That's My Bix!

My Evil Throat Of Death continues to plague me. I’m all snuffy and my voice has slowly gone from sounding Kathleen Turnerish to the realm of Henry Kissinger. Tres sexy, non?

So I went to the Doctor on Wednesday. Dr. Perky never works on Wednesday so I got to see her backup guy. I don’t have a pseudonym for him. Dr. Hot N’Gentle, maybe we’ll call him. He’s sexy but in a tender, Sarah McLaughlin kind of way. He’s Rupert Murdoch mixed with a Walton boy.

‘Well, Weetabix, you’re certainly looking a lot better today!’ He exclaimed in his Hot and Gentle kind of way. And I did look better. I was wearing a light blue long-sleeved t-shirt that did good things to my complexion and pearl drop earings, a far cry from the enormous sweatshirt and sweatpants with my ghostly white face of last time.

‘Well, that’s because I’m not heaving into your garbage can.’ I quipped. With health there is sarcasm. He didn’t get to see that side of me last time. He instead got to see the shivering, bleary-eyed wanting-to-die Weetabix. ‘But I don’t think it’s completely gone away. I mean, I haven’t spoken with my real voice in a month and my throat is starting to hurt again and I’ve never really gotten better.’

He felt my sinus’ and looked up my nose (What the hell can they see up your nose? Seriously? It’s just a booger canal, right? I think all doctors are just some kind of sadists.) and down my throat and then tapped on my forehead (‘Does this hurt?’ ‘Ow!’) and on my cheeks (‘How about this?’ ‘MOFO OW!’) and then looked at my throat. He agreed that it wasn’t too bad yet but assured me that it would be getting worse.

‘Also, my neck really hurts. I think it’s my blimphoids or something.’

‘Hmmmm.’ He said, feeling up and down my neck and jaw. He screwed up his face and then said:

‘Well, Weetabix, exactly WHAT have you been doing with your neck?’

My mind filled with the image of me involved in many strange and surprisingly acrobatic acts of perversion involving my neck. It was as though that question, with the sort of speculative sotto voice he used, was apparently a subliminal cue. From the look of shock and horror on Dr. Hot N’Gentle’s face, his brain went there as well. The muzak had even taken on a rather specific ‘Bow chicka BOW BOW’ tone and for a brief moment, I had a mental image of a hot pizza delivery boy about to knock on the door of the examining room.

We both fought mutual blushes and he stammered that we were going to try Cinemax’. ZITHROMAX to combat the swelling’er’ CONGESTION ‘deep in my ‘ um’ throat. Yeah.

Note to self: schedule yearly physical on day other than Wednesday.

On a plus note, for all of the extra hours I have put into work this month, I have been rewarded with a half day off. Woot!

And I’m spending it going grocery shopping. Seriously. This is not my beautiful life.

I still keep crying quiet little sad tears over Mister Rogers. I probably should refrain from reading lovely articles such as this one but I just can’t help it. Read it if only for the bit about the subway ride with the children or the thing about the boy with the sword. They are all so beautiful. He was just such an incredible example of what we have a chance to be. The magic.

Be a sweetheart and make someone smile today. Or just smile at someone who isn’t smiling at all because it’s a nice thing to do. Or make someone’s day and sign a guestbook today. Or check out a diary you might not have read. Pretend to be an optimist if you’re a pessimist. Take a moment and find beauty in something you see every day. And most important of all things: look. Just look. It’s a big word, that. Look. When my brain used sounds like coloring books, the word “look” was a flash of green, like a leaf in June.

Look.

Have a wonderful weekend. It’s just full of possibilities.

Shhhhhhhhh.

Don’t speak.

Just sit there and listen.

Do you hear that?

No’ wait’Nevermind. It was nothing.

There it is again. Did you hear it that time?

Let’s just wait it out. We have some time, right? I have a whole little pot of Body Shop lip balm. Born Lippy, it’s called. I think that’s what I should have called my web page, instead of Dumber than a Box of Rocks. Because no one calls it that. It’s too long. Too wordy. Seven big ass syllables, which is a whole lot when you consider that we live in a world where everything needs to fit into a two second sound byte. Andy Warhol was wrong about the fifteen minutes of fame. No one has time for a whole fifteen minutes anymore.

But Born Lippy. However, it’s yet another mickey fickey trademark. Fucking copyrights. They Plague Me ‘.

Did I tell you? I ran out for takeout food the other night’ curry shrimp, actually’ yeah, it was really good’ you know, that little place on University’ yeah, by the nail place and the cleaners’ mmmhmmm’. Anyway, I was sitting there at the bar, waiting for my takeout order, and there was this beatnik boy in there, eating so close to the bar, sort of like he worked there, only I don’t think he did. And everything was quiet, it was just us, the woman taking down the Mongolian barbecue line, and Peter the cook who was in the kitchen making my shrimp’ and there was a television and it was tuned to CNN, and they were talking about the war and stuff’ yeah’ so, it’s quiet and all of the sudden, the beatnik guy says ‘What do you think about this war in Iraq?’ and I’m startled because he asked it so conversationally, as though we had been talking all along, as though we had even acknowledged each other, and I actually peaked behind the bar to see if he was talking to someone else. So I said sort of sarcastically ‘I try to think about it as little as possible.’ And he didn’t take that for an answer, and prodded me to make some kind of decision, and that’s when I realized that I honestly didn’t know JACK about the war in Iraq and I ended up postulating some kind of motivation behind the actions of our nation’s leaders and then wished and prayed that my shrimp curry would come before he realized how completely stupid I really am. And then he apologized for making me talk about something I didn’t want to talk about and then I felt even more stupid for being such an ostrich.

Listen’ there it is again. Sort of’ pingy, you know? Like metal, but sort of’ wet metal.

I’ll talk softer.

And so then I thought about how when I was growing up, Mom dated the hippy guy and we’d go to these disarmament meetings and have these No Nukes rallies. And I even did a watercolor painting about nuclear war with my little set of 8 Crayola watercolors. And in our basement we had a poster of Nagasaki. And there was a book on our bookshelf that had a little girl all burned, so hurt she couldn’t scream. And I remember how when I was growing up, I thought everything was futile because we were just going to get blown away or radiation poisoning when they nuked Chicago anyway and that no Volvo could drive fast enough to get away from a big mushroom cloud. And I remember thinking that it was ridiculous for the United States to declare that no one else could have bombs but us, so no wonder the rest of the countries all look at us and shake their heads. But sometimes it makes me feel dumb. Because honestly, I’d rather talk about boobs and nail polish and watch ‘You’ve Got Mail’ for the eight hundredth time. So yeah, I think that did something to my head when it comes to current events.

But the other night, something unique happened. It was an epiphany of sorts, although it had nothing to do with the war or anything else. I got two incredible pieces of mail, from two writers I admire greatly. It was actual mail, on paper, with a stamp and writing. And one was from my college friend Laurie, whom Esteban always called ‘The Girl With The Shit In Her Face’ because she was very decorated.

‘What? What did that have to do with war? Nothing’ other than the fact that she’s an activist for various things, peace and animal rights being foremost. But stay with me’.

I found her on the internet and while she doesn’t email a whole lot, she likes regular mail. I sent her a Valentine and she sent me back her chapbook and a lovely little letter with her crooked handwriting that I recognized immediately. It’s funny, that kind of thing, handwriting. Mine has multiple personalities, honestly. Sometimes it is thin and cold slanty perfect and othertimes it is fat and loopy and giggling and listening to Cyndi Lauper and Madonna on its Walkman while snapping lime green Hubba Bubba bubblegum. So I read her lovely little letter and then some of her poems, which were incredible and made me want to steal some of the lines, which is how you know when you’ve found something really good. Instead of appreciating it, you are jealous because you wish you had written it. Like Jincy Willett. She makes me jealous too. And Ethan Canin, but mostly because he attended and now teaches at the University of Iowa’s writing program.

No, I think the sound stopped now’ I don’t hear it anymore’ but let me finish.

So Sunday night, I gathered up all of my loose stuff and started trying to combine all of my pieces and scribbles of poems and vague writing into my current journal. Every homeless piece of something that I have stored on computer or in my planner. And I didn’t get very far, but it was lovely just the same, especially when I’d find the original of some poem and then the second and third versions all typed up and official. I could have done it for hours. Actually, I did sit there for hours, but I could have gone on all night. Literally.

The act of holding a pen, of scribbling your little glyphs onto paper. It’s so intimate. Not like these perfectly formed Times New Roman letters where I can type off a sentence at 100 wpm and then obliterate it just as quickly. It forces you to write at the pace of your breathe. A heartbeat for every word. It’s a strange thing, watching those random slashes and scribbles.

All through my old journals are pictures of fish. All sorts of fish. Lots of sharks, some googly-eyed cartoon fish, little segmented eel things, plankton, shrimp. I never realized that my doodles had a theme before.

And in one place, I found a little written conversation that I had with laurie, who only writes in lower case. It went something like this.

‘I ate too much peanut sauce.’

‘I’m sorry’

‘I smell pickled.’

‘Nope.’

And then there are little giddy children figures dancing across the page, off into the margins. Those have to be laurie’s, because my figures would have been chased by sharks.

So I did about a third of the organizing that needed to be done and ended up writing a couple of poems too, so now my current leather journal is a compilation of uncataloged poems, scribbles, song lists, poems all neatly typed out but then cut out crooked and taped onto the page, and a poem that I love by a friend I miss about the Hayakutake comet. And during all of this cutting and taping and scribbling, I realized that long fingernails have no place on the hands of a writer. So I cut them off and took off the polish. Ok, a bit extreme. I’ll likely polish them again, but for the moment, they are plain and short. Certainly not the nibbled nubs that they were when my notebooks swam with crill eaters and cartilaginous life, but shorter just the same.

You have my permission right now to club me over the head repeatedly with a Spiegel catalog if I decide to stop shaving my legs in the name of my art.

But the important thing there was that I realized as I sat there working through all of this stuff that was for me, just for me, that it was the best thing I’ve done in months. MONTHS. And I can’t believe that it never even occurred to me to do such a thing before then. Oh, I’ve gone through my old stuff, particularly while I was compiling my applications to the various grad school programs, and I’ve kept writing more, but to sit there and just dive wholly into the bulk of it, all of those really private words and scribbles and where I could see exactly how hard or how lightly I pushed the pen into the paper’ it was like the compass had aligned and was pointing straight north once more.

Sometimes when you think you’ve lost something, it’s exactly where you left it.

Hi.

Me? I’m drunk.

Malibu. Malibue and Diet Coke. I think I bought one drink, then Naked Chris bought the rest. He never did get naked. And then there was another Chris. And Elvis. And somehow my lip priunts got on Elvis, Chris, Eric, and a very old man named Don.

Good god.

Oh, and my sister stopped me from kicking the asses of several skinny bitches.

Seriously. Bitches. I think they were the moms of the previous skinny bitches. Or possibly the First Bitches (kind of like the First Evil on Buffy but.. not. Oh! And Faith was our bartender. She was five by five, b, ain’t that right? Want’ take’ have). They were like muses from greek mythology only bitches. Or butches. No, they were bitches.

Bitches.

Fucking bitches.

Fucking skinny bithces.

I so cannot spell when drunk.

And there was Elvis. Did I tell you that? Elvis. Elvis is everywhere.

My fingers, however, are not everywhere and typing is oh so hard at this point.

Esteban just came in and told me to come to bed. And I’m shirviering.

Shivering. That’s the wrd. Right there. Shivering.

And I wore my tinerkerbell tshirt with my tinkerbell sundies. Like underoos but for big girls.

That sounds like a special department at Sears, doesn’t it? Big girls. Like ‘hefty’. I always hated that word. Hefty. It’s a garbage bag, people, don’t call your children ‘hefty’ because it’s just not right.

Damn.

Goig to bed nowl

So I was on the phone with my drunken mama and mentioned to her that I would be going to San Francisco in a few weeks.

“I wish I could go somewhere. No one ever invites me anywhere. It’s not like I’ve ever gone anywhere in my life. You go everywhere and do everything all the time. You’re so lucky.”

Seriously, I could almost see her crawling up onto a cross in her living room and asking her father in heaven why he had forsaken her with the inability to earn frequent flier miles.

I rolled my eyes, especially at the “lucky” comment. It wasn’t luck. It was by design. I made things happen. I decided what was important. It is, for instance, important for me to have fun, to go to different places, to expand my life experiences. It is not, for example, important for me to do extraordinary amounts of drinking and allow people to mooch off me with pathetic excuses about how they are down on their luck. Nor is it part of my personality to basically wait around for some mythical windfall of cash to drop into my lap.

But I didn’t say that. No. Instead I said “Mother, if YOU want to go someplace, then go someplace. All it would take for you to go to San Francisco is the $220 in airfare.”

And as the words left my mouth, it was like the final scene of The Longest Yard as my brain tried frantically to recall the words back into my mouth, with an anguished “NoooooooOOOOOOOooooooooOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH!”

“Wow! That’s a great idea!” She brightened. “You and I could share a hotel room and I’m about to get my tax return in ten days… when are you going?… oh my, and there’s a special right now at my bank where if you sign up for a direct deposit checking account, you can get a buddy ticket and fly free, so all I’d need to spend money on would be my food and going out and oh my gosh, that would be so great because you always have such fun and I’ll have to talk to Grandma about watching Jonathon… I’vegottoruntothebankrightawaybye!”

There I sat, listening to a dial tone, envisioning my drunken mama making passes at my friends, or having grand discussions with the sea lions in Fisherman’s Wharf, or pretending that she can speak Chinese in Chinatown (because she worked for a Chinese restaurant for eight years and felt that was immersion into the language). And the sad realization that it would be easier and less painful to get rid of a flaming case of herpes than to ditch my mom in San Francisco.

And I could only sit there and cradle my head in my hands. My head which had failed me. Every stupid thing I have ever done has originated in my head. Perhaps surgery of some nature would be beneficial. Lobotomy. Decapitation. Any of the above.

So I quickly called her bank to learn more of this free ticket. Apparently, you would need to buy the first plane ticket at full price in order to get the Leech ticket for free. Something I wasn’t willing to do. So I quickly devised a plan. I would use the bait and switch method.

She called back, very forlorn. “You’d have to spend $450 for your ticket… and you wouldn’t want to do that for me.” with the rather obvious intonation that she hoped that I would do just that. For her.

“Mom… listen. You don’t really WANT to go to San Francisco, you just want to go on vacation right? So let’s actually plan a trip with the entire family… you, me, Esteban, Mo, Abigail and Jonathon….maybe to Disneyworld in Florida… and we could rent a condo or something and it wouldn’t be all that expensive… and you’d have time to save up rather than scrambling for funds.”

Given that she punctuated my little practiced speech with “YES!” and “YESSSSSSSS!”, I think I managed to walk away mostly unscathed. I walked over to tell Mo about my horror and she pointed at me and cackled about how I almost had to take Mom on a vacation with me. Then I told her about the trip to Disney that I had implicated her in. She grumbled a bit but understood that when in the crossfire, I had needed to buffer some of the agony. And she’s up on the Disney thing, having a child who will then be five.

But we’re both pretty sure that at one point we’re going to find Mom in the sack with one of those guys who walk around wearing the big character heads. And then have to have a rather painful status conversation with the folks back home.

“Mom’s got a new boyfriend who is Goofy. (pause) No. Really, Grandma. He’s Goofy.”

If you don’t watch Buffy, (and wait a second… why aren’t you watching Buffy? Seriously… watch Buffy. It’s too good to miss) just skip this part:

Oh Spike you hot souly hunk of a manpire. Between you and the hot brooding Principal, I was awash with gleeful man loving. You almost caused me to forget about my current lust for John Corbett and the Irish guy from the Ya Ya movie. But there were definite shark-jumping elements with the Dawn knowing Sumerian all of the sudden thing. And I really wish that Kennedy would stop channeling Joe Polniaczek from Facts of Life because I keep expecting the First to come in as her father Moe Greene with a shot-out eye.* And Buffy? Why did the wardrobe truck from Fleetwood Mac’s The Dance throw up on you?

*You see, Alex Rocco played Joe’s father on the show, but it was at the same time that The Godfather 1 & 2 were playing incessantly on HBO and it traumatized me to see him get his eye shot out as Moe Green and then be a deadbeat dad in freaking Peekskill, NY. And maybe I should stop with the pop culture references when they become so obscure that they need footnotes.

OH! I almost forgot.

I’m compiling a mix CD for friend and her new boyfriend. and I’m currently having a problem deciding the songs that should be on it. The centerpiece of the CD will be Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” because… damn… that’s one hot song. I get a little sweaty just thinking about that one. I’m also throwing on Supreme Beings of Leisure’s “Strangelove Addiction”, K’s Choice “Virgin State of Mind”, Fiona Apple’s “Love”, and probably Puddle of Mudd’s “Control”. But now I’m stumped. I’d put John Mayer’s “Your Body is a Wonderland” on it, but I’m afraid that Trent and the boys would kick the snot out of him and then Fiona Apple will be throwing her skinny little body all over them. So I could use some suggestions… tell the comments section.

This morning, it is a balmy 20 degrees, up from negative eight million, and it feels as though the world is waking up. Although it isn’t, really, and it’s all Mother Nature’s clever ruse. She’s just resting, filling her lungs to blow a breeze so cold it makes your soul shiver.

And I, however, have the beginnings of a baby migraine. Mickey fickey genetic makeup that causes these mini breakdowns inside my head. I suspect sometimes while I am watching the explosions when I hear cymbals, the fragments of light like ice crystals into my eyes, that these are stories inside my head that I never wrote down. They are fighting a way out of my head no matter what I do. I’m terribly remiss about writing sometimes and I suspect that this diary is one way that I can alleviate the guilt of not writing those little brain movies down.

Esteban’s tour of duty at Chez Parents is almost over. They will be returning from Cancun on Saturday and then I will have to relinquish my annexation of the middle of the bed. I’ve been doing ballet at night, it seems, reenacting the pirouettes of my dreams between cloudlike sheets. The new bed does not have a headboard nor a footboard and is so high that it seems a bit like a pedestal. Last night, I dreamt that I slept on a wedding cake, a bride fallen asleep inside a pillow of tulle, waiting for her little plastic groom. Mrs. Havishsham combined with Princess Aurora while some unseen voice sung Cotton’ the fabric of our lives..

I ran out midmorning for some Advil Migraine and an institution-sized bottle of Diet Coke. It seems to have staunched the flow of agony from behind my right eyebrow. I no longer feel as though my head will implode with a nice meaty squick sound. Now there is merely a wooden clothespin there, but I can live with that. And I can sit here without sunglasses on, which was making my coworkers wonder if I had gone Hollywood all of the sudden. They were my lovely new CK sunglasses, so I can understand their concern. And I’m wearing my Bad Girl t-shirt from Torrid today with red hoodie and my hair is all crazy. I look like a sell out. Or like I’m coming down off something.

I should have known that there was a migraine in the staging area of my head. I’ve been all light sensitive since yesterday and this morning, I was driving to work with the radio off (cymbals’ the cymbals hate me. They are everywhere, lurking with their wicked friends’drums, people with screechy voices and the piano keys that live above middle C) and thinking to myself, which is a dangerous thing right there but incredibly scary when there are these words in my head that are trying to bust outta da joint, and suddenly, I thought about this picture that Hez took of me talking to Pamie at Journalcon last October. I look all inbred and freakishly shiny and my head decided that the picture needed to be a panel of a comic book and the thought bubble coming from Pamie would read ‘My god, is there a light shining directly out of her chin?’ and the thought bubble coming from me would be ‘I think I just made a poopy.’ And I then I almost crashed the Monte, because I was laughing at the sheer comedic genius that exists in the word ‘poopy’.

I have been wondering for a while why the Dreadbaron calls me a ‘total freakazoid’ in his diary profile. However in that one instance, it all became clear.

I think I just made a poopy.

Umm’.

I can’t help it. Still funny. Even with the headache. Or perhaps because of the headache. I don’t know. It is a mystery. I think I’ll just go back to listening to the Etoys song over and over and being mad at people for having the audacity to talk in conversational tones.