Ways to Procrastinate in the Morning

After making your To Do list for the day and checking boring, university and work-related emails, you need more tea. Tea to Write By. Go into the kitchen. Pick up fabric tape measure on the way to play with your cat.

Spend five minutes playing with the cat by dragging the tape measure on the floor while he stalks and pounces. This is creative play. This is acceptable. Cat loses interest before you do, however, and soon you’re just a person dragging a tape measure around her house all alone; you realize you are 1. not sleeping in 2. nor reading anything inspiring 3. nor writing, but rather entertaining, not your cat any longer, but yourself with a fabric tape measure at 9:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Heed the call of the boiling water. As you stand there, putting teabag, then hot water to mug, tape measure strung around your neck, you realize anew that you are alone in the house. Recall all those episodes of Six Feet Under, which would begin in just this sort of way, all disquietingly-innocent-enough: A humdrum person doing her quotidian activities, only to land herself in some freak accident: getting choked on a fabric tape-measure, for example.

Get back to your desk. Look up “quotidian” to see if it has quite the ring of the mundane that you intend.

Tell yourself you’re not going to check your frivolous, personal email. Check your email.
But your connection’s too slow. Hit Stop. This is a sign. You should be writing.

Look at the cat as he creeps through the room, around the rug that’s too new to yet be trusted. What were his New Year’s resolutions? When you went back to the UU church for the first time in nine months or so the other day, the minister was talking about Tomorrow’s-Gonna-Come-No-Matter-What; How-will-you-arrive-there? And you were enjoying it, the metaphor about being out to sea in your little Schooner (the Schooner of Life), no land in sight, but that land, ho, ho, it would come, yes indeedy. Then on the drive home, the metaphor started to annoy you. Or the fact of it. Because, like many UU sermons you’ve attended, this sermon was: Pick a metaphor and find different ways to riff on it for twenty minutes.

Not to say it wasn’t useful. And the meditation was nice. And the moments of silence and the singing. (Except when they tried to go all gospel for one number. There is nothing worse in this world than a roomful of white liberal people trying to sing gospel music. It makes the heart fold in on itself.)
The people are always nice there, though they’re all your parents’ age; oh god when will you meet someone your age in this town not somehow connected to your freaking MFA program?? Or just some new, real friend, would be nice. But oh well.

So worn is this thought, it’s your autopilot, it’s your I Like Chocolate statement of fact for these three years; sometimes the shoulder-shrug comes first, it’s so emptied of meaning. Like shampoo when you say it twenty times: shampoo, shampoo, shampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampoo shampoo shampoo shampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampoo.

Shampoo, Henshaw. Okay, I’m gonna get to work for real.

The office is cold in the morning. This morning, the cat who is usually the coldest in temperament insists on my lap. Heat, soft weight, there. Feels like a gift and a threat, all at once. Also, I find this beautiful thing by artist David Silverstein at the website of the wonderful literary journal, Pank.

The Dance of Destiny, the Loafing of Laze.
There’s a reading tonight on campus, but I’m feeling extremely hermitlike in here, inside what my roommate calls “Your Cave.” She always comes home, all the house lights turned off: the kitchen, the hallway, my bedroom, back, back, back until, there’s my office, all warm and dim and cozy. I specifically don’t want to interact with a bevy of people or sit up straight in a chilly auditorium wearing real clothes tonight. I just want to curl up inside by the blazing radiator in an afghan on the amazing antique rocker I found a few weeks ago. Chamomile tea, even, and nobody in sight for miles. Just this book. Hell, if I were outside on a park bench with this book and a handy streetlight, I'd take it.

So, I’m here.
Carmelita and I had this really yummy brand of frozen pizza for dinner, which is worlds better than the delivery alternative. I’ve never seen this, but Carmelita says that whenever we order from Papa John’s, we get the creepiest delivery boy ever. Last time he came, he warned Carmelita to be careful of jumping over the giant corners in our house, his stare hard and evil and empty.
“And he drove up, his car blaring with that song! That 'Whoa-whoa-whoaaaa' dance song?”

Logically, I thought: I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about, Carmelita. But then I heard myself singing back to her, “Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more…” We both laughed over the fact that we keep that song stored away inside ourselves without even knowing it. She says this: Something about that song, coupled with that delivery boy, equals creepy.
What is love?

I always just sort of linked that song in my mind with Rick Astley, who, a number of years earlier, sang that “Never Gonna Give You Up, Never Gonna Let You Down” dance song, which is basically, like, the same song. It also being true that Rick Astley and the “What is Love?” man possess basically the same voice. And what if they are blood kin, we wondered? What if all dance singer men are chosen from one family of men, like boy sopranos of English days of yore? Chosen for how their grumbly-weird voices sound, projected over a very specific beat.



Ecce Romani
I need to go running. No; better than that. I need to do community service; need to take a year of my life and devote it to relief in Somalia. I’m saying this not because I had pizza for supper tonight, five pounds of hors d'oeuvres at a party last night and haven’t gone running in a week. This isn’t about being skinny or fit; it’s about real virtue, or total lack thereof. It’s because of the other thing I ate last night, which a friend brought to said-party: a gourmet dark chocolate bar with bacon in it.
He told me about it and I said, “No. Gross. Gah.” But then I went and tried it and yes: It is the best, most evil thing I have ever put in my mouth. The incomprehensible, looming, loamy sweetness of the darkest chocolate and then, the crunchy, salty Perfect Foodness of bacon, all there in one really, really decadent bite. I would have felt less wrong, less tainted with Romulus Augustus-styled hedonism, had he fed me some damn foie gras on a Chicken McNugget. Just hand me a toga and a feather. Surely, we are the Romans.

Night Sounds
Our house is filled with knocking at night. In the apartment above my bedroom and office, they start stacking heavy piles of wooden pallets, it seems, beginning around eleven and ending a half-hour later. Also, walking around in heavy-soled shoes and I know exactly which is their squeakiest floorboard. Take me up there; I’ll walk you to it.

They begin loading their clothes washer (this I know is true), also their dryer, and hitting “Start” on both. In my bed, I hear and feel the rumble, hear the water make its gurgling exit between Rinse and Tumble Dry. The dryer too, as it growls and shakes. Usually, those things don’t disturb me from sleep any more than the trains that pass through here every couple hours on some weeknights.
Their whistle: Long, long, short, long.

I went through a bad spell last year. During that time, the train whistle, which I heard at two a.m. at my old apartment, felt like a part of my own personal disquiet; a dramatic underscore to my own insomnia. Train whistles can mean anything. When I was little, sleeping in the trundle bed at my grandma’s, they meant that shiver of risk: Train train coming from the wild unknown and disappearing to the same—but meanwhile it was now right here, mere yards from my bed, the safest place in the world. Sometimes I still catch a spark of that feeling. Mostly though, my brain has tuned it out. I fold clothes and put them away, or read, or sleep—right through it.

Too Much
It’s too: warm, sunny, humid for the start of December. I remember it was the same at this time last year. We stuck our toes in the ocean surf the night of December first: “Can you believe it’s almost Christmas? Almost Christmas.”

I still feel like a stranger who just happens to be living in this town, but I feel sure, walking through campus at class-change, that everyone is waiting for the ten-degree temperature drop predicted for later this afternoon. Everyone waits for the air to become hospitable, breathable again. And who wants this year to be last.

These underpants
These underpants come in a pack of three. It’s the way their colors match so beautifully, the way that you loved holding the berry, purple and fuchsia fabrics together there in the store, that made you want to buy them. Sigh, so pretty.

So perfect together. Which is why you feel a bit sad, breaking the plastic connector and separating one from the other, for folding in your drawer, for wearing. This moment had to arrive. You bought underwear to have underwear, after all.

They’re still nice, but not as nice somehow, as they were there together, on the hanger, in the store. You wish that there were some trendy style, the way there is with tank tops, in which you’d wear two or three pairs layered together, perhaps the fuchsia over the purple one day, the pink over the fuchsia another. It would look so nice, if only. If only you could actually do that and every-day people would even see your underwear in a way that was understood a healthy appreciation of color, rather than as something trashy, or a come-on.

Which is what they are in the store, I guess. A different kind of come-on. They look so pretty you drink ‘em in with your eyes, yes, sure, now, but once you get them home and separate them, never again.

Except here. Which is why I picture them, Henshaw. Just so you can see those pretty colors. Nice, huh?

Sable-kitty has been doing this...



...all day. Same corner. My bedroom. Where Middle-of-the-Night Rats #1 and #2 were wrangled.











Good night and sleep tight, you of vermin-free households.

Cats & Rats & Elephants.
I should feel honored somehow, because it’s my room they bring them to, my room, central somehow, the Buddha Belly where you drop off your soft meat hearts.

Instead I stood there last night, four a.m., after grabbing for the thickest-soled shoes and sweatpants, layers between me and It. I thought, Keep the door shut from now on? No, because then the pampered cat, my darling who hasn’t been to the vet in years and who usually sleeps in my bed; he might get bitten by a rabid one and I’d never know; I’d have shut him out like he’s some barn cat. And what if fresh vermin should appear in here with no cats to attack it? Only me, and my futon not so far from the floor. Besides, there was something happening in the corner under the bureau, something I had to take care of right now.

For the second night in a month, the cats have presented me with a rat. I’ve always rented out old houses, places whose walls and floorboards never quite meet, whose windows may or may not open, houses possessing novel heating and cooling situations, high ceilings with pretty molding, secret old balconies, noisy radiators and hardwood. There’s always a price for the beautiful antique wallpaper and the claw-foot tub, however. Character, it means many things: the faucet you have to jostle, the window held open with a stick of wood, extra sweaters.
This place is the most stunning of all; this is the place that leaves our friends truly slack-jawed. “How’d you find it?” they ask and we shrug as if the stained-glass pocket doors and domed two-story dining room ceiling is not remarkable, as if it is our right.
Wonder means hardship in equal proportion. I’ve felt lucky to have porches and commodious kitchens; now I have a veranda and a dining room you must mount stairs to reach. I’ve dealt with kitchen ants, with swooping cockroaches. Now we have rats.

Feeble squeals. The light was dim when I turned it on, so you couldn’t tell that its eyes had been gouged out, that half its pointed head was a bloody mess. It sat upright, its long tail splayed out, its head tucked down, cats surrounding it in a loose hunting circle. A cat would paw it and it would squeal, uncle, uncle, uncle. I just stood there beside the dresser feeling inept. Move the dresser? What if it then ran under my bed? The cats sat and snaked around it. “Kill it! Just kill it!” I told them. Wide awake now. Useless adrenaline.
I went to the kitchen and found an empty tomato can in the recycling bin. I already held another heavy shoe, not consciously sure of what I meant to do with it. When I returned, the smallest, sweetest cat, the dainty spirited cheerleader who is of course the chief hunter, grabbed the rat up in her mouth and ran from the room. The black cat followed, as did my pampered cat and I said, “No! Don’t!” to him, but the more I said no, the swifter he ran, so I followed, envisioning rotten rats beneath sofas, envisioning sick, foaming jaws.
In the living room, I tossed the can atop the rat atop our gorgeous oriental carpet. This cut across its tail and it squealed in pain. Then I edged the insides of a local weekly paper beneath, and a thick book beneath that. I lifted it all up, and the rat brushed weakly against the inside of the steel, a soft, uneven percussion I could feel more than hear. I unlocked the front door with my foot and carried the whole thing over to the edge of the veranda, where I dropped the floor out and the rat pitched to the unused garden below.

This morning I talked with our maintenance man. He tells me getting rid of the rats will be “a process.” Rats will flatten their skeletons to fit through the smallest holes. Rats are smart; they learn to avoid poisoned traps. Which we can’t put inside because of the cats. We’ll start with the basement, he says, and our cabinets. Our house has many gaps and secret spaces. We’ll just see how it goes.
This week I will update my cat on his shots. Tonight I will leave my door ajar again. I don’t know how well I’ll sleep.

Hiya, Henshaw.
Here in Beachtown it hadn’t rained in weeks and months and we’re still sleeping with our fans and air conditioners turned on us full-blast as we push away covers and cats and significant others. Still sweating. It’s October, for God’s sake.

Then this week, we finally get rain. And that’s good, but now all is tropical rain forest. The humidity caused us to drink beer sluggishly last night as we attempted a jolly show of pumpkin carving out on the veranda. But this was not pumpkin carving weather. Hell, we squirmed and perspired at lighting the candles inside the finished jack-o-lanterns. Before that, we had to flee indoors when a swarm of flying cockroaches descended mid-carve, attracted by the sweet pumpkin meat, I guess, seeking a nest in my hair, for sure.

The weather caused me to go off on a long tangent to my class today about Disney World and about Florida and how odd it is to plant this artificial shopping-mall environment smack dab in the middle of what’s basically a swamp and meanwhile it was becoming increasingly swamplike in the classroom. I was using my cellphone to keep track of time and the screen fogged over. I let them out early.

Tonight there’s a Halloween party at the old mansionhouse and we’re looking forward to running makeup and more sweat. Actually, I am excited about my costume even though much of it consists of thick polyester. My friend is Bad Cop, I am Good. She has fake tattoos and a scary nightstick; I have pamphlets on volcano safety and sugar-free candy to distribute. Also a jaunty hat. Mainly, the jaunty hat. And the volcano safety.
Happy early Halloween from under the sea, folks.

Senseless Attachments, Part 36
In Four Acts


1. Subway tuna-melt sandwiches.
Like I can’t go home and stir together some damn tuna salad and sprinkle some oil and vinegar and banana pickles and oregano over top and call it a freaking sandwich. Here’s the first thing, though. If you lived here and got amnesia but had remembered first to link “Subway” in your mind with “Beachtown,” you’d be saved; there’s one of those ugly little yellow awnings every third block.

And as I drive near one of the eight or twenty Subways boasted by every major thoroughfare, it’s the whole package deal I find myself longing for. It’s the sandwich itself, on that fake wheat bread, with chips and a root beer and that horrible lighting and that horrible booth with no padding. It’s smart in none of these ways: Nutrition, Money, Total Dining Experience.
But it’s my weird little habit and I must keep it.


2. Pringles
We all know that these are fake and reconstituted. That second word? “Reconstituted”? Is how my mother ends any conversation in which the P-word is brought up. “They’re reconstituted, for god’s sake!” with a roll of the eyes, toss of the arm, argument done.

Yeah, I know, Mom; you raised us on the best-ever homemade bread and wouldn’t buy Froot Loops and had us listen to Free to Be, You and Me, but I’m sorry. You couldn’t save us. Yesterday, when I stopped into the gas station for a huge bottle of water after going down to these salt marshes for a story I’m working on, it was ninety degrees. All my own salt was sweated away, a blotchy pattern on my green t-shirt.
Then I saw the can.
It had been maybe years since I’d last had Pringles. Although you wouldn’t buy them, you didn’t count on my best friend in elementary school. I’d get off at her bus stop, and she and I would measure entire afternoons with Doritos and Hohos and Pringles and entire sleeves of Girl Scout Samoas while we dressed and undressed our Barbies and had the little sugar-and-fat-fueled gals run away from home and rescue each other. Till it was time for supper at her house. When we’d order in pizza from Domino’s.

So yesterday, I buy the regular Pringles can, not the small “snack” size that’s one-quarter the height and ten cents cheaper because, you know, I’m a smart shopper. I get in the car and start snacking—no, munching—no; something more grotesque and gluttonous. And then I see I’ve eaten a quarter of the can and so I close the lid.

Fast forward to tonight, when my roommate gets home.

Fearfully, I approach her. “Did you eat some of those Pringles?”
She shakes her head nah.
“Oh, no, Carmelita. You—didn’t? Tell me you ate some! Tell me I didn’t do—this!!” (Alice tears off the plastic lid to reveal…four, maybe five, sad chips curled sideways and alone at the base of the Pringles silo.)
Oh, but I did. I did. I am powerless.


3. Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year
When will I tire of this record? I listened to it on the way to and from the salt marshes. O, “Calistan” and “Ole Mulholland”. “Fazer Eyes” is my favorite love song and “White Noisemaker” just rules and then, like two seconds later, it’s over. Oh, perfect rockitty-pop; I love you. I love you. I love you. I do.


4. My car.
Dear ghostcar may be dying. My mechanic can’t find the problem, but a car whose battery light flashes and then just dies mid-drive is not a well car. So tonight I dropped it elsewhere for a second opinion after not driving it for four days.

Your car becomes the main thing you come to count on without thinking about it if it’s been with you while other, more seemingly-solid things have come and gone.

But it’s old. A few years ago it started burning oil. Then the speedometer and odometer went. Great big tears have rent the upholstery for as long as I’ve had it, and it’s got its share of dents, too.
But it’s a good car. It’s always run well, and I love driving it. Love the way it shifts, its tiny size and vroomy pick-up.

I’m not one to get romantic over cars; I drive a Honda, for god’s sake.

Still, there’s not a major milestone since the end of college for which Ghostcar’s not been there. It was the first car I bought myself. It housed my first major, marathon, heart-wrenching breakup, which spanned a drive from Detroit to Atlanta. (Yeah.) My dog’s muddy, destructive jaunt from puppy- to adulthood. About a dozen moves. Spur-of-the-moment trips to Kentucky. I swear it knows the way to Pittsburgh.

Even with its busted front bumper. Even with its lack of a/c--I'll even take that, here, south of the Mason-Dixon. And the old stickers that will not peel off. I hope it sticks around a little longer.

Bad lyrics good life
I’ve been listening to a lot of music with very bad lyrics lately. Interpol and The Rentals. I love, love, love this music; you just have to plug your ears and go “la la la” when you start thinking about the words (“Would you like to be my missus and in future with child?”) you’re singing.

Things both are and are not as stressful as I’ve made them out to be here. I have a number of ideas for the thesis, and I’m plugging away on quite a few. It’s just that something someone said yesterday in a class, is true: Researching and writing are polar opposite activities. So while I’m all into the research end of things, I see no daily output in the writing, and that… Well, it’s just a big ol’ bummer when everyone around me is coming to workshops with pages and pages and with gleaming faces, “Oh, the writing was just so great, this weekend.” This weekend, for me? Well, the writing About Things Completely Unrelated to the Thesis was pretty good. But even that didn’t amount to much, quantitatively. And the poets. The poets-! With their, “Oh, I wrote two poems this week.” A poem. I am jealous of that unit of measurement. Gah-. Fucking poets with their beautiful, perfect, gifted fucking writing.

This year is weird, altogether. I’m a lot more solitary than I’ve ever been, and I don’t care. It’s that knowledge of people in the next rooms. People who are kindred. I need not talk with them, however, to get along with them. It reminds me of those odd sexual relationships where you don’t have anything to say to the other person. Except I’m not sleeping with my roommates. And we have plenty to say when we come up for air. So I guess that’s a bad analogy. Boy, it’s a good thing I’m a writer. I’m so obviously a writer.

Okay, to bed.

(Note: Other beanbag surface features the image of a joyful, smiling Tammy Faye.)

Began this night quiet, at home, writing after going for a run. Pleasant. Nick Drake. Smog. Then silence.
Then there were people here. These people—my friends, after all—announced, “We have wine!” Kept writing for about an hour. Made a mix cd for my very oldest friend. Heard people in kitchen. The best thing, after all, is this: to have people in the next room, available, but you, still alone. Then emerged, so tired, happy. Drank wine. Talked. Joked. Drank more wine. Joked about: Billy Squier, Abba, Crash Test Dummies. Mmm-hmm-hm. (“Didn’t he die? Cancer? Oh god, I’m terrible.”)

A game of cornhole outside. Thwap, thwap. Terrible, tonight. Beanbags landing everywhere but the neat little circle cut out of wood. What do you expect, after three glasses? We stenciled these to celebrate the generous spirit of Tammy Faye Baker, for a party. The friends who lived here before had cornhole sets spraypainted to look like June and Johnny Cash. When I put the purchase of these naked wooden boxes on my credit card, my roommate said her dad would slap her for paying good money for a few pieces of wood, nailed together. I said, we don’t have time to go looking for the perfect cornhole trees. My goodfriendinWisconsin found the whole thing enormously amusing. On the phone, the night we stayed up really late painting them the night before the party at which they would be unveiled, he made jokes: “Your favorite thing in the world always was the cornhole out on the verandah.” and "Okay. Don't stay up too late obsessing over your cornhole."

Tonight, thought about practice. Decided I could do this just about forever. The same gesture, something calming. Casual toss, thwap. Casual toss, wonderful silnece of landing the beanbag perfectly. Decided: we should be the very best at this game at any party, since it belongs to us. We should be cornhole sharks. Thought about the drinking while playing as an advanced brand of training. Should be able to play, drunk. In fact, we should only be able to play drunk. Thought of my father, how he loves to grow wistful and sweet with wine. Thought: I am exactly the same. Thought, What a nice Saturday, after all. Realized: it wasn’t Saturday. What was it? It was this game, midnight. Traffic outfront and you should relax and wow, you are.

The D-Word
I think I’ve said here before that one perk of having moved to Beachtown is that it’s much easier to visit my grandmother, who lives about three hours away from here. She turns 92 this month. She’s lived the majority of those years independently, and willfully so, by herself in the same ranch-style house where my mother spent her teenage years.

I admire my grandmother more than I can say for this independence, and for her snappiness of spirit, her good sense of humor and her amazing adaptability when it comes to changing with the times. (“I don’t know, Alice, why—you know—gay people are like that, but I guess it don’t matter. I guess they just love each other.” This, out of the blue on any given afternoon while slicing up chicken for salad, the kitchen scissors held aloft in that way that you can tell she’s been chewing on this idea since she saw a segment on Larry King the night before. And this, let me remind you: from a nonagenarian who’s lived her entire life in a very small southern town whose major feature amounts to the tobacco, soy and cotton fields that surround it.)

What’s true about what’s happened to her is true even though I hate it, and I hate it because: 1. it seems so preventable in retrospect and also because yes, 2., it’s such a freaking cliché, and who wants to have the circumstances of her life or that of those she loves so easily explained and discardable?

I start and re-start this same sentence:
She had a fall
Since my grandma had a fall last spring, she’s
There’s no denying that my grandma
False starts. I don’t want to use the word “decline,” because it sounds so inevitable and I don’t want to believe in the inevitability of this. I want to get mad at the doctors for not figuring out what’s still making her back hurt her so, after so many months. For not getting it: This is Nona. You have no idea how amazing a woman you’re dealing with, here. She’s never been on a single medication on her life, and now she’s on this horrible merry-go-round of painkillers that she hates and which make it hard for her to keep up much of an appetite and that make her groggy and confused. It’s not her, I want to tell them. I feel angry at them for making her not her.
She had a surgery on her back a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to slug the nurse who shouted to her, an hour into the recovery room, in this horrible sing-song, “Nowww, Elizabeth, are we ready to try to eat something?” The lurch of pride and anger inside me, at this woman who looked at Nona and saw only her lack of hearing (hearing aids out), her grogginess at the drugs which caused her to move her denture plate around in her mouth as though it itself were food. This is not the entirety of who my grandmother is. It’s a moment; it’s not her identity. I wanted to tell Nurse Kindergarten Marm to stand the hell back: This woman’s worth three of you.

Maybe all this anger is in part, confusing messenger with message.

I guess you can’t prepare yourself for this. You can’t make yourself feel everything as hard as possible in the anticipation of what’s to come. Every time my best friend in the world takes off on a plane to a rainforest village in some Central American country as part of his job, try as my hamster-wheel mind might, I can’t make myself dream up every terrible scenario as part of some superstitious Terrible Event Prevention method. And I literally, cannot tell him I love him, enough.

My grandma knows what’s up. She’s scared of the physical pain and scareder still, of the increasing loss of independence it’s meaning. That hour after her last surgery, she really didn’t know up very well from down, but she was sitting up and looking for her shoes; she wanted to go home, now.

She is not afraid of death; at least that’s what she’s said for the last ten years: that she’s ready to go up and sing with the angels. It’s all that comes before. And what I’m scared of, in the end, is that same helplessness: on her part and on mine and on the parts of my mother and uncle: As she walks down this road, we cannot follow; we cannot fix. The most I can do is to be there through any decline that happens, pat her soft hand and tell her I love her, as many times as I want.

News in Briefish

The move – It’s over. The three of us began our move on the morning of an extremely muggy Saturday, under the direction of Yammers, the neighborhood streetcat. Yammers has successfully charmed Ginger and Carmelita’s block with his street-hustler brand of affection, his prodigious drool and equally generous gifts of dead mice, voles and—most recently—a squirrel the size of Yammers himself, on G and C’s front porch.

Interlude/Ode:
A jolly little song for Yammers (named for his sweet potatah’ color and disposition) by Ginger:

Yammers, oh Yammers.
Our new Gentleman Caller.
He doesn’t leave his Calling Card;
He nails it to your Heart.

Turns out that Ginger and Carm’ are not the only ones who’ve been caring for Yammers. He goes by George across the street, where they feed him wet food and dry, and down the road, he’s known as Sam. We found out about one other life that last day. Turns out that next door, Yammers is Walter. There, he lounges around inside and out, and enjoys free-form jazz music with the elderly bachelor who lives there. Oh, Yammers. You’ll be just fine.
So, Yammers/George/Sam sat in his usual spot on Ginger and Carmelita’s porch, looking on with slit-eyed approval as the three of us lugged their heaviest, most unwieldy furniture down G and C’s steep staircase and onto the Oldest UHaul in Beachtown. I’m serious: When I drove the thing off their lot, I first thought it did not work at all, since there was zero forward motion until I had the acceleration pedal flush with the floor.

The Oldest UHaul also turned out to be rusted-through in spots, so when the subsequent noon downpour came, it also ruined a couple boxes of Ginger and Carmelita’s books and soaked through their mattresses as well. Word to the Wise: This is not covered by U-Haul unless you buy their special “Your UHaul is a piece of Crap and Will Ruin Your Personal Belongings If it Rains” Insurance. S’true.
Around noon, two friends came and kicked much moving ass with us until long after the sun went down. Things went a lot faster and both apartments were translated to Mansion House.

Mansion House has many small, quirky, things wrong with it. It is, however, utterly amazing on the whole. I had a friend over for supper the last week and she walked around slack-jawed for about five minutes at the place’s high ceilings and wood paneling and awesome antique peacock wallpaper in the dining room. I remembered, suddenly, doing the same when last year’s tenants had me over for supper for the first time. And thought of how we take for granted what we’re around every day. And how maybe Lorrie Moore is right in this one short story of hers in which one of her characters posits this notion that we can only love what we don’t understand. In some small ways, at some small moments, maybe. Maybe, Lorrie Moore.
Anyhoo.

Chicaaaago! — is where I am, at present. Visiting my sister, yo. This morning, she asked me what I wanted to see, so I looked up all these “Haunted/Weird/Historic Chicago” activities online, but they all cost more dinero than Lowly Grad Student Me wants to spend. So instead we went to Wicker Park for the Haunted Consumer-Whore Tour of Chicago. Ducked into one shoe store where I flipped over a price tag that read $485, and immediately had that sort of scary nightmare idea about What If I somehow destroyed these shoes completely?-->like, dropped them and then jumped up and down on them repeatedly with the hefty mary janes I wore into the store? That whole fear-of-walking-too- close-to-the-edge-of-the-Scenic-Overlook,-because-what-if-you-just-jumped? thing.
Gives you goosebumps.

Tonight, we take in one stop of the cheap and yummy Salvadoran food tour, so I am psyched about that.

Also, about Chicago: The stranger-type-men here are all stare-y and flirty, (and in the worst cases, cat-call-y.) It’s a little jarring after Beachtown, where the creepiness was more in the vein of “Wait, isn’t that guy dating that 19-year-old, 40?”

Also, about Chicago: At any hour that I sit down on this couch in this apartment, there are children playing in the street down below, with at least one screaming in a repeated car-alarm-like pattern. This includes midnight.

Eyelid twitching – I was lying down reading the very last issue of Punk Planet (huge sob. possibly more about this later), dozing off to said screams and shouts. It was that sort of quasi-sleep that involved a To Do list of things that must be accomplished upon return to Beachtown. It also included a brief worry session over the fact that I often have trouble recalling the perfect descriptive words right when I want them, and does this mean I have some sort of early-stage brain disorder or perhaps a tumor? The poor word-recall is part of the reason that my Real Writing™ takes so long, part of the reason I’m an abysmal arguer who often scripts perfect witty and biting come-backs several hours or days after the argument. So I’m lying there falling in and out of sleep, worrying because I’m trying unsuccessfully to come up with the word “integrity,” and then I really fall asleep. And then I wake up and my left eyelid’s twitching. Still is.

Today I broke up with Proactiv.
And old P’ took it surprisingly hard.

So, I was clearing out everything from the cabinet under the bathroom sink, and somehow, I’m telling you, like six or eight or three-dozen of those little white bottles of the mail-order acne solution stuff had accrued there. Some of them had gotten together in the dark, down there, and mated, or maybe populated the space via some creepy spore-like process. I don’t want to know. What I do know, is that the shit’s expensive, and that it works no better at maintaining my sparkling fine complexion than the five-dollar stuff you buy at Harris Teeter.

So I went to the Proactiv website. Logged in to my account and searched and searched for the page from which you could cease, halt, all ordering of the stuff. No such page. So I grabbed my phone, hit the 800-whatever-whatever, and went back to cleaning out the bathroom.

A nice enough sounding woman answered the phone. She called up my account.
“Ms. Deaver, we have no record of your phone number, on file in your club membership. Would you care to add one?”
“Well, actually, no,” I said, “I don’t think so, since I’m actually calling to cancel my account.” I said this in a nice-enough voice, maybe a tad distracted, since I was now tossing other things from beneath the cabinet: old bottles of lotion with miniscule amounts left, tubes of this and that, expired ibuprofen, and I was marveling at all the junk a single person can collect in the course of a year. How complex can one person’s own body and physical conditions thereof be? Was I some sort of closet-hypochondriac? And good god, was I this vain regarding my damn looks?
Meanwhile, the Proactiv operator had started in on her, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that you’re canceling...” spiel. I only half-listened as she asked me why. I know computer scripts, and I was imagining the one in front of her, which required that she ask me this.
“Oh. Well,” I said, collecting all the tampons into one box. Those freaking buggers can scatter all over the place; I’m telling you if you’re not familiar, s’true. “Well, I guess it’s because-” I hadn’t thought about a concrete reason I could give her. I glanced over at the dozens of bottles of Proactiv acne treatment all lined up like soldiers in the brown cardboard box onto which I’d scrawled “Bathroom” in black Sharpie. I could survive in a bunker with blemish-free skin for years with that box. “Um, well. I guess it’s because I could buy the over-the-counter stuff and it works just as well.”
“So are you saying that the Proactiv isn’t working for you?”
“Well, no. That’s not it.” I stood up. The last thing I wanted was to get into some personal discussion about the degree of effectiveness of acne medication on my blotchy, frustrating skin with this woman. The last thing I wanted was to get into any sort of discussion with her, really. But the times when really elementary prevarication would smooth the way in life are precisely the times when I tend to just trip up and start telling the stupid, messy truth. Usually when I’m distracted by something else. “No, that’s not it. It’s just that I could just get stuff at the store,” I said, considering it honestly for a moment. Then I realized that she just needed an answer to fill in her stupid computer screen. “Oh. Well, you know? That’s fine. I guess I’ll just say that. It doesn’t work.”
This is when everything changed. Suddenly, the woman adopted a new tone.
“Well, Ms. Deaver.” Her voice was sad, disappointed, my sweet kindergarten teacher when no one in class would own up to stealing the cherry-scented Mr. Sketch marker from the set. “I really, really would hope that you would feel you could be honest with us about why you feel you need to discontinue your membership.” Was she going to cry? “I see here, you’ve been a member a really long time.”
What? Was she next going to remind me about my first really bad outbreak when I was nineteen? And how nothing would help? And how it was a shame that Proactiv hadn’t been invented yet, then? Was she going to bring up Nero, my first cat, dead these twenty years? The fact that I had eaten popcorn as part of my so-called nutritionally-complete dinner for the past four nights? What secret tool did this woman not have in her arsenal?
And what fricking nerve? I mean, Jesus.
I reminded myself that she was just a telephone operator who probably hated her job. I would not be that asshole. Further, I would not let her get under my skin, let her ruin my pleasant detachment. I tossed the box of reunited Tampax into the cardboard box, and said evenly,
“Uh, you know? I guess it’s just because there are other, cheaper things that work just as well.”
“Well, how long would you say you've been using these 'other products'?”
“What? Oh. Some months, I guess.”
And then she said, yes, I shite you not:
“Only a few months?”
“Well, months, years."
"And are they honestly as effective as Proactiv?"
"Again, I...yes. Yes, they're better. I really want to cancel this membersh—this account.”
And then, just as she’d arrived, the ghost of my kindergarten teacher Reborn as Condescending Saleslady disappeared. Her voice was crisp, officious.
“Okay, well. I’ll cancel your membership, then. Effective August first. Is there anything else I can do for you, today?”
“Uh, no.”
“Okay, then. Goodbye.”
And she. Hung up. On me. Which is fine. I got to finish up with packing the bathroom stuff, and move on to the kitchen, which was the real bear.

The cat, he's a bit of drama queen, and there's no way to convince him that it'll be okay, that the advancing brigade of cardboard boxes do not signal the end times. He twitches and flips over again, washes the same spot on his chest, and won't move from that spot on the furthest corner of the bed, where he faces the wall.

Hey Summer, Where ya Been?
A= This is moving week. Yes, it’s adieu to ye olde artsy garret in favor of a portion of giant old mansion built in the nineteen-teens, with my two pals, Ginger and Carmelita. It’s not that I don’t need, love and crave solitude, Henshaw; it’s that too much of it in an enforced way magnifies my weird little proclivities to the max. Soon, the decoupage is everywhere and things are organized in a ROY G BIV sorting system made up in a fit of 2 a.m. inspiration. You understand. Merely having people in the next room, or the next wing, as this gigantor apartment will allow, is comforting. It tells me there’s order, and there’s dinner taking place at a normal hour in the next room, which I am welcome to join, or to decline, politely.

The folks moving out left things in the mansion house—which I may just call the place here—with a wink and nod to a great Jenny Lewis tune—anyway, they left it kind of a mess. This means that Carmelita and Ginger and I have spent the past two weeks dumping things and scrubbing things and shouting, “Oh god, that’s disgusting!” a lot, upon revealing items such as particularly gigantic dead cockroaches, rat droppings and dog turds in kitchen cabinets.
No one ever said the road to the life of beauty was a smooth one.

So, we’ve been cleaning. Meanwhile, I’ve been in the early stages of trying to put together a syllabus for my classes this fall, and-! working on two stories I want to have ready for workshop when classes start up again. This, between: putting in many a mind-numbing, but necessary hour at ye olde call center of doom and writing articles for various local publications. That and I can’t seem to shake this weirdo summer cold which tells me that all I really want to do is sleep all the time.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to Carmelita and Ginger, the notion of creating some Uruk-hai from the pits of the steamy swamps west of Beach Town to help us move things from our two apartments to the new one, come Saturday. Seems their only close male friend is outta town for the weekend, which brings our collective grand total of close male friends here in town to zero.
Not that we need the menfolk. The three of us have enough moves under our belts to be able to move our big unwieldy wooden furniture in our damn sleep at this point, anyway, I suspect. We’ll be fine. Freaking exhausted, but fine.
Gotta go, now. See ya.

(Meanwhile: Listening nonstop to these songs on the National’s newest record that Marshall keeps feeding me, one by one. Argh.)

Today I am boycotting the great outdoors. Today, the outdoors are not so great; when I got up at seven o’clock this morning, it was 80 degrees out. The high is 96. Which, when I swung my legs out of bed and listened dully to the public radio announcer say it, made me want to just disappear, like some reverse version of Toad, back into the great cave of my cool sheets and blankets till fall.

Besides, today, I am not so great, either. Last night after work, I went out for Mexican food with Ginger and Carmelita, and even though I’d been the one drumming on the dashboard, practically, in my excitement at the prospect of mole chicken and the best salsa in the world, by the end of our meal, I was ready to crawl under the table and sleep. We crawled home instead, and while Ginger and Carm’ went on to drink beers on their porch and enjoy the beautiful evening, I tossed the shade over my the bedroom window to shut the sun out and went straight to sleep.

I have a scratchy throat today, and a feeling of fatigue that will not quit. However, I also have a/c and a loyal kitty-cat and a computer. And a fall syllabus to design, and an article to write and well, an apartment full of furniture and belongings to transport across town in the coming week when I move, but screw it. I will eat corn fritters and watch McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which has been sitting, taunting me for weeks, lounging around my apartment in its little red Netflix sleeve. (I like to pay fifteen dollars a month to rent what usually amounts to one or two movies. It’s great.)

Anyway, today I will read good things, and I will write things that have nothing to do with obligation, and I will sure as hell not take one step outside until that sun has the decency to go away again.

The Fabulous Destiny -!
Last night I had two friends over for supper. While I was buzzing around getting ready, cleaning the bathroom counter, chopping onions, singing to el Dangercat and whatnot, I felt this weird hum beneath the surface. This is good, I thought. I am coming out of my summer funk, I thought, which, in truth Henshaw, has been more of a late winter/spring/summer funk. It was then that I realized that it’s been months. Months. Since the end of winter, that I’ve invited another person into my home. Which is highly ridiculous, since cooking meals for people and breaking the old bread together is one of the things I live for in this world.

Here’s the thing, pointed out in another context by one of the good friends I had over last night: You have to put out there what you hope to get back. You can’t just sit around miserable and hope someone freaking notices. Which sounds all platitudinous, maybe, on the surface, but really: How many of us have ever bitched about not getting real letters in the mail anymore? How long has it been since any of us has sat down and written a real letter to someone?
So, not to get all Amelie on your ass, but still. It’s something to think about, Henshaw. We had a really great time last night. I am thankful for the good people in my life.

Something Like
Homecoming. That’s it.
I’m back in Beachtown. It's been about three minutes since I stepped into this apartment, this place presided over by this Dangercat, (presently yelling and twining himself all around my legs), and it’s weird: A few weeks’ absence isn’t that lengthy a stretch of time, but when I opened my apartment door, extremely unwieldy suitcase in tow, and looked up that mammoth staircase, I inhaled sharply. I swear it surprised me, Henshaw, to see everything still there, that brown, shiny banister and the horrible fluorescent lighting and the dust.
I breathed it in, and breathing it in made me think these exact words with sort of a detached wonderment.
“It smells just like my old life.”
My first weeks and first semester here, a time which, as I pulled the giant suitcase up those 32-million steps, came rushing back in a disjointed and distant little montage (Thunk, thunk, thunk, went the suitcase.) Everything so far away, feeling about as personally related to me as do childhood memories that your elder relatives tell you about: “You remember that, don’t you?”
Sure, I do. Sure. Absolutely.

The feeling didn’t cease once I came inside. My belongings, all these books on this cherry-wood shelf, this black-and-white photograph positioned just so, currently far above the head of the little furry beast loudly proclaiming its ownership over me; someone named me once put these things together in this space and decided it was home, which, at the moment feels, not sadly, but utterly, ludicrous.