mom's lame fake husband, who definitely did.  So anyway.

Is astrology real?

No, it's not.

As much as I had wanted, at a younger age, for hippy dippy alternative "sciences" to have any bearing on my life, redefining ideas that I thought were set in stone against my will, I think it's just bullshit.  I bristle every time a certain friend sends me a link to a horoscope, which is often, but I haven't had the heart to say anything.  I think people only turn to this shit when they're unhappy, so snootily informing her that her five minute distraction is stupid is more than I'm willing to do.

Years ago, when I was feeling a revitalized wish to become engaged with intangibles of meaning, I considered trying to force myself to believe in some kind of candle-burning secret-living lifestyle that allows one to assume that raising the aesthetic values of your home and surrounding yourself with the right stones will somehow change your fortunes.  I have never really been able to believe in anything after childhood (and I only believed in scary stuff then, like things following me up dark stairs or hiding under my bed or hanging outside of my windows at night).  There were a few years in which I basically only read ghost story anthologies to the point that I'm surprised I don't believe in more nonsense now.  

In high school, I went through a time where I would burn all the candles and incense, accidentally melting scented wax into hard mounds in the carpet.  I would read all the Llewellyn books and wonder about all the intangible things, and still my life was the same as it would have been otherwise, except it was infused with a temporary quasi-belief that made it all seem more meaningful and malleable.  Maybe that is the great benefit of mysticism - the sense of potential that it lends, because maybe. 

I guess that was fine for a while.  I didn't waste too much time on it because it all happened during that brief interval that occurred upon first feeling grownish, but before having a job or a car or dating.  Those things do much to banish the spirit world.

Except.

One high school Halloween night during that in-between age, this fantasy realm was expanded to include Ouija boards.

Our friend had brought the board on a teenaged walkabout, one of those nights when we all left our homes during sanctioned hours that crossed over into darkness, and played with the board in a local neighborhood park.  Nothing happened, but when the group dispersed, the board was shoved into my backpack instead of going home with the friend who owned it. 

The next weekend, my friend, the ringleader of our limited boundary-pushing, found the board relegated to a lonely corner of my bedroom, and asked for a game.  We played, nothing happened.  We played another time, something happened.  I, faithful to the game, laid my fingers lightly (you might say as a feather) on the planchette.  It began to surge around the board, telling stories and calling each of us out, saying I was the quiet one, ringleader Megan was the sexy one, friend Becky was the slutty one.  We laughed and put it aside.  I was sure Megan had controlled the dialogue because she controlled everything in our micro society.

Eventually, as our friendship solidified, Megan came to my house more and more after school, and we would play with the board to kill time before she had to go home.  It always turned into two-sided exchanges between the spirit and Megan, and I would keep my fingers on the planchette only out of eye-rolling hospitality.  One could never play with the board alone.  I began to feel sure that Megan was either intentionally creating the conversations by consciously or subconsciously moving the planchette.  All of the conversations were slanted to suit her ego, I noticed, as were most of her interactions in life. 

One day, Megan crawled out of my second-floor bedroom window to sit on the roof and smoke.  We had been playing with the board and it had gotten tedious with lots of Q&A by the time she decided to take a break.  I stared at the wall for a few minutes, bored, and once I noticed she was lighting a second cigarette, I pulled the board closer and jokingly put my fingers on the planchette, saying, "We're going to talk about you, Megan..."  The planchette moved lazily and slowly and didn't respond to my questions.  Suddenly, it jerked around a little.  It was 4 pm, a bright and sunshiney after-school afternoon, so I didn't feel scared, until the planchette suddenly started spelling words.  "C-A-R-I-S-C-O-M-I-N-G"  Cariscoming?  What the hell did that mean?  I was repeating the letters aloud when a knock on my bedroom door made me jump a foot.  I dashed the board under my bed, slammed the window shut on Megan and opened the door.  It was my mom, home early.  

Need I say it?  My mom's name is Kari.  CARISCOMING, Kari's coming.  Using the board was strictly banned in our house, and I had already been firmly instructed to get rid of it.  Not only that, she wouldn't exactly have been pleased by 15 year-old bad girl Megan smoking on our roof.  She didn't want her on the roof, in the house, or in my life.  Megan, what a biography that could be.  The point being that warning me of my mother's ascent up the stairs was quite relevant to my situation at the time.  I could have been grounded, for god's sake.  

I had felt no "presence," no hairs sticking up, no tingling, no fear, and yet this thing had apparently actually happened.  How did it know my mom's name, but not the correct spelling?  Why wouldn't it say "mom's coming" if it was my own unintended doing?  I don't call her Kari, never have, even at the height of my mutinous disrespectful teens.  I call her "Ma!" like a civilized daughter, like Dorothy Zbornak.

So all I'm saying is it's complicated. I don't believe, but that actually happened.  

Much as I'm sure I'd sleep better if otherwise, I don't believe in anything.  Obviously not organized religion, but tales of the supernatural just annoy me.  The people who trade in this interest are too eager, they just look for evidence, and of course find it everywhere.  I only like to hear creep stories from people who hate telling them.  Obviously, then, I can't get enough. I am a human being.

I never understood religion right.  It was never fully installed, just as a simple oversight by my parents.  Had they stopped to think about it, had they not felt so busy, I'm sure they would have indoctrinated me as is intended in America.  My mom has always passively believed, because she did get the full installation in childhood.  She wore a little lace thing on her head at church and got confirmed.  Saints and symbols were all over my grandma's houses, but they didn't mean anything to me.  I never felt watched by "the lord".  I only thought about god when I was pissed off, when I didn't get my way, when I was like, "And where were you!"  It was a failed transactional relationship while it lasted.  

One of the shocking "tastes of life" that my dad told me about his parents was that when my grandma would take the kids and travel back home to see her family, her husband would play.  He would take all of the saint statues that were ubiquitous around the house and put them in drawers when he entertained girls in the family home.  Why?  Why bother moving them?  Was he worried the girls were Catholic?  Surely he wasn't trying to fool them into thinking that staid family home with the playhouse out back was a bachelor pad.  Finding one of her Catholic figurines in a bedroom drawer was a terrible tell to my poor g-ma that her man had been up to shit while she was away.  How gross for her.  How unmatched they were.  What a world in which someone wasn't nice to my grandma.

I was taken to church by old women on occasion, but it was early enough in life that the visit was a success if I just kept quiet.  My grandma brought paper and an 8-box of Crayolas on those occasions and set them down on the pew.  My cousins and I would kneel on the tile floor at St. Francis and use the pew seats as desks.  After that, donuts outside.  I remember bonding with an ex once when I told him the only thing I liked about church was the donuts.  He's dead now.  Nice guy.

Years later, while visiting the same grandma's house, my best cousin and I would wander over to the yard at St. Francis and remember.  It was just a couple of neighborhood streets away.  A couple of times, we went inside (remember when I was talking about those "before times" when you're big enough and have no occupations, but all the opinions?).  One afternoon, I noticed the pen sitting on the guest book in the anteroom of the church.  It was a cheap Bic, but taped to it was a tiny printout of the words, in Old English font, "Thou Shalt Not Steal".  I put it in my pocket immediately and my cousin and I cackled wickedly about it as though we had performed a heist.  After that, we went and lay down in the pews, staring up at the blue and rainbow stained glass ceiling of the church, inlaid like stars.  We were innocent and just kids, and we still enjoyed the beauty of the sight even though we were technically there as trolls.  It is a nice place to hang out, a baroque yet vaguely Spanish 1950s Catholic dream palace.  We were run off the premises soon after.

I kept the pen for years, guarded it carefully, and I still lost it.  St. Francis must have returned personally with his staff and his lamb and taken it back.

The only other shit I'll cop to, supernaturally, is this crazy house.  Now that I'm so far removed, I don't believe as much as I used to.  But I remember how that felt, and, as my dad pointed out to me once, that I've never been afraid like that in any other place.  I know this is blowing holes in my claim as a skeptic, but you can walk and chew gum at the same time.  

DNA & Me

 I know DNA tests are so bougie.  I struggle between "this matters less now than ever before" and honest, self-centered curiosity.  And, as I'm finding, it's even more interesting to see how inaccurate the oral histories and assumptions based on little more than a surname are in the face of data.

That's the real story here.  People are constantly making reference to their ethnic heritage like they have any idea what it is, and like it has bearing on their lives.  "I'm Italian, so I yell, you know?!"  I guess?  You're probably adopted, you don't know.  It's inevitable that people want to categorize and box themselves, but I'm so interested in cases where whatever you thought you were is not what you are.

My results have changed several times over the last few years since I first took the test.  The percentages have fluctuated within the same general part of earth, but it's been a dramatic shift if you're operating from within my dad's and my conversations.  Like I said, he first was thrilled to be a viking because it totally fulfilled some David Mann painting* in his mind, but he never even was, I was.  That was before his DNA came in, and I took for granted that his would be very similar to mine because I went to public school in Arizona.  Yes, I was like 34 when I finally learned how DNA works - I was able to admit that because I was a powerful viking - But he went to a Jesuit school and still didn't know, so that's just on American society, not to mention Catholicism.

Essentially (should you require the update as well), you can envision what you inherit from your parents as a grab bag of prior generational genes, a mix that changes with each fertilization (gross), so you're not likely to entirely match anyone in your family short of an identical twin.  You won't inherit everything that your parents did, and you may even manifest things from prior generations that they don't have.  

So when my dad got his results back, he was basically mostly British and Irish, with some random smaller percentages of generalized Western Europe.  But really, he was largely British, something he was firmly unimpressed by.  I tried to trick him by telling him (the truth) that very few people, certainly people living outside the UK, have that high a percentage.  It's true, I read it online.

The next time they pushed out an update, my Northperson percentages declined significantly while my Irish percentage shot up to the majority of my heritage.  Woops, I'm actually not a strong Viking woman, or not much.  My dad stayed steadfastly British, as they do.  

All the other stuff is not as expected.  Obviously my dad expected to be German as hell because of his name, and because his grandparents spoke German at home, as their parents came from Wurttemberg, an obscure locale by the Black Forest, so at least we're from a cool part of the Germanic Empire.  I expected to be Italian, because my great-grandmother and all of her prior folks were Italian and came from there.  Since she was a major person in my life, I figured her heritage was mine too.  Not so much.  The only one who was ever accurate in her assessments was dad's mom, who said she was Irish AF and dang it, that's largely what the rest of us showed too.  She would like that.  Love it really.  She was never smug, but when she was, she was.

All this to say that the results changed again this year, around the same time that I sent in for 23&Me.  The changes were slight, but my Scot went up.  All I know is nearly 40% Scottish should 100% warrant some dual citizenship.  And, I'm less than 2% Neanderthal.  So use that as you will.  

And to entirely have buried the lead, the site has also confirmed what I already knew about a certain embattled half sibling relationship I have.  I texted her, saying, "We don't have to go on Jerry Springer anymore..." which, god bless her, she loved.  Even though she's a breeder PTA mom, she's still edgier and cooler than I ever was in my entire life.  

I'd normally say that at the end of the day, this is all just trivia, except for that last bit.  This latter detail was no revelation to me, only confirmation. That's why 23&Me makes you check several boxes acknowledging that the data that they will reveal to you may not be what you expect to see, and it sure as hell isn't their fault.

Pretty fascinating stuff, even while the world is burning.

*y'all realize this is just another kind of basic, right

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.


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*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.