auf wiedersehen

I’ve commented and posted every day since March so I thought I should explain my disappearance in case you wondered, “Why hasn’t that Sword-Chinned Bitch said anything about my new post?  Where the heck is her head?”  I may be absent from commenting and blogging for a bit.  I say MAY be absent because I don’t know, maybe not.  That’s why I didn’t know if I should mention it at all.

Hopefully I’ll be writing more fiction.  I’m planning a reading at the end of October.  Who knows what else I’ll get into.

Talk to you later!

 

 

As Ice Cube says, I gotta say it was good day

Overall not a bad day, despite the flare-up inspired by what my hairdresser did to me a month ago.  It hit hard today.  A bad hair day with a bad hair cut.  I hurled that bottle of John Frieda’s Frizz-Ease into the tub.  The squirter part flew into the window and I still can’t find the top – eh!  Maybe it’s not for black people hair.  But I can’t blame John Frieda.  Nope, I blame my hairdresser.

But not a bad day at all really.  Mondays and Tuesdays are my Saturday and Sunday which kind of sucks because my friends can’t play with me sometimes because they have to work.  But because the economy stinks a few are unemployed and are able to. I thought I would go to the Hudson River Museum, but wouldn’t you know it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays.  I don’t get a weekend vibe being off these days.

Ah but not so bad, despite my plans to do this that and the other being overtaken by lethargy.  I never understood how you’d ask people what they were doing over the weekend and they’d say, sleeping in.  Sleeping in!!!???  Are you kidding?  What a waste of time.  Actually I hate sleeping and I hate eating.  Today my body paid me back for all that hysterical running around like a chicken without a head I did the previous week.  I fought down to the minute though.  At 12 noon when the sluggishness hit, I brought a book and my eyeglasses with me to bed.  But nope, my brain wouldn’t allow it.  So I went to sleep and had some lame ass dream I can’t remember now.  All I know is that it was lame, I remember that.

I got up and started reading blogs and reminisced about the time before blogging and Face book last March when my computer time was spent simply checking aol, playing chess with the computer, editing one of my stories, and listening to Pandora.  Today I discovered ‘online’ that a guy I liked is bisexual.  Some of you may know I LOVE men like that – but screw him and his new relationship – it’s with a girl by the way – and I hear she’s ugly and she stinks – nah just jivin’.  I wish them the best of luck really I do – hehehe.  I also discovered a video by Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg called Mother Lover – now where the hell was I when this came out?  Stupendous!

I hope I can be as accepting tomorrow of my day as I was with my day today, however imperfect it was, and I wish the same for all of you.  As Ice Cube says, I gotta say it was good day.

A Hermit in the Woods

When I was a kid my dad took us to the home of an artist friend of his.  There were three boys.  One had long, sandy-colored hair.  The mother was a white woman with blonde hair and the father was black.  I was seven.  It was 1970.  Beads hung in the doorways and there were Persian rugs for a bohemian feel.  The boys played tarot cards with my brother and me.  My reading said I would be a hermit.  On my card was an old man carrying a staff in a black hooded robe in a cave .

I enjoyed riding my tricycle alone, pretending that the trees and bushes were a forest.  I had private adventures.  The people walking around were monsters or some other imaginary, vague threat.

Sometimes Dad had to make me play with other kids.  I wanted to be reading, writing stories in my room, or playing with dolls.  The kids would yell up to the window, “Sandee, can you come outside?”  The idea of playing with them was exciting and frightening at the same time.  Once I began hanging out as a pre-teen and teenager, there was trauma.  I wasn’t innocent, but there were rules and trends you had to follow and ugly gossip about other people.   At fourteen, I started smoking, which took the edge off.

Though I have a social life, I’m the same as I was as a girl.  Sometimes people are monsters or vague and imaginary threats.  Small talk can make me physically unwell.  Even in planned social events there is a strain.  It’s because of the way I’m made physically.  I’m not socially awkward the way I was as a child.  I just need a lot of space.

While people get the opposite impression of me at work, being around the collected neuroses, insecurities and various social conditions makes me a mad woman.  This was evident when I worked for a carnivorous corporation.  It brought out the worst in people.  I’m not good with politics and trickery.

That’s why I work in a garden.  Its mission is simply to inspire happiness and to encourage a connection between people and nature.  It’s a heavenly place on the river, close to home and I like the people.

I used to have a vision about being a writer in the woods, an old woman wearing black with a big stick, very much like the staff in my tarot reading years ago.  I’d live in a small house and every month I’d be in touch with my agent.  I wouldn’t have to deal with all the assholism occurring in offices.  I think about that tarot reading now and wonder how close I am to that prophesy.

Cheap Phone Camera Pictures of a Virtually Zombie-Free Road

I’ve been taking a new way home from work to avoid riding the bus with zombies masquerading as people.  As soon as you turn away they smack their fists in their hands and point at me.  They peel the latex ‘people’ skin from their face to show me decaying flesh then stick it back on before anyone else sees them.  Sometimes the bus is filled with them because they know this is my usual route.

So this is my new route home.

It’s the back roads of Riverdale in the Bronx.   There are others walking here but it’s rather quiet.  Since there are mansions on one side and a few houses speckled on the other by the river, I might be saved by a compassionate homeowner if one of those stinking dead bastards comes.

I imagine this road in the fall when the leaves turn Halloweeny and the moon is huge and orange with the wicked witch flying through it on her broom, and I get all oogie.

That white speck is a zombie but I’m behind the tree.

This walking path is like a country road with the woods and the river.  The people who live here don’t make the path less twiggy and gnarly because they don’t want riff raff like me too comfortable on it.

The road leads back to a luxury apartment area winding east.  At the end where the road curves back is a quaint old apartment complex, units crookedly piled on top of one another on a natural terrace jutting out over the river.  Each unit has an iron terrace and the roofs are rust colored, corrugated.  There’s ivy crawling all over the buildings.  There’s a serene view of the river and the palisades.  Woods are across the street.  Next to that is a prewar building, rather average but attractive, resembling the kind in my neighborhood.  It also juts out over the river.  It’s strange to see a building like that in a privileged position.

I’m going to live there.  That’s also why I walk this route, to get used to it when I have to come home this way, zombies or not.

But now, for my trip home from work this way, after a mile and a half, I get on a bus that zombies refuse to ride.   They don’t know where I live and they’re not blog readers.  A few are starting to get on Facebook, but I blocked them.  Trying to avoid them is exhausting but I don’t want to become a zombie anytime soon, so it’s what I accept.  They want to eat my superior brain and I can’t do anything about that.

Baaad Bunny

My hateful bunny post the other day was so evil – I had to get on the other side of it.  Carrie also reminded me of needing a balance.  To be whole, one needs balance.  So I thought, Now I’ll write about love.  But what I really want is to write porno.  I haven’t watched porno in ages but I know I could make up something really good.  I’ve never written anything like this before, so it would be an adventure.

I’m just sharing my process, what’s in my head.  Unfortunately I wouldn’t put any porno on my blog.  I don’t have the balls for that.  I know you’re disappointed.  But when I finish writing it, just look for books published under one of these names:  Aysia Marie, Misty Kelly, Harlem Cherry, Angel Black, Shameeka Blue, Tailor Lee Tyler, and Velveeta von Sapen Heusen.  I’m going to be using these pseudonyms.

Have a great weekend and drink responsibly!

My father speaks to me

From my inner ear, in the recesses there and in the brain, you settle and speak to me and I shake my head to feel the fleshing out of this voice that has to do with who I am, and what I want more than anything I can grab, hold, and keep so solidly in a static notion that can only be captured in a moment of creative expression.

I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to kill you

I wrote this inspired by the Cannibal Corpse phrase above:

You violated.  And you’ll know how big a mistake you made when I’m done.  You’ll be a bleating peasant, on your knees.  I’ll rip the meat from your arms with my teeth and pull out your hair strand by strand.  I’ll tie you with wire, smash your toes with a mallet and have rats nestle with you in a tub filled with bloody piss.  I’ll pull out all of your teeth and dangle you from the 50^th floor.  You’ll be fired from your job because your boss will believe every lie that I tell him about you.  I think of killing you in ways where you’ll live for a week before you die. You’ll want death.  But I won’t do it – you’ll die on your own from the torture.  I’ll cry with you then snatch my hand away and laugh at the snot on your face.  In that dimming light you will regret.

Me vs. Me

There’s an old lady who lives on my avenue in that odd house lined up amongst apartment buildings.  She has fairies, gnomes, trolls and wind chimes in her yard.  She patrols the street in front of her house like lord of the manor.  When I jog she stares with her forehead wrinkled.  Once, when I jogged by she put her hand out to stop me.  She was hosing – she’s a controlling little bully.

Today she had workers in front of her house.  There was enough space for me to jog, but she charged out with both palms facing me and stomped, “Stop! The sidewalk’s wet.”  I looked for wet cement, but it was only water.  She shrugged as I moved forward and said “Okay, but if you fall.”  “Thanks for your concern,” I said.  When it rains on the sidewalk you don’t slip – ridiculous!

On my way back there was a cement chute from a truck blocking the sidewalk in front of her house.  I ran up a few yards from it.  I prepared to run around in the street because this time there was no room.  Frankly I wanted to confront her.  “You can’t go this way,” she yelled.  I told her she needed to put a sign up saying there was construction going on.  I told her she didn’t have to yell and that she shouldn’t be ordering people off the sidewalk.  Then it came, roiling out of the space in my brain that I’d been saving for her, “I don’t know who you think you are with your cheesy little house with all that tacky shit in the yard, but you don’t own this block!”

Why didn’t I just let the woman continue thinking she was mistress of the manor? Well, somebody had to let her know that she doesn’t own the sidewalk, that’s why. See it was my job to tell her that she can’t bully people.  But what would it have cost for me to have simply gone around the area by walking in the street without saying anything?

When I’m tired, stressed or haven’t eaten enough I have to watch myself.  That’s when I might be looking for people I can easily use as targets for the anger I have about my own situation. I reminded myself that this is how bad stuff happens in a split second, when you let your temper fly.  I’ve been training myself to think and move slowly when I’m weak but I didn’t have a handle on it today.  I thought I was okay but issues were floating around back there in my subconscious so I wasn’t immediately aware of the stress.  But I admit telling the woman that her house wasn’t shit felt good.

Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in The Park

A woman sees a man sitting on a park bench from the window of her posh apartment across the street.  She peers through the curtains in the dining room while her guests prepare for the fine cuisine that her servants have cooked.  She’s distracted throughout dinner, staring off into nothing, making excuses to get up to see the young man on the bench.  It rains but the man remains sitting there. The woman becomes agitated.  “That man out there, he’ll be soaked,” she says to her guests.

When they leave, she goes out with an umbrella, introduces herself and invites him to stay with her.  She feeds him a fine dinner and a pineapple cake she made herself, plays music for him and offers him up her tub for a bath. The man plays mute the entire time so she runs her fucking mouth – it’s Sandy Dennis with some weird accent that sounds like one of those stars, Tina Turner, Madonna, who’re enamored by the foreign and effect some bizarre rendition of European accent. The movie is in Vancouver and though I’ve never been there I don’t think they talk like this.

Eventually Sandy Dennis takes the boy prisoner and invites a prostitute to have sex with him.  She kills the prostitute and tries to soothe him, telling him that everything’s okay even though the windows and doors are bolted and he can’t get out.  Tears stream down his face while the credits roll and she strokes his face, kissing him and whatnot in an extreme close up.

I loved this movie soooooo much when I was a kid!  It haunted me something awful.  I found it bizarre and transporting.  It’s not on Netflix so I had to watch it on youtube in segments which is straight up wack!  I wondered why it wasn’t on Netflix so I looked for reviews – it’s a Robert Altman film – I loved 3 Women by the way.  Robert Altman’s good right?  Well, everyone hated the film, called it psychosexual nonsense blah blah blah – what killjoys!  I give the movie 10 stars because Sandy Dennis is a weirdo and I liked the Vancouver scene because you don’t get to see it much in movies and I like that she took somebody prisoner in her posh apartment.  Roger Ebert can kiss my butt with his bad review.

Can’t I have anything!?

When I was 12, a friend said I’d get titties in the springtime.  I did.  Sort of.  I got A’s.  Wasn’t bad actually.  Had returning customers.  (No. I wasn’t a prostitute.  Maybe I should have been.  You know, charged money?)  But if my breasts were gonna be small I’d have a tight body I reasoned.  I exercised stringently and smoked cigarettes — crack diets didn’t come out ‘til later. The payoff was being skinny, which wasn’t always good enough.

I told my dad I was getting implants.  He said I needed to go explore, be around different types of people – I like to think he meant I needed to be around classy, arty people who were too deep, too brilliant to focus on titties — haha yeah, that’s what he meant — and my friend said smaller breasts are aristocratic; and my other friend said, Yeah, yeah, I like your titties like that – ah shhhhit yeah!  And as I’ve said before, if you have smaller ones all the energy is focused, you know, down there.

So at times I wasn’t bothered, though I wondered what it would be like to have big ones.  Summer would come and I saw how big women’s breasts were – wow – this is where mine went – these bitches got my portion!  I’d go in and out of feeling inadequate.  I regretted not being able to ‘have sex with my breasts’ or not being able to slap somebody silly with my titties.  Then it would be okay again because I was a waifish nymph, or a nymphish waif, or a nymph-waif-pirate drunk.

Now that I’ll be 50, I’m more relaxed.  I spent years going in and out of being skinny and nearly sick because of it, and obsessively weighing myself, because I valued myself that way.  It all came from being flat-chested.  I still exercise regularly, but it started out as an obsession having more to do with vanity than fitness.  I gained weight here and there, freaked out, and went on a holistic diet.  I thought of becoming a vegan not for health reasons, but because I thought it would keep me skinny.

Now I have fibroids that cause a slight protrusion in my abdomen.  Menopause, which is soon, may shrink them.  I don’t want surgery because I’m asymptomatic. Along with running and working out regularly, I do fifty sit-ups at least three times a week.  My stomach was flat until a couple of years ago.  Can’t I have anything?  I feel like all my effort is futile at times, just as I do with my other efforts that yield minimal results. Are my biorhythms off?  Did I kill somebody in a past life?

No, I just need to find my worth in areas that don’t require external approval.  Who I am is not any certification, degree, award, Pulitzer Prize, or drooling admiration. Unfortunately I didn’t get that until now.