Back on the train/off the wagon
I just put the water on to boil for a french press of coffee. For months, now, I’ve existed pretty squarely in the world of green tea consumption in the morning. It’s quicker, for one thing. Also a lot less messy. (Somehow, whenever I make coffee, the entire counter likes to get into the act.) And mainly, it doesn’t have the crazy-making effects on my energy. None of the empty-noon-leadbelly or the nervous toe-tapping; I sleep better and I don’t start feeling like Grandma Death if I miss a morning.

All of which are completely worth it, of course, for the taste of cup number one, and the happy morning mania that follows.

I knew it was coming. This week, I’ve gone to the local coffeeshop and bought a cup here and there. Which in itself meant nothing. The real moment was this morning, when I flicked the switch on the coffee grinder. As the anonymous teenage drug addict in the (totally true!) memoir Go Ask Alice wrote, “I’m back! And I’m glad! I’m glad!!!”

The Psychic Coffeeshop Exchange

Monday Night.
Disheveled Man at downtown coffeeshop counter on borrowed phone [his voice growing louder and louder until everyone else has fallen silent, staring at their coffee cups, pretending not to listen] :“Well, you just gotta help me out, here. Help me out! I mean, I’m at the end of my rope, here. I’m at the end of my rope, here! I just don’t have anyone else to call on!”
[Hangs up, storms out of shop.]

Tuesday afternoon.
Middle-aged Woman sitting at coffeeshop across town [her voice also steadily increasing in volume]: “I don’t know where you think I’m gonna get this kind of money. [Pause.] No. Every time, it’s more. And I don’t have the money. I just don’t have it!”
[Hangs up, slams phone on table.]

Torkeys!
There are expressions we all use on a fairly regular basis that we never intended to allow to creep into our everyday speech. Too late now, though, ‘cause there they are. I stand firm in this: Trying to have an expletive or a manner of speech you use only occasionally is, you know, like dabbling in crack-cocaine. Or decoupage.
Okay, so maybe that last one’s just my own compulsion.

But anyway, a quick example: I have a colleague who says, as an expression of surprise, not
“Dude!” but rather the more drawn-out hang-tenny sorta
“Duuuuude!”
All the time. And he doesn’t even want to! No, he originally began saying it to make fun of this other guy he knew who said it all the time. But then it was there, lodged in the circuits of his brain – and, sooner or later, the Ironic has a funny way of becoming the Un-ironic and there you go. He’s a Minnesotan who talks like a damn surfer, now.

That’s how language travels. Like a virus.

And then there’s mine. Or the one I realized I’d picked up and now say, no, not occasionally, but rather: All the time.
The word I’m thinking of? Is “Oy.”
I realized this tonight. I realized that I’ve actually been saying “Oy!” for a long time, without giving it a second thought. I’m not Jewish. I have no relatives who use this term. In fact I have known only one person, a coworker whom I didn’t even see every single day at Small Publication, who ever said freaking, “Oy!” She was Jewish. And she usually said it with some variant of a knowing wink. Not that she had to, but she did.

But me? No. In moments of unthinking, automatic reaction, when others might fall into an, “Oh, my God,” or a “Yes. That is a dizzying amount and variety of drugs you have done in the past 72 hours,” or a “Jesus, these grocery bags are heavy!” there it is, my small, but audible,
“Oy!”

Tonight I wracked my brain to figure out where and when this started. And I did: In my case, it’s wasn’t a friend or anyone I actually even ever knew whom I’m aping.

It’s a cartoon character.
It’s the TURKEY VENDOR in the obscure little Christmas special, Ziggy’s Gift. Now, for the record, it is Simple Fact in my book that Ziggy’s Gift is the best never-seen Christmas special, ever. (According to this website, it won an Emmy, but internet/schminternet; who knows.) Whether it’s good or not though, it’s a strange place for a person to be nabbing her Expletives for Daily Use.

To figure this out, I sat and tried to recall the original context in which I thought of the expression. What I heard was a brawny male voice saying, “Oy!! Torkeys! Oy!” and remembered: Yes, okay, Turkey Vender guy. Then I realized that sometimes I say NOT just “Oy,” when I’ve slammed the tail of my coat into the car door, but instead, The Whole Thing. “Oy!” I’ll mutter. “Torkeys.”
Without even thinking about it.

And the weirdest part? The first time I saw Z.G. and the period of time when I was really, well, “into” it, as I guess you’d say, was when I was a teenager. I haven’t seen it in a number of years. Which means that I’ve likely been saying “Oy!” and its close relative, “Oy! Torkeys!” for at least ten years without even realizing it.

Tiny Darts of Rebellion
‘Morning, sunshine.
Today, there is an alacrity about things.
Today, there is coffee, for the first time in weeks. And glorious sunny beautifulness out there.
Therefore, it is not a day that I feel like hanging out in the ol’ Artsy Garret Apt ™, doing fricking internet research.

Ah, but isn’t this sort of sacrifice – not to mention maintenance of the pallid complexion -- that the artistic life is all about, after all?

See, I decided to devote this weekend to sitting down and researching the haps on various literary journals. Coming as I do, from the World o’ Journalism, Henshaw, I know my newspapers. I know my public radio stations. Coming from the world of, well, people who eat and sleep and go into bookshops, I know my magazines. But. I do not come from the world o’ academia, my dear Mr. H., so I have no fucking clue about lit mags.

But I’m supposed to. See, here’s the deal: When you enroll in an MFA writing program, you’re supposed to be constantly sending your work out to small publications with arresting titles like Stony Creek Review and Autumnal Corners Quarterly – publications read far and wide… by other academic people who are also feverishly sending out their own work to the same journals.

And in order to send your work out to these places, you need to familiarize yourself with them, so, on any given day, you might end up sending 17 bucks to, say, Punxsutawney, PA so that you can learn whether Marmota Monax considers itself more of a traditional or cutting-edge type o’ publication.

So you end up with: a bunch of poor-ish grad student and profesorly types shelling out all their money on publications that other poor-ish grad student and professorly types read in order to find out if said-publication would ever go for their kind of work.

Okay, so that’s kind of asshole-y.
The writing in the good journals is pretty damn compelling, after all. I mean, the emphasis on quality over mass appeal is so front and center that you really find yourself blown away by the short stories, essays and poems in best ones. As any of the 75-or-so subscribers to any of them will tell you. And there’s something refreshing about that. Just jumping on into this fray and sending your eight pages, your cover letter and SASE to The luNAR mOTH Review is one way of kinda sticking it to the man, of shouting, “Screw recognition by large or medium-sized audiences! It’s all about my art!”

You know: like sticking it to him…with a teeny, tiny needle that he’ll never, ever feel.

But I’m going to do it. I’ll learn myself some literary goodness this weekend if it kills me. It kind of feels like active training to be a record store geek: This weekend, I will crack this insular world-! And I both hate insular worlds, and - like all of us to some extent - am irresistibly, helplessly, drawn to them. And then I just want to make fun of them.

Oh, dear, dear lord.

Wish me luck.

Late/Early
The cat can sleep through and on anything. I am jealous of him. On the futon where I am reading a Best American Short Stories collection, the insomnia back, his haunches are on my lap, his head face-down into the pillow, his sides twitching with dream.

It is January at three in the morning and right now I am: annoyed by a song stuck in my head, alone, insecure and missing friendships I've lost.
When you can’t sleep sometimes you just have to give in to it. You just have to be awake.

Special Responsibilities
At the post office, clearly visible on the wall in the Employees Only area behind the desk: a placard. On this, in deadly-serious bold, sans-serif lettering, the words “ADULT CPR,” with a cartoon how-to beneath. Beside the sign, a plastic lunchbox sorta container is also affixed to the wall. It reads, “CPR KIT”.

There is a lot more to the day of a postal worker than I thought.

I’m not belittling people working anywhere; I’m just saying I never worked anywhere with these things on the wall, and certainly not displayed right up front and center, as if it were a primary responsibility of the job. I’ve worked at a library, a hippie nursery school, a grocery store, a coffeeshop, a half-baked events planning firm, a restaurant, a radical women’s collective/magazine, a corporate bank, a "gift shop", a radio station, a small publication, a university, another coffeeshop, a career testing agency, a citywide volunteer organization and a classroom. I might have left some places out here, but nowhere do I recall such a sign placed so prominently in my place of employ.

Top-Secret Cold Remedies (Don’t try this…Ah, well, whatever.)
I’m doing better. Either the bourbon-toddy worked on Thursday, or that was just the moment in the cold’s timeline for the coughing to knock it the hell off, for the most part.

I’m not sure whether going and getting utterly, conclusively (excuse the foul language, Henshaw; no other term really applies, here) shit-faced Friday night and spending Saturday in Hangover Hell helped or hindered.


So, Friday, a friend had a deep-fry party. That’s right: two deep fryers, beer batter, cake batter and the guests provided the items to fry. So, harmless fun, right?
Here’s the thing, though: The party also had said-host refilling my champagne with a freakishly uncanny ability to not raise my awareness. At all. I’m telling you, we’re talking a dealings-with-the-occult kinda invisibility. So, yeah, lotsa champagne.

Then, well, beer, and then I recall a few of us leaning out the porch (the porch in the photo,) inviting the friendly folks across the street to come on up and bring the stray dog they found, too. None of us was actually the host, but I don’t recall that striking anyone as problematic at the time. Back inside, the host was saying, “Why is there a black lab in my house?” And my friend leans over and tells one of the visitors that it might be time to take the dog out.
“Sure, no problemo. He just needs to say the word, man,” says the guy.
“I think that word is ‘now,’” says my friend.
Cute dog.

I won’t say much about Saturday; I don’t think one person’s all-day nightmare hangover is much different from anyone else’s.
(And, for the sake of my own dignity: I have not experienced this level of drinking and hangoverlineses in years, and am not planning to, um, ever again.)

I will say, there is no portion of Hangover Hell that beats the Masochistic Mental Food Parade. This occurs at the very worst moments of nausea, like, three-five minutes pre-bleah. You close your eyes and suddenly it’s a damn TGI Friday’s ad in there. 1950s cookbook images in greasydripping living color. “No, no, no!” you tell the disembodied slice of pepperoni lifting away from the rest of the pizza, tantalizing cheesy strings and all. The steaming-fresh fried poppers rendered by your evil brain in disturbingly crisp contrast. The blooming onion, the aromatic roast chicken -- and the jambalaya you ate before the party last night – remember that? It was Zatarains. Kinda greasy. But you went and added andouille sausage and chicken anyway. And. You. Had. Seconds.

Lord. I’m glad yesterday’s over.

Reading about other people’s colds can be a lot like reading about other people’s dreams. If this next entry bores you, sorry. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled, um, whatever, as soon as I get fricking better, damn it. Till then, I’m sucking it up and you will, too. Sweetness.

Mr. Bartender, come here.
I love the one-upmanship that comes with sickness.

Like this, for instance: Every damn time I get a cough, it’s the worst cough that ever there was. It’s worse than your cough, yours - and also that one you’re sitting there trying to tell me about that you got two years ago and for which you had to go to the doctor to get special prescription-strength cough syrup. Yeah, well, whatever, Mr. Fancy Health Care Plan. Listen here: In 1997 when I went to see The English Patient with my college roommate, I coughed so hard, I had to leave the theatre! I had to go out into the hallway! (Lucky for me, that fricking movie ran for something like five months in Chapel Hill after that, so I had ample opportunity to see it again. And again and again, had I cared to.) (Okay, so truth: I was a nineteen-year-old obsessed with The English Patient, so I did indeed care to.)

This coughing, it goes on, for days/sometimes a week or two and I start to think there’s something seriously and uniquely wrong with my (mymymy!) immune system. It’s very similar to that feeling of isolation you get with a bout of insomnia. Being sick puts the same sort of barrier between you and the rest of the world, as long as it persists. And then it goes away. And you forget how bad it was. And that you were so darn special in your aloneness.

Right now, I’m at that point where I’m beginning to think I’m unique again with my ill-equipped-to-handle-a-damn-cold immune system. This cough has gone on for four days. Prior to the coughing stage (at the sore throat/fever stage) I took very good care of myself. I napped! I rested! I took a damn load off just like they tell you to. I have consumed more oranges in the past week than you can shake a stick at, you citrus stick-shaker.

Now, though, the dratted coughing is trying to undo all that good care. It’s keeping me up at night. Robitussin does nothing. Nyquil, nothing. Nyquil doesn’t even make me sleep. It has zero effect. I just lie there. Coughing. I slather myself with Vicks. Which does something, admittedly. But its power is short-lived. I wake up three, four times, still, coughing and have to re-slather myself until I’m just about ready to take the bottle under the covers with me and huff it and huff it until sweet, methol-eucalyptus oblivion comes to me. I could write a folk song about this, sing it with a Celtic warble, maybe. … Could one asphyxiate from Vapo-Rub inhalation? I don’t know how romantic that would actually be.

I think I should just be put on night watchman’s duty somewhere. Only my coughing would give me away, probably, and the bad guys would find some way to kill us all off. Maybe my amazing powers of phlegm generation would actually keep our group alive, by keeping everyone awake and alert with my incessant hacking.

So I’m at this stage. I think my next-door neighbor hates me. Dextromethorphine is a lie, lie, lie. Earlier tonight, a friend told me that I should drink whiskey or bourbon. I sort of said, “Yeah, uh, sure,” till I remembered an old story of Hunter’s about being Sick Like Dog while out on tour in his youngsterlad musician days. It was New Year’s Eve and his old band, Pontius Copilot, was set to play but Hunter was shivering and shaking with fever and coughing up a storm. Then someone gave him some bourbon with lemon and miraculously, a half hour later, he was good as new and the show went off swimmingly.

I don’t even ask to rock, here. Only sleep. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe I’ll just get drunk. I’ll let you know. I know you’re out there with your bated breath, dear Henshaw. I can smell it. It's like camphor.

Well, tra-la.
I took this humor test because I'm being so gosh-darn productive, today.
Apparently, I like Letterman. Well.

the Cutting Edge

(57% dark, 42% spontaneous, 21% vulgar)

your humor style:
CLEAN | SPONTANEOUS | DARK



Your humor's mostly innocent and off-the-cuff, but somehow there's something slightly menacing about you. Part of your humor is making people a little uncomfortable, even if the things you say aren't themselves confrontational. You probably have a very dry delivery, or are seriously over-the-top.

Your type is the most likely to appreciate a good insult and/or broken bone and/or very very fat person dancing.


PEOPLE LIKE YOU: David Letterman - John Belushi






The 3-Variable Funny Test!

When all the others turn their backs and walk away
My landlord and her boyfriend don’t really seem to talk to each other, and this makes me nervous. I say “boyfriend,” but it’s not really the right word. They’re both in their 40s or 50s and are stable adults - and I know that she, at least, has gone through one divorce and has a daughter my age. So “boyfriend” seems wrong, hints at a certain carefree, youthful arrangement that doesn’t match this one. If you can think of a better word, let me know.

So she’s the landlord and he does maintenances-style tasks for the apartment building and so far, (always, always knock wood), everything’s okay. Sure, he never installed some shelving he promised in the bathroom when I first moved in, but on every single request I’ve made, he’s been prompt - and almost obsequious in his quickness of response and interactions with me on whatever the matter is.

But the thing is, after I hear from him, I always hear from her. Or sometimes it’s the other way around, but it’s always completely separate: He’ll call from his cell phone somewhere, and then she’ll call from her office. It is always, always two completely separate interactions.

Example: When I was moving in, he had left me the wrong key and I couldn’t get in. So I called their office and he called me back. He was out of town; he’s usually away on business on weekdays, but could be back here in two hours with the right key. Fifteen minutes later, a call from her, starting at square one: So the key isn’t working, huh?… I told her I’d talked to him and that we’d ironed everything out. She called him and then called me and apologized for “his stupid error” and then sighed her harsh Sigh of Russian Contempt.

Since then, I’ve heard her Sigh of Russian Contempt regarding a number of things: the men painting the side of the house who’re trying to screw with her, Small Beach Town for raising the prices on new mailbox keys, a tenant who screwed with her on rent - and the man fixing the ceiling who was doing his best to screw with her. And her boyfriend, Mr. Maintenance. Not yet for anything so acute as screwing/with anything – (at least, our conversations, thanksbetogod, haven’t gone there) - but for various small things he’s forgotten to do.

So far they seem have a rather symbiotic relationship: She, at constant war with a hostile world, and he, with his docile affect and desire to please her. This notion of a relationship frankly gives me a bit of the jim-jams; I imagine it fraught with passive-aggressive snares and whatnot. (You know, whatnot.) Apparently, though, they’ve been together for something like eight years, so I guess it’s worked so far.

What worries me is this seeming complete lack of communication between them. Its oddness is heightened by the fact that both of them are so darn good at getting back to me. I called this morning about a stopped-up bathtub and a burned-out light bulb in my (extremely high) entryway ceiling. Twenty minutes later, he called, promising to come by tomorrow night, “if that’s okay with you.” Then, an hour later, she came to my apartment, telling me she has Drano if I want it and also talking of eight-foot ladders that are really quite difficult to carry up these steps, but if I insist, it’s fine. I told her that I’d take the Drano but that Mr. Maintenance had offered to change the bulb. “He did? Whoa-kee,” she said. “Sounds goot.”

She leaves and I think: I have never, ever seen the two together. They live beneath me and, in five months, I have seen them both in and around the building, but I have never seen them in the same space, conversing. Or even not-conversing.

If this is simply their way, then fine, but if it’s some relatively new development in their relationship, I’m a bit concerned. I want this couple to stay happy. Because, (mama, daddy,) If they broke up, what would happen to me? I like having him as my maintenance man. Yes, his sometimes oddly submissive attitude makes me uncomfortable. It feels artificial. But then, so do all our interactions. He and I are chock full of, “Nice weather we’re having” and “Thank God Friday’s almost here” sort of non-exchanges, and that’s just fine with me. It keeps us on a good, businesslike level of Friendly. I don’t want some new maintenance person to have to adjust to, or worse: No maintenance person. And I don’t want my landlady going through a personal crisis, either. Then again, everything’s a crisis to her. Or maybe she just attracts a lot of genuine crises. Either way, she’s holding up just fine as my landlady, though (again with the wood-knocking) she hasn’t really been called to task on anything with me in her capacity as landlady, either.

Just in case things are getting dicey between them, I’m about ready to blast the Al Green from the windows of my apartment, which overlook their porch. Or maybe “You and Me Against the World” by Helen Reddy. I wonder if he was frightened by the clown when the circus came to town. If so, I want to make sure she’d punch out that red nose. For screwing with her man.

Marshall just sent me this. Who knew this was actually a word? In the Pittsburgh Airport, there’s a big sign over the moving sidewalks that says, “Standees keep right. Walkers to the left,” and we made up this whole thing where it’s this entire culture of repression. When we arrived out west, the airports were free of such limiting labels.
Maybe you just had to be there.

Urgh. I'm sick. Like all-a-sudden-mega-sick. I drove home from my New Years in Atlanta last night and woke up this morning with a sore throat and that not-so-fresh feeling (no, not that one) and all day, it's just gotten worse and worse.

I worked like the dickens (Dickens?) on this current writing project, just knowing that by tonight I’d feel about like I do and be totally useless. I spent the day completely alone but enjoyed myself. Felt like I was preparing for a hurricane. Stocked up at the store (food and robitussin and oranges – my sister’s got me paranoid with her news that orange juice actually contains mostly sugar, not vitamin C. So I’ve been eating straight oranges all day) and library (movies!) earlier, and tonight I hurt all over. Bleah. You know, like, where your fricking *skin* hurts? Sore throat. Fever.
Hooray.

Just watched Laurel Canyon again. Love that movie. Yes, I do. Okay. Now it's off to bed. Though that entails moving. Which hurts. Also I can't seem to keep warm and the heating vents are in this section of teeny-tiny apt, not in that one.
Bleah. See ya, Henshaw. Hope you’re faring better.