The March Hare

On Running

2007-02-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

I've never been a runner. In elementary school, when forced to participate in the Presidential Physical Fitness program, I "protested" by walking the mile rather than running it, reaching the finish line only seconds before the autistic boy. However, I've decided it's time to turn all that around.

At this writing, I can run just over a quarter of a mile before I have to stop and walk. In one session, I can run an entire mile and a little extra with some walking in between. It hurts, but only later. When you're actually doing it, it feels good, something I didn't think was possible. Your body hits a point where it decides that fighting you is getting nowhere, so it might as well just go along with you for a while. Your body doesn't worry; you'll pay in the morning, when you get out of bed and crumple to the floor in a pitiful heap, unable to stand for a full minute and a half.

With all of this comes an immense feeling of personal power, aside from the morning pain. I'm starting to feel that if someone was coming towards me with ill intent I might actually be able to run away from them and escape, rather than having to rely solely on my ability to fold myself into a ball and weep. I will weep no longer; I will run with an even gait and regular breathing, until I am at least a quarter of a mile away.

The only problem is that you can't run with your eyes closed. I don't know why I really want to do this, every time, but you end up running into fences and tripping over things.

I'm not sure how my dog feels about all of this running business. She seems to enjoy it, but last night she vomited twice on the track as we made our way around. I admit I felt oddly superior. I didn't puke, and I'm the one who's supposed to be out of shape.

A Beautiful Day

2007-02-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

I should not complain about the weather in Mobile during the winter. There is no ice, people don't die of hypothermia or have to have fingers and toes removed after being beaten by teenagers and left outside overnight. It's windy, and it gets down into the twenties at times, and once it snowed, and that's about it.

But there's something about spring here that makes it better than spring anywhere else I've lived. For one, the Japanese magnolias, one of the mose beautiful flowering trees I've ever seen, bloom in February and in March the petals start to fall in a two-week-long shower of pink and white that is unearthly, it makes you feel like you're living in a movie or a snowglobe. For another, spring wakes up a certain smell in Mobile, the smell of old buildings and trees, an authentic smell of time. Some might call it mold, but I call it history.

I've been spending a lot of time walking around Mobile lately, partly because of a bet I have going with my boss that I can lose more weight than he can in fifteen weeks (I'm winning, by the way), but also because I know that my time in Mobile is limited, and I'll never live here again once I leave, I'll only be a tourist. It seems only fair to the city that I figure some of it out, see some new things, before I go away to places that are not normally described as "throwbacks" or "backwaters".

Today is Mardi Gras, and as I walked toward downtown, I started to see families camped out in the parking lots of closed banks, grilling burgers and sausages and wearing t-shirts in purple, green, and yellow, not a good color combo unless you're The Joker. Girls with batons walked together away from the parade routes, their duty done.

People were collectively trying to be happy, and that's always a nice thing to see. It shows perserverance in the face of great odds, and that, with the help of beer and grilled meat, we can forget our problems for a few hours and put on a damn fine parade. Plus, there are moonpies to be thrown, caught, and eaten like bounty from the gods.

Add this to a sunshiny morning on which it is possible to wear a t-shirt for the first time in months, and things feel pretty good.

Check it Out

2007-01-10T20:53:00.000-08:00

I have a brand new short story up on Raketenwerfer.

Strange Christmas Gifts From My Family

2007-01-02T07:03:00.000-08:00

My family celebrated Christmas on New Year's Eve, because it was more convenient for everyone and gave us all more shopping time. So there we were, opening our gifts and having a lovely time, when I looked into the bag of stuff my grandmother was giving me. Inside the bag, there was an honest-to-God muu-muu.

"Is this a muu-muu?" I screamed, and then I immediately put it on over my clothes, pushed a pillow under it, and put my cigarettes in my pocket. I was already wearing flip-flops, so that was covered. Voila, instant white trash.

After my grandmother left I asked my sister if she had gotten anything odd from her. "Oh, yeah, she gave me a can of Progresso Tomato Soup."

"You don't think she's maybe..."

"No way," my sister said. "Remember when you were ten and she gave you and Brennan bottles of ketchup and mustard for Christmas?"

It's good to know that some things don't change. My grandmother has always wrapped up whatever she has lying around the house, regardless of how inappropriate it might be.

However, the muu-muu was part of a trend this year to give me sleepwear that could be packaged and sold as birth control. Three-inch-thick flannel jammies, a pink chenille robe that zips up the front, a pair of raspberry cotton pajamas that emphasize everything that's wrong with me. Obviously someone doesn't like the idea that Stephen and I might breed.

Big News

2006-12-29T12:28:00.000-08:00

I got engaged! On Christmas Eve! To Clurg!

Also, I have been accepted to UAB, so I can finally get an education, and I have just gotten my first real publication credit for short fiction, in the next issue of ' The Project for a New Mythology' (I think there's a link to it on Clurg's blog.)

I have been writing many ghost stories, rearranging my furniture, reading everything but Don Quixote, which is the only book I'm supposed to be reading right now, and I hope to get The March Hare in fine fettle once again. If you have any suggestions for themes for the Vineyard-Clurg nuptials, leave them here.

International Rage Day

2006-09-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I did several uncharacteristic things.

First, I had a shouting match with the chef at work. I don't shout, I generally act pathetic and cry and win arguments that way, but yesterday was different. Yesterday I was filled with white-hot rage.

When I bicycled home after said shouting match, I found that the water company had shut off my water for non-payment of my bill, which I pay every month online. I had to give them one hundred and five extra dollars, and still fill a bucket of water at my neighbor's hose in order to flush the toilet. I got really snotty with the water company on the phone, and generally stomped around like an ogre. The water company was totally unimpressed with this, and their 8-noon turn-on service didn't show until 12:30, just to put me in my place.

Rage, I tell you. Absolutely useless rage.

Daughter Smarter than Daddy

2006-09-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

Last week my dad called me.
"Hey Sunshine!" he said. "How about you tell your job that your appendix is burst and you can't come in for a couple days, and we'll go to the beach."

"I like my job, Dad. I'd rather not get fired."

"Oh, come on. They ain't going to fire you."

My dad said this as though he knew it for a fact.

I compromised with him. He picked me up after work on Tuesday, and we rode on his Harley to Destin, Florida, where my uncle has a time-share he hasn't been able to use. We ate dinner at the Waffle House. My dad told jokes for three straight hours. My dad made friends with our surly Waffle House waitress.

The next morning I got up at seven and went into the ocean at seven-thirty. For anyone who has never been to the Gulf of Mexico: our beaches have the softest, most powdery snow-white sand imaginable, our water is a perfectly clear green, the color you think emeralds ought to be. At seven-thirty, there are no waves, three are no other people, there are no strong currents to pull you sideways down the beach. I walked into the water and was soon in above my head, but I could see everything on the bottom. In fact, I felt very afraid, because I knew that this was too good to be true, that some nasty sea-creature was waiting below me to sting or bite or maim in some way. The water was like green glass.

We rode away from Destin at eleven o'clock that morning, because I had to go to work that afternoon. My dad was sad when he left me at my house, he didn't want to be at the beach alone. I told him to go to a bookstore and get a few books and read them on the beach. That sounds like heaven to me.

My dad didn't do that.

My dad still can't believe that neither myself nor my sister had the gumption to just take a week off of work to keep our dad company at the beach. My dad can't believe how boring my sister and I are. Boring, and functional. One day my dad will have to accept us as we are. We've accepted him as he is for some time now, after all.

Europe '08

2006-08-31T20:20:00.000-07:00

Today, my best friend Stella and I decided that in the summer of 2008, we will cross the Atlantic to visit the grave of Muriel Spark. And also to see the Paris catacombs, one of the few places in the world where human remains have been used decoratively to good effect.

I just have to figure out in which European country Muriel Spark is buried. Ooh, maybe I can be really gruesome and make a rubbing of her headstone and get it framed and put it up on my wall. I can't think of a better memento mori to have hanging over one's head every day.

Here is my Muriel Spark reading list:

The Comforters
Memento Mori
The Girls of Slender Means
Loitering with Intent
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
A Far Cry from Kensington
The Abbess of Crewe

If you've never read any Muriel Spark, any one of these books is a good starting point, although for sheer pleasure I would suggest The Comforters and Loitering with Intent.

Distractions

2006-08-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

To avoid writing ten pages of my never-ending novel (it does have an ending, I just haven't gotten there yet), I have:

pulled a table out of our shed, cleaned it off, and created an area of our living room that I call my 'office'

moved a lot of other furniture around

done laundry

deep-conditioned my hair

reread several of the Chronicles of Narnia

listened to an April March album and danced in an alarming way

taken several smoke breaks

made cornbread

cleaned a lot of things

repositioned my new desk several times in order to find a placement that is most conducive to creative thought

organized things

talked to my dog

admired my work

taken two (2) showers

Now that is what I call a productive day.

The Hare has Returned to the Burrow

2006-08-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

If rabbits even burrow. I don't know what they do, really, besides hopping and looking squeezable, and occasionally screaming in an alarmingly human way.

Over the past several weeks, I have sent stories out to magazines that will most likely reject me with form letters. I have watched a lot of movies, mostly horror movies where teenage girls scream a lot and go crazy at the end (it seems to be a theme). I have started writing a children's book/ young adult book that I am currently on vacation from writing. I have gotten better at my job in a fine-dining restaurant, although I have broken many glasses in the learning process.

Most of all, I have been attempting to relax, which is not as easy as it sounds. Relaxing is, in fact, very hard work.

I bet rabbits don't have to worry that they aren't relaxed enough. I bet rabbits are permanently "chill".

Week of Fun!!!

2006-06-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

What an awesome week I had! Let me tell you all about it!!!

First, I got a letter from the IRS! I couldn't understand a freaking word of it, so I had to call them to get an explaination, which is so awesome. I love phone queues. Unfortunately, it turned out to be something minor; and here I was hoping I was being audited. Oh, well, disappointments will happen.

Then, I overdrew my checking account by ten cents, which resulted in one hundred and twenty dollars' worth of fees! I love the bank! Wooo!

I also began to deal with a student loan that I didn't even know I had for five years, which involved many forms, calls to people who don't care about me or my petty problems, and long, deep conversations with a collections agent. We're friends now.

And last but certainly not least, my scooter was stolen while Clurg, myself, and our fierce guard dog slept peacefully. Better yet, the next morning when I realized my scooter had been stolen, I couldn't find my phone, so I had to walk to the police station to file my report! And it was only ninety-five degrees outside! I love to sweat!

I think I'll go cry a little more and maybe take some time to wonder where my life went so horribly wrong. That sounds relaxing.

A Story: Part Three

2006-06-12T07:59:00.002-07:00

Miller wakes up with Janelle's arms wrapped around him. Even though the ancient window unit air conditioner is on high, he can feel the sweat start to come out on his skin. She looks so sweet there, holding on to him, that he decides not to move her yet, not for a while.

The whole house is still; it must be very early if his mother is not yet awake, moving around the kitchen and listening to the morning news on the radio. Miller decides to enjoy this time, alone with his sleeping wife in the sleeping house.

He hears footsteps from upstairs, the creak of bedsprings; Anna's room, the one that used to be his own. He watches the ceiling and traces the sound of her feet across it as they make a circle around her room, no pauses, he thinks, what is she doing up there? A soft humming drifts down to him, and the circle moves faster and faster. Like dancing, he thinks, is she dancing up there? It ends with a sound like a sack of flour hitting the floor, and he hears that laughter again, deeper and throatier than his daughter's laugh only a few months ago, drifting down through the floorboards. It raises gooseflesh on his skin. Janelle stirs beside him, rubs her light brown head against his chest, and he puts his own arms around her, holds her tight.

Miller and his mother both decline to go into town with Janelle and Anna to see a movie. HIs mother pleads both exhaustion and having a million things to do around the house, and he says he would like to just talk with her and help her out with some of the chores, if she'll let him. "I'd hat to leave her alone when we're here to see her, but you and Anna should definitely get out. She won't want to stay cooped up here all week." Janelle nods and follows Anna out to the car. MIller and his mother stand on the porch to see them off, and he watches his daughter's face, pale and expressionless, slightly blurred behind the windshield. Once they are gone, his mother turns and walks quickly back into the house.

"For a long time," he says, having followed her into the kitchen where she begins to wash the dishes with as much noise as they can produce, "I thought you couldn't hear it."

"I didn't want to make it worse. I thought, if you could just think it was something in your mind, it would go away, you wouldn't be so scared." His mother turns from the sink to face him. "I'm sorry, baby, if I made it harder for you. But can you honestly tell me that you wouldn't do the same thing? That you aren't doing it now?"

He sits at the table and puts his hands, palms down, on top. "I don't blame you, Mom. I was just relieved when I found out that you heard it, too."

"You should never have gone there in the first place, Miller. I should have kept a better eye on things, not let you wander out there by yourself all the time. I should have known that you would find it sooner or later." HIs mother rinses a plate under the faucet and puts it in the drying rack. "Tell me," she says. "Was the road there still fresh, no leaves or dirt covering it?"

"Yes," he says, "it was like it had been made the day before."

His mother finishes the dishes in silence, then sits at the table across from Miller, pats his hand.

"You know she looks just like her. Anna, I mean. I never showed you pictures of my mother, but she looks just the same. Right down to the haircut." His mother goes to the living room, comes back with an old shoebox. She rifles through the photos inside until she comes up with the right one.

"Here, this is her when she was about twenty. Older than Anna, but then Anna is starting to look older now, too, isn't she?" Miller nods and takes the picture in his hand. There are the waves of dark hair that fall just under the chin, the smooth pale oval face and dark eyes. He holds the picture closer to his face and looks at the skirt and blouse his grandmother is wearing in it. He can see how similar they are to the new things Anna just bought, just picked out for her birthday.

"I used to wake up in the morning and here her dancing around in the attic, dancing in a circle and humming to herself. When I was a little girl, I wanted to go up there so badly, I wanted to know what she was doing. But I knew better than to disturb her when she wanted to be alone." HIs mother pulls out another picture, this one of his grandmother and grandfather together.

"My father's parents said that he never should have married her, that she was a foundling, that she was cursed. Well, his parents were a little odd themselves, you know how country people can be, so separated from the world, so tied to the land. But my daddy, he loved her so much, he wouldn't listen to any of it." She fingers another photograph, this one of her mother standing in front of what looks like a stone wall.

"And she was the prettiest girl around, that's for sure. And Daddy had been to school, he was a businessman, he didn't have all the superstitions that the country people did."

"Mom, Janelle and I haven't told you about something that happened a couple of months ago."

His mother is still fingering the photos in the box, carefully touching their cracks and yellowed edges. He looks down at the pictures she has pulled out for him, his daughter's face superimposed on a woman's body, his daughter's face pulled out of time and taken back forty, fifty years.

"It was at Anna's school. There was this boy, a terrible accident. He and Anna were alone in the music building, we're not sure why. We think he may have followed her there, some of the other kids said that he had a crush on her. He died in there, Mom, with Anna watching. An exposed pipe that ran along the cieling, it fell, it cracked his skull." He looks at the picture of his grandmother, standing in front of the stone wall. It's too close up to tell if it's the side of a house, or of a tiny playhouse in the woods.

"Anna was so calm. We sent her to a counselor the school recommended, and she told us that she was having a delayed reaction to the emotional stress of witnessing something so awful. But it's been months now, and she hasn't cried. She didn't even want to miss a day of school."

"I watched my mother," Miller's mother says, "every night, when she would go off into the woods alone. My father, he always slept through it, he never knew. Or if he did, he had sense enough not to say anything about it. We all knew there were some things about my mother that you just didn't talk about, you didn't ask. You wouldn't like the answer."

"It was even before the accident that she started changing," Miller says. "We just hadn't noticed it as much. And then I heard her laughing one day, up in her room, and it was the same. It was the same laugh I heard then, in the woods, and then in my room every night. Every night for how long, Mom?"

"Years, baby. I haven't heard her since you left home. Until Anna."

Across the table, Miller and his mother grip hands, hold on to one another. They stay like that until they hear the crunch of gravel under car tires, and then all the pictures of Miller's grandmother are swept away, the shoebox replaced in the living room cabinet where it hides. Just before Anna and Janelle come in, his mother says, "The day she disappeared, it was like a weight was pulled of Daddy and I. We just looked at each other while the sherriff asked us questions, while they combed the woods with dogs, and we knew that she had gone off to wherever she came from, that she was gone. And it was a relief."

That night, Miller gets out of bed for a glass of water and stands drinking it at the bathroom sink. From the small window above the toilet he sees someone, a girl with dark hair wearing a full skirt and frilly blouse, pass over the lawn, headed toward the line of trees. Before, he would have gone after his daughter, caught her and taken her back inside the house, told her not to wander off on her own. Instead, he finishes his water and goes back to bed, thinking, she knows where she's going, and I don't have the heart to follow her there.

A Story: Part Two

2006-06-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

When he was eleven, he went exploring. Their house was on a hill, with cleared but mainly unused fields around it, and a deep forest starting on the edges, and always creeping closer. The woods were never off-limits to him then; it was what boys did, they explored, they wandered out into the wilderness. Now, he thinks, Anna would never be allowed to do that, to go off on her own like that. But then, things were different.

It was several degrees cooler in the woods, the trees so dense that sunlight hardly hit the ground between them. There was a smell of rotting leaves and fresh dirt, and, occasionally, of a small animal with its skin falling away, its flesh carried off by shining black insects bit by bit.

That day, he went in farther than he ever had, far beyond the familiar paths. In his dreams now, he charts his progress again and again, following his boy self through the maze of trees until they come to the road again, the dirt track he had never seen before. It had to be long-unused; this far in it could only have been a way for moonshiners to reach their stills and those days were nearly gone. But the dirt was still fresh-looking, no fallen leaves covering the red clay, so that it was like a gash cut through the forest floor. In his dreams, he feels this feet in their worn-down sneakers gaining the new texture of this path, he turns east on it and walks o, in the thick quiet of a place far from other people.

It has always been hard for him to describe the rest of the day. Time compresses and expands for him in his memory, and he's not sure that it didn't in the present of the event, either. He knows that from twenty feet away he first saw it, what looked like a small stone house with most of the roof gone but the door and windows shut tight. When he got a little closer, he started to find the detritus on the ground; broken pots, a length of rusting chain, one corner of a mattress sticking up through the dirt that had been slowly covering it for years. Any number of small bones. He remembers standing in front of the door to the house and thinking that it couldn't be right. It was hardly the size of a child's playhouse, and no child would be out this far, no children could build something out of stones this heavy-looking. The broken things lying around it were full-sized, adult-sized objects; everything was out of proportion.

Miller knew even then not to open the door. Instead, he looked at the objects lying around the house with the interest of an archaeologist, with the idea half in his mind that this was a decent mystery, finally, worthy of his investigations. It was while he was digging something shiny out of the dirt with his shoe that he heard the door open behind him. Though he did not turn around, he knew that the woman's laughter that followed the door banging open came from inside the house. She's in there, he thought. She's been watching me all this time. That was the last thing he remembers thinking before he ran, not stopping until he fell into the light of his father's sod field, never looking behind him.

A Story: Part One

2006-06-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

His mother is there to greet them at the door; it looks like she has been waiting there for hours already, a tea glass clinking with half-melted ice and a murder mystery are resting on the top step. They've arrived at just the right time, just the time when the evening starts to fall around the house, when the darkness that's always waiting just on the edge where the trees stand together thickly comes creeping across the lawn.

"Honeys," his mother says, and grips Janelle in a tight hug. He is next, then Anna, who was last to get out of the car as she was carefully rearranging her things in her purse. He watches his mother, sees the slight pause in her smile as she holds Anna at arm's length and looks her up and down. There, he thinks. She sees it. And then her smile is back and they are all being chivvied inside and sat around the table.

"Miller, baby, help me set," his mother says, and Janelle smiles. She always loves that when they come to visit, it it his responsibility to help with domestic chores, while she is still treated as a guest. "It makes a nice change," she always tells him, glowing with a book in a lawn chair, happily excused from duty.

Over dinner, Anna is quiet, smiling over her food and eating without any of he voraciousness she used to have. MIller watches her spear to string beans on her fork and remembers the last time when they were here, when she would clean two plates in half the time it took the rest of them to eat one, and then be out the door again, running back to some half-finished project that had to be completed before dark. Now her dark hair is tamed into chin-length waves, the bones of her face shine clearly through her skin, and she is calm, without any of the frantic movement she used to have.

"Did you have a good birthday, Anna?" his mother asks, and Anna nods.

"Yes. I got my hair cut, and some new clothes."

"She picked it all out herself," Janelle says,"and she came out of the store looking like a little heiress. I could've been a maid, following with the bags." Janelle takes another bite of her fried chicken. "A classy heiress, not a trashy one."

Anna only gives her mother the same half-smile that she's been wearing all day and continues to eat slowly, deliberately. Miller watches his mother watching her and wills her to know, to recognize it.

After dinner, the all sit outside in reclining lounge chairs that his mother built herself, looking at the stars through the hole in the trees, talking and laughing. Anna is still quiet, but the one time she does laugh, it is like something has grabbed Miller's heart and squeezed it dry. All the air leaves his lungs, and, as it does, he looks over at his mother and sees that she, too, is sitting breathless, staring and this strange creature sitting with them.

They send Anna to bed and he thinks that he can feel everyone relaxing, enjoying the conversation. His mother has always had a filthy mouth, one which she manages to control around children and religious fanatics, but lets loose on occasion as though all the time she has spent filtering hersef has left a store of curses and filthy jokes waiting to come pouring out. At som point, Janelle reaches for his hand and he takes hers and they sit like that for a long time, separate but linked, staring up at the sky.

When Janelle has finally plead exhaustion and gone up to bed, Miller closes his eyes and leans back in his chair. When he opens his eyes again, his mother is standing over him.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she says, and he can see that she's truly angry, with an expression on her face so rare he's only seen it once or twice before. "Come inside," she says, and doesn't wait for him to follow, just strides away over the dark grass toward the lighted square of the kitchen door.

"Why did you bring her here?"

"I wanted you to see her. I had to know that it wasn't just me, that I'm not going crazy."

His mother pours herself another glass of iced tea and adds a generous shot of rum to it from a bottle she pulls from a high cabinet. "I heard that voice, when she laughed," his mother says, "and I thought I might die right there. I thought my heart would just stop."

"You recognize it, then."

"How could I not, baby? How many years did we hear that, every night, that voice in your room? I could never forget it."

Today I Wrote a Story

2006-05-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

It's a very scary story, one I've been meaning to write for a long time.

When I was about ten, I was standing in my bedroom, brushing my hair or something, when I heard, very clearly, a woman laughing outside my window. I remember how all my muscles locked up, how fearful that sound made me. It was so loud, and so close, and so unmistakably the sound of a grown woman, crouched in the bushes that surrounded the house, laughing.

I went to go tell my parents that there was someone outside the house, and my stepfather got a shotgun that I had no idea existed from the top shelf of a closet and went outside. I think that maybe this was around the same time that my sister was followed home from her boyfriend's house by some guy who had to be scared away by my stepfather; he'd actually pulled into our driveway and was going to get out of the car when Tom came out, so tensions were pretty high at the time. We had started locking our doors for the first time I could remember.

I sat with my mother in the living room and we listened to my stepfather prowling around the house, looking for whoever could have been out there, laughing. Of course, there was no madwoman in the bushes, and the whole thing was dismissed. It was well-known that I had an overactive imagination. Or I could have been asleep and heard the sound in my dream, as I had a problem with sleep-walking and -talking. But I knew. There was no way I could have imagined something like that, not unless I was downright schizophrenic, which I was not.

So, I've played with this idea for a long time. In a poem, I proposed that it was my future self I heard, my own laughter echoing from a different time. In this story, I've used the sound of laughter, first as a disembodied presence, then reembodied in a young girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to her paternal grandmother, the original source of the sound. Tomorrow, after Clurg proofreads for me, I'll post the story. This will signal my new commitment to blogging on a daily basis.

Sorry I've been so boring lately. Let's blame it on how f*%$ing hot it is in Mobile. Ninety degrees and counting.

Pumpin'

2006-05-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

I joined a gym.

This is the last thing I ever thought I would do. I am just not a gym person. I don't like sweating, or weights, or Lycra. Nevertheless, I have joined a gym.

Today, I did an hour on the elliptical and half of my weight-training routine. I am supposed to go at least five times a week and do this. I am in a certain amount of pain. Yesterday, a lady weighed a measured me, which they will continue to do at six-week intervals, which makes me nervous. What if six weeks of sweating profusely while lifting weights and wearing Lycra produces no results? What then, gym people? How much can a person 'step it up' and not have a heart attack?

I'm going to write a story about a man whose wife starts going to the gym. When she becomes stronger than he is, he's so intimidated that he can hardly stand to be around her, for fear that she might beat him up if he does something she doesn't approve of.

Writing

2006-05-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

I wrote a ghost story based on a dream I had. I think the story's pretty good, so I had this idea to write a whole series of stories based on my dreams. Last night, I dreamed that my best friend cut half of her tongue off and I had to drive her to the emergency room, her wriggling tongue wrapped in paper towels, over an Escher-ish maze of incomprehensible freeways.

So, maybe not.

I Can't Take It Anymore!

2006-05-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

For the past week and a half, I have thought only of modern furniture, color combinations, accent seating, area rug dimensions, drapery panels, fabric swatches, decorative storage, and many, many other incredibly annoying topics. And I'm through with it! I don't care anymore! I just want my life back, I just want out of this mire of throw pillows and coffee tables. I just want a house that doesn't depress me every time I walk in the door, not one that requires that I think about it every moment of every day.

I hate you, HGTV. Better Homes and Gardens, you're on my list, too. It's you who've done this to me, with your constant exhortations to design on a dime, get organized once and for all, and find a place for everything. Maybe I like living like a pig, okay? So just back off.

Today, all I plan to do is vacuum and read Ovid until my mind clears, and then maybe I can get some of my real work done.

Movies Cause Profound Sleep

2006-04-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

THX-1138: five minutes was all it took. Five minutes of quiet, white backgrounds, hushed voices. I got a plot synopsis from Clurg when it was all over, and had a lovely nap in the meantime.

Fellini's Satyricon: I really, really wanted to watch this movie. I did watch it for an hour. And then I slept very peacefully for another hour. When I woke up, the movie was still happening. Perhaps at some later date, I will be able to enjoy this film. Perhaps.

Productive

2006-04-18T10:22:00.000-07:00

Today I completed the first draft of the first third of my novel. That means four chapters, done, at least until I write eight more chapters and then revise them all. 2006 is going to be the year I finally finish this thing.

I am rereading Muriel Spark's The Comforters, her first novel, which amazes me. Tonight I will go wait some tables and make a bit of money.

I am heartened by the fact that it is only noon, and that I have already accomplished so much today. Including chasing my dog for five blocks while she ran wild down the street, then taking her home only to have her crawl into shady spots along the way and lie down like the lazy beast she is. I even made my bed today.

I'm going to have a good week.

2006-04-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

Muriel Spark is gone forever now. It's only been two years since her last book came out, and Wednesday night, as I was wandering through Barnes&Noble, I found her tiny section in the shelves, shoved up against Nicholas Spark. There were only three titles there, her latest, The Finishing School, Aiding and Abetting, and, of course, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Three out of over twenty, and that's not including her short stories and poems and works of criticism, biography, and autobiography.

Muriel Spark makes me want to write. When I read one of her books, I have a clear and crystallized idea of the sort of books I want to make. Her prose is so sharp and precise, so devoid of the paragraphs of 'scenery' that I like to skim over when I read other, weightier books.

And now there will never be a new book by Muriel Spark for me to rush out and buy. I'm lucky that she's been so prolific, because there are still ten or so of her books that I haven't yet read, and so I can keep being delighted over and over again. However, I can't help feeling that she was one of the last of a certain breed of fiction writers, the kind who refused to analyze their characters, who did not involve themselves in the mire of mental processes for pages at a time. She was a sharp lady.

I'm going to miss her.

Deception

2006-04-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

It was a sin of omission.

I didn't want to tell anyone because I'm already seen as more than a little unbalanced for riding a scooter around town. If I told anyone, but especially Clurg, that I had a wreck on my scooter, I didn't think I could bear the disapproval.

So, I kept it to myself, arranging how to pay the lady I hit for her damages without anyone getting wise. And it was all working out fine, until yesterday.

I was at work and the lady came by. Clurg was home. While she didn't state the purpose of her visit, it would have been ridiculous for me to believe that Clurg would never question why this strange lady came looking for me. I played it off for as long as I could, but eventually, I had to confess.

Dishonesty is not my forte. I can come up with excellent, plausible lies, but implementing them is something else entirely. I could never conduct an illicit affair for the simple reason that I cannot imagine not telling people about it. I have no secrets and very little sense of secrecy, something which has horrified my father as he's read this blog. Even when I deliberatley try to be secretive, by going off by myself and doing things on my own and then not telling anyone about what I've been up to, I feel a blush of shame. If you can't share it, then there's something inherently wrong with what you've been doing, even if you just wandered around Target for a few hours or drove across town and back. Suddenly, it's shameful; otherwise, why would you keep it to yourself?

Salvage Yard of Horror

2006-04-10T06:33:00.000-07:00

I think that, if you own and operate a salvage yard, you should take some time to look around and ask yourself, "Does this look like the kind of place where young women are regularly tortured and killed by myself and my staff? If so, what can I do to alleviate that?"

When I finally had my old, trusty '93 Geo Storm towed away last week, I visited a salvage yard that did indeed look like an ideal place for the imprisonment and torture of young women. And an owner who seemed more than up to the job.

For one, the place was in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it was in the middle of somewhere, but it was the most desolate and horrible somewhere I'd ever seen. Dirt road, rusty trailers; the few neighbors scattered around seemed, from the appearance of their dark and crumbly homes, more than up for a little torture if it came to it. If I lived there, I would want to torture someone.

Then there was the man inside the 'office'. Speaking lightly accented English, he first asked me about my business there. Then, as I waited for the tow truck that seemed as though it would never come, he began asking more personal questions. Much more personal questions, such as where he might be able to find me on a weekday. He punctuated all of this by telling me that I was 'a very beautiful woman' or a 'very nice person'. Knowing myself to be neither, I became very afraid.

If I met the guy out on the street, in a well-lit, extremely public place, then I might think he was pushy, or really lonely I might have laughed and said 'no thank you' and gone on my way. But out here, within screaming distance only of those who didn't care if I screamed, I felt trapped. I couldn't leave until the tow truck came, for one. It had forced this man and I into a more intimate situation than I cared for.

Finally the tow truck arrived, and I quickly did a sweep of my car to make sure that absolutely nothing containing my address or phone number remained inside. The salvage yard owner expressed a hope that I would come out to the salvage yard to visit sometime. I said I didn't think that would be happening. And then I escaped.

I mean, really. What about a salvage yard is not scary to begin with? At the best of times? Add a creepy owner, a desolate location, and a tow truck driver who never shows, and you've got a great horror movie. Except that it's been done over and over again. So, come one, you weird little man at the salvage yard, come up with something original!

What is Wrong With Kids These Days?

2006-04-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

I was talking to an old friend last night who recently returned to Mobile from Atlanta. He said:
"All of my friends are either pirates, ninjas, or Jedi."

"They're what?"

"Pirates, ninjas, or Jedi. Like, the pirates wear pirate clothes and carry flasks of rum and say 'Aargh.' The ninjas wear all black and have kitanas. And the Jedi are Jedi."

That is disturbing. Not to knock personal style and freedom of expression through off-the-rack outerwear, but a ninja? Or a Jedi? Go out to a club with an eyepatch and a hook hand? I don't know.

Apparently, the pirates, ninjas, and Jedi of Atlanta are at war. They don't actually fight, they just talk behind one another's backs like little girls. Should they fight, the ninjas will probably win, provided that they actually know some martial arts and aren't just punching the air at home and saying 'ayah!' over and over again. Besides, they probably have throwing stars they picked up at the last gun show. The Jedi will get nowhere with those big plastic light sabers for children, and the pirates will be too busy singing 'Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum' to even notice that the ninjas are coming for them.

This trend is taking identiy crises to new levels of crazy. At what point does one look in the mirror and say, "You know, I think that if I were a Jedi things would be a lot better for me." The scariest thing is that they band together in groups of pirates, ninjas, and Jedi knights. It's not even an individual assumption of a role; they require backup for their metamorphoses.

Are there any pirates who long to be ninjas, but all their friends are pirates, so they're stuck with frilly blouses and tricornered hats? And what if a ninja falls in love with a Jedi, what then? Who will have to give up their identity for the other one? These are the kind of important questions that pirates, ninjas, and Jedi should ask themselves before committing.

Desire

2006-04-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

I have fallen in love with a piece of furniture.

It is a perfectly round bed that costs nearly eight hundred dollars, but I must have it.

I will find a way for me and this round bed to be together. I don't care if they don't make sheets to fit it! I'll make my own sheets. All I need is a turntable I can put it on so that it will revolve. I am going to be so James Bond with this round bed. I hope Clurg is attracted to Sean Connery, because this round bed is going to make me talk like him. Clurg is no Ursula Andress, but I guess he'll do. I guess I'll let him on my round bed.

Furniture is the obsession of my adult life. For some reason, I think that a new piece of furniture is going to change my dingy little rental into an awesome pad, or suddenly make me organized when every other piece of furniture has failed.

This round bed though, man. I mean, it's a round bed. It's different this time, I swear.

Don't Judge

2006-04-02T17:48:00.000-07:00

Listen:
Don't judge all of us by the leprechaun video. We really didn't intend for that to get all the way around the world. We thought it would just be a little, funny local news item. And now it's everywhere, and people are thinking, 'Alabama... whoa.' Alabama is not all about leprechauns. Alabama is a lot of things, none of which are leprechauns.

I Hate Dreaming

2006-03-30T06:29:00.000-08:00

Last night, I had a dream in which Clurg said, "Oh, I'm done with school early. We're moving to Minnesota next week." This caused a great deal of anxiety. I dream-quit my jobs, giving them very short notice. I dream-packed my house up, a scary and disturbing process in reality, so you can imagine how much worse it became in my dream. I was just explaining to an Asian girl that I was being forced to move to Minnesota ahead of schedule when Clurg woke me up to say goodbye. I was worried, and then I realized he was just going to school, not Minnesota.

I suppose this dream means I'm getting cold feet. What if I get all the way up there and it's a shithole? What if I can't understand what anyone's saying, or they can't understand me? What if I get frostbite and have to have my feet amputated and Clurg can't handle a girlfriend with no feet and moves to sunny California leaving me stranded and footless in Minnesota? What if nobody there likes me?

Could someone please remind me of why I'm moving to Minnesota?

2006-03-27T16:45:00.000-08:00

I'm researching skin diseases for a class I'm teaching tomorrow, and I found that I simply have to look away. This is disgusting stuff! Who took these pictures? Did they want to vomit like I want to vomit? The thing about these pictures is that it's just the awful, pus-y, bleeding area that you see.

It's not balanced at all by the person's face, so it seems that this carbuncle exists independently of the human it plagues. This is horror movie stuff. This makes me want to go lie down for a while because my stomach is hurting. This is stressful. What if I get one of those? Will I scare children? Will my own mother look away from me and choke down her bile? Skin is wretched.

Vacation Over

2006-03-27T07:02:00.000-08:00

I'm back.

Over the past weeks, I have:
Gone to see my dad for the first time in a year, and seen him doing better than ever. Hammond, Louisiana is a beautiful place, and the restaurant, Vineyard's I, has amazing food.

Celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday.

Gotten a new job at a fine dining restaurant where I can make twice the money in half the amount of time.

Read some truly horrid vampire books.

So, now the plan is to get cracking on that novel I keep planning to write, and, for the first time in a year, I actually have time to do just that. And today, I'm getting a manicure and pedicure. Life is good, people! Life is real good.

Thinking

2006-03-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's what I've been doing. Thinking. Hard.
And then, sometimes I have not been thinking.
Let me clarify.

At some point in the past, I think the week before last, I went to Atlanta. Then I came back from Atlanta and immediately embarked on the longest, crappiest work-a-thon ever. It was called Mardi Gras in Mobile, and I lost a great deal of faith in humanity after watching a girl pour marinara sauce over herself and parmesan and red pepper on the floor of the restaurant where I work. During this period, it was really best not to think too much, just drink three Rockstar energy drinks and go about my business like an automaton.

Then, I started thinking. I started thinking about my novel that has been sitting dormant for I don't want to say how long. About all of those big plans I have for writing projects that have been on a back burner. And about the fact that I work six days and five nights a week. And that I only have three pairs of shoes, clearly an inadequite number.

The answer? I turned in my resignation as massage therapist at a chiropractic office where I have been practicing for three years. I applied at a really nice restaurant for night shifts, and probably came across as crazy because of all the follow-up I've done.

Last night, I started thinking about writing a romance novel, just for the hell of it. I would set it in the circus. The only thing is, I would have to put something romantic on, like, every page, and I don't know if I have that much stored-up romance. I would have to get really creative. High-wire sex scene? Maybe.

Basically, I am doing some life restructuring, which has sapped every bit of mental energy I ever had.

On an upnote, I have a birthday coming up. One of my new year's resolutions was not to talk about my birthday so much, because I usually start handing out shopping lists a month beforehand and call my family the night before, just to make sure they won't forget. I tried to restrain myself, but it hasn't worked out so well. All I want for my birthday are
1)shoes
and 2) Gorilla Racks.
Behold the unmitigated beauty of the Gorilla Rack. It's storage powers are absolute and unwavering, and I sure do love adjectives.

Not Dead

2006-02-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

The past week, during which I have been blog-silent, has been about these things:
1) picking up a scooter from a weird warehouse in a strange part of town
2) putting said scooter together (not complicated, but do I look like the kind of person who knows what spark plugs look like? No, I don't. I had to get a seventeen-year-old boy to do it for me.)
3) getting the wrong end of the stick. I showed up for a rehearsal four days early.
4) cursing. My bike chain is loose and keeps falling off at inopportune moments. And the seat is loose and somehow squashy, making for an uncomfortable riding experience.
5) wondering what that smell is (pork and veg dinner made by Clurg, left lying around by me)
6) trying to get out of work (it worked!)
7) teaching adults about the circulatory system. Badly. Really hoping I do better next time.
8) having strange dreams, including one about getting a boob job, one about my nephew wearing a cape and singing 'Bohemian Rhapsody', and one about my mother.
9) trying to get my shit into one sock. Failing.
10) general confusion of the senses.

Oh, and I watched a video of the 'Anatomy' performance. I'm hoping that my appearance was due to camera angles and poor lighting.

Everybody's Doing It

2006-02-11T22:50:00.000-08:00

I have reached a point in my life where everyone I know is making major life decisions.

I have two friends who are married, a friend who is getting married this year, and three people I work with are pregnant. I am twenty-three years old, and I feel that that is too young to make such decisions. I should wait at least until I'm thirty before I do anything of the sort.

So, the question is: who is right, them or me?

I still think of myself as some sort of overgrown teenager. Perhaps its genetic, because my mom and dad are perpetually seventeen. I work three crap jobs, I have artistic ambitions that have not yet been crushed, I shop in the Juniors' department. Anyone who is going to be a mother should definitely not buy a scooter instead of a car, or think that they could possibly ride a bicycle across America. And that's where I'm at in my development. A married woman should probably not think that hookers are the prettiest ladies around. Right?

I don't know. I was out on my own before all of my friends were, having had to give up on the college experience due to financial considerations, so, in a way, I'm pretty mature. I can pay my bills, shop for groceries, basically get things done. But marriage and family? That feels very, very distant to me. And these are people who I've known since I was thirteen. I know what they were like then, how totally insane they have always been, and I just can't grasp the fact that now they are trading in their last names and picking out bassinets at Target.

I watched Eraserhead for the first time tonight. What if I have a baby dinosaur instead of a baby human? For some reason, it seems entirely possible.

Scary thoughts. On an upnote, I sang 'Ode to Billy Joe' tonight, as well as the female vocals in 'I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)'. We brought the house down.

Issues

2006-02-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

Hello. My name is Amethyst Vineyard, and I am compulsively messy.

It started when I was young. Really young. My mother used to tell me to clean up my room and I would forget to do it, and then when I could hear her coming down the hall to check on me I remembered and so I scooped everything up and hid it badly. And then she would find it all and do the worst thing: sit there and make me hold up each item in my room one by one so that she could tell me where it went. And then watch me put all of it in its proper place. This is a woman whose car perpetually smells like vinegar because of all the spilled coffee and rotting french fries ground into the carpet.

In high school I lived in a dormitory. That's where I learned that laundry, since it's going to get dirty again anyway, doesn't actually need to be put away.

Then I was out on my own. Every time I've moved, I've found this strange ground-covering of ephemera that I never noticed while I lived in it; a soup of feathers, broken doll limbs, dusty bits of metal and wire, sewing needles, scrap paper, melted crayons, drinking glasses, batteries, things I never knew I had in the first place. Shop-Vacs are great for that, by the way.

Because of me, the house we live in looks kind of like a crack house. The stoop is littered with cans and cigarette butts and soggy cigarette packs. There are two broken bicycles around the side, and one broken car in the driveway. There are beer bottles in the bushes (not my fault). There are towels (no, I do not know why they are outside) slowly rotting in the grass.

Am I missing some important component in my genetic makeup that makes me incapable of a)seeing the mess in the first place and b)actually fixing it? Today I went out and bought two planters and some playsand and made myself a front- and back-yard smoking station. I raked all of the detritus into a pile in the back. I have plans for removing all non-functional vehicles from the environs, plans just itching to be enacted.

I will get better. If it means posting dorky lists all over my house, reminding my hopelessly untrainable brain to do what it takes to not live in a spiralling storm of my own garbage, I will do it. There is more at stake here than just possibly contracting salmonella. There is Clurg's sanity to think of.

With God as my witness, I will never crumple up trash in my hand and throw it in my yard again!

Aquisition

2006-02-07T09:30:00.000-08:00

Today I purchased my twenty-fifth fancy skirt, my eleventh fancy dress, and my fourth pair of pants. That's right; fourth.

What is it about buying things that changes the whole day? First, the excitement of going to the store and planning to spend money. Then, picking out everything that you could possibly, maybe, want or need and piling it into your arms as you head into the poorly-lit and slightly stinky dressing room. This is the worst part, and not just because of the smell; you'll have to weed items out because they don't look good on you specifically, when you know that someone else would look great in them. And no cheating! It's not going to look any better at home, bad lighting or no!

Worry sets in. You go through each item, figuring sales price, tax, and total over and over again, until finally you give in and say, 'Oh, what the hell. I can afford to treat myself just this once." So a non-sales item joins the select group of your new posessions.

Checkout is joyful; you've just liberated your wallet of its great burden, and the glow of having bought something, having been a consumer with all of the power that it implies is upon you.

You leave the store feeling giddy. Maybe you shouldn't have done it, but you did it anyway, and God, it feels so good. New stuff! Better, new stuff to make you look pretty, like the princess you've always known you were. Those twenty-four other fancy skirts were toying with you. They didn't live up to their promise to make you a different person when you put them on. But this one, twenty-five... well, you just know that it's the one that will make all the difference.

Go home and try on all of your new things again, this time with a variety of underwear so that you can find the best combination. Turn around for your dog and ask her if she likes it. She will probably yawn, but don't read too much into that. She's just a dog.

Now comes the best part; introducing your new clothes to your old ones. "Summer dirndls with interesting patters, meet your new neighbor, champagne silk with matching tulle overlay. Move over there, pleated plaid. Pants, meet my new favorites. I'm sorry, but you just don't make me look as good as these." Of course, trying to find an empty hanger is fraught, because this is your TWENTY-FOURTH SKIRT and all, but you'll manage to dig a few out of the back in the end.

Now, unfortunately, you have to go back to your old clothes, the ones you wore to the store, and therefore to your old self. But soft, fear not; you'll surely be invited to enough high-class social events soon to wear all of your wonderful new clothes.

2066

2006-02-02T19:38:00.000-08:00

Amethyst Vineyard, celebrated novelist, sits in the book-lined study of her lovely Greek revival home. Through the open curtains, one can see the flourishing garden and the swimming pool that she still uses daily at eighty-four years of age.

Miss Vineyard smokes non-carcinogenic cigarettes as she speaks to me of her beginnings as a writer, publisher, and war correspondent.

"You know, in those days, everyone had advanced degrees. You could hardly move without bumping into a Master of something or another. Because I didn't have the letters after my name, I had to prove myself in other ways."

And prove herself she did. With the publication of her first novel, "Wunderkind", at only twenty-five, she established herself as a wunderkind of the literary world. Twenty-six novels, over one hundred short stories, and three collections of poetry later, she has certainly lived up to the promise of her youth.

Still a lovely and lively lady, we move from the study and take a tour of the house, from the recording studio where she still produces her weekly radio plays, to the room devoted entirely to period costumes, and into a grand Tuscan-style kitchen where Miss Vineyard pops the cork on a bottle of red and pours a generous glass for each of us.

"The secret," she says, "is proper planning. You can't do what you can't imagine yourself doing, and so every day I conduct an interview with myself in which I discuss the recent accomplishments that I haven't completed yet. It takes the fear right out of it."

It certainly seems to be working for her. She has a new novel in production, the details of which she refuses to divulge, along with a forthcoming film adaptation of her sixth work, "The Gardener".

"I try to stay buy, of course," she says, tapping the ash off the end of her perfectly safe and healthy cigarette and taking another sip of her wine. "Who wants to be one of those old ladies with nothing to do?"

Zadie Smith's 'On Beauty'

2006-01-31T07:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, when I could have been involved in completing a host of projects, I read 'On Beauty'. The entire day, the parts of it not spent on a bicycle or waiting tables or eating messy burritos, I read 'On Beauty'. I could not stop reading 'On Beauty' because it was so beautiful.

I think this novel is a return to form for Smith, whose first novel 'White Teeth', blew everyone out of the water, and whose second 'The Autograph Man', was a little less so. Well, a lot less so. You get the feeling that it was written in a panic, that she didn't want to be Zadie Smith, Author of 'White Teeth' anymore and that she was just going to see this thing through to the end, goddammit, even if it killed her.

Not so with 'On Beauty'. The story just folds out like a beautiful box with many sides enclosed in its shape. Plus, there's an awesome Forster twist in there that is at once funny and sad.

Sooo... You should read it.

Karaoke

2006-01-29T20:13:00.000-08:00

Last night I slammed two beers, then sang 'Criminal' in the style of Fiona Apple into a microphone. The background was turned up so high that I couldn't hear myself at all, so I relied on hot dance moves to pull me through. After another quick beer, I did the Tina part on "Proud Mary" complete with high-pitched "ooh ooh ooh's" and more hot moves. Once again, couldn't hear myself at all. But it was okay, I was there, the only other people in the karaoke room of the bar were close personal friends who had probably seen me do worse things without even beer to blame, and the time was just, right. Right for acting foolish in front of others.

But, while I was waiting to do my number, I had this thought. I thought, you can either go up and act incredibly goofy the way the guys are, or you can be kind of shy and embarassed and giggly the way the girls are. You can be ladylike, or you can be one of the boys. And then I thought, oh hell, what is this, high school? While I know that some of the people there probably looked askance at my exuberant performance, I had a really good time. I was neither ladylike nor tomboyish, I was just me singing a stupid song in a stupid situation and making the most of it, and so I feel actually kind of proud of my karaoke today, because I could have chosen to be a girl about it, singing softly and blushing when bad notes came out, trying to look cute whilst doing the most ridiculous thing ever. I would not have had nearly as much fun that way.

Time to Get Serious... Oh, Crap

2006-01-26T06:52:00.000-08:00

I have been invited by the curators of Mobile's historical home, Oakleigh House, to participate in a very important ceremony there In February. Though the house has been owned by the city for fifty years, they hanve only just opened the old slave quarters and restored them to what they would have been in the 1850's when one family, the Gaythors, lived and worked there.

There are going to be a lot of speakers, mainly community and arts leaders, reading fom newspaper accounts of slave auctions or from slave narratives. And me, ME, their waitress at Janino's, they want to be their 'poet laureate', to write an original piece to read before this crowd of local brass, make them tear up and open their wallets.

Oh, holy crap. Where do I even start? It's about slavery, for God's sake, and also about two people named Sealie and Tom who lived one hundred and fifty years ago. And it has to be good. None of this dashing it off and it's good enough stuff. It has to be something special. And I want it to be good. Who wants to write a shitty poem about slavery?

Excuse me while I do some deep breathing.

Position Open

2006-01-24T07:46:00.000-08:00

Job Title: Personal Assistant

Job Description: Filing, Mailing, Typing and Dictation, Light Cleaning, Cutting and Pasting, Gofer-ing, Whispering what I mean to say in my ear when my mind goes blank, Hand-holding, Cheerleading, Choreography, Editing, Stapling, Appointment making, Appointment Keeping, Shipping, Recieving, Dog walks.

Qualifications: Three personal references and one year experience

Interview with Resume

Contact: Amethyst Vineyard

I Think I Figured it Out

2006-01-22T20:36:00.000-08:00

I could not understand what was wrong with me. I can't stop sleeping, I feel just awful, I'm angry and sad in turns. And then it hit me, tonight, when I was standing outside and the wind picked up and it raised goosebumps on my arms even though it's seventy degrees outside.

Hurricane.

The sky has been dark in Mobile for a little over a week now. Not raining all the time, but dark and cloudy and windy. On the few sunny days, I felt so much better. And then the clouds would come back and it was like someone was drawing a curtain and everything went dark. I am afraid of hurricanes. I am shaking as I type that, because I'm not the type to be afraid of much, only ghosts and dead fish. I am terrified of hurricanes, I have refused to check the NOAA website even for a local forecast, I have refused to go anywhere near the state line because I don't want to see it.

For four days in August and September I didn't know whether my father was dead or alive. The Saturday before Katrina, I called my dad so many times, trying to get him to leave. I had a bad feeling, but my feelings are hardly ever accurate, and so I hoped that I was overreacting. Then the storm hit, and there was no more communication anywhere, but especially Mississippi and Louisiana, and the levys broke. And I just didn't know.

The Friday after the storm, I got a call from Martin Savage, from NBC News. He was at the convention center and had met my dad and gotten my number. He told me that my dad was alive, and I thought, well, that's over.

It's not over. Through the entire ordeal everyone noted how well I was taking it. I cleaned my house. I walked to the store for food and ice, I cooked meals and had friends over and we sat out in the yard with chips and beer and talked in the dark because there was no power. I acted normal. People forgot that this was happening to me, because I was acting so normal. I cried once for the levys, once for the idea that my children would never know their Grampa Bob. And that was it. Except that it isn't, apparently. Apparently, I need happy pills.

There are no hurricanes in Minnesota. I can live through one more hurricane season, and then it's just blizzards, and cabin fever, and the occasional tornado. I can handle that. I can definitely handle that.

The Passage of Time

2006-01-20T13:53:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of me when I was fifteen (red hair, red hat). It's eight years later now, so I want to think about the differences between the me in the picture and the me sitting at the computer at the moment.

1) I am not in high school anymore. I no longer live with my brother. Mistakes are not as easy to rectify or excuse.
2) I no longer have the boundless, manic, crazy-person energy that I did then (and which I think can be fairly clearly seen in the picture.) I am now a normal-energy-level person.
3) I no longer think that I can have long hair. It just doesn't look right.
4) I am much more devoted. To many things. Then, writing, while an important part of my life, was something I could do on the fly. Wake up, write a poem or story, submit it for class that day. I am much more methodical now, and so my output has gone down somewhat.
5) I was always really worried about how I looked then, and I'm not so much now. But I actually looked prettier then, so what does that mean?
6) The girl I'm clutching in the picture is still my best friend.
7) I have been through a lot since then, which makes me altogether different.
8) I have many of the same dreams.
9) Then, I had horrible nightmares every night. Every single night I would wake up in a cold sweat. Not so much anymore.
10) I can no longer see my pediatrician.

Where Am I?

2006-01-19T14:44:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, having three jobs is not so fun as it sounds. Sometimes, having three jobs is terrible.

Let me start by saying that I am not a workaholic. Far from it. My best times are spent onmy couch, with a book and some toast. Or on my porch, with a book and a pack of cigarettes. That's who I am. Unfortunately, for the last four years I have had to juggle more than two jobs at a time, leaving very little couch/porch time left over.

In the past, I have been (simultaneously): a coffee-shop worker, a massage therapist, a dance teacher, a cleaning lady for a dance company, a receptionist, and a server. So far, I have kept all but dance teacher, cleaning lady, and coffee-shop worker. Today I worked a lunch shift, met with the director of a dance company about writing integrated lesson plans for adult literacy classes based on our 'Anatomy' show, bicycled home, and am about to go meet with three massage clients in their homes. This is exhausting, people. Where's the 'me' time?

Right now, I have this dream. See, my dad, who scared the crap out of me by remaining in New Orleans during Katrina (he will get his own post, if not book, for this), and who somehow managed to come out of it smelling like roses, is now part-owner of both a nice house in Hammond, Louisiana and a restaurant in Covington, Louisiana. My dream involves getting on a train (the only way to travel, really), taking the damage tour and weeping, riding on the back of my dad's motorcycle, getting the princess treatment at his restaurant (it's called Vineyard's One, for chrissakes, it's my family legacy), and actually marching with the Paradise Tumblers once again on Mardi Gras day in the Quarter.

But first, I have to figure out where the hell I am, and where the hell I'm supposed to be tomorrow.

Why? Why Not!

2006-01-17T20:31:00.000-08:00

This morning I started crying while blow-drying my hair. Why? I don't know. Quickly, I tried to come up with a good reason. It's... raining outside. My hair doesn't look good. I, umm... nope. There was no good reason for it at all. So I decided that it was all due to low self-esteem and went on with my day.

Yesterday, I resisted taking a bath. I made it until one o'clock in the afternoon, and then I really ran out of things that could be done with nest-like hair and pajamas. Why didn't I want to take a bath? I'm not six years old anymore, so what was bothering me about the very idea of ceasing to wander through my house with dirty hair and slippers on? I couldn't figure it out and so I had to go take a bath anyway.

A few years ago, I was driving home from work, listeneing to All Things Considered, everything pretty much normal. Then I realized that I was saying the words 'spotted eggs' over and over again in a Sean Connery voice. 'Shpotted Aigs.' The hell! That's crazy! Why was I doing this?

What bothers me is that there is no train of thought leading up to these events. They just... happen. Like the time I got so angry for no reason that I actually lost my vision for a few seconds. Or just now, when I got dressed and ended up looking like Mobile's version of Bjork. (It's good on Bjork, just not quite right for the rest of us.) In Nobokov's 'Look at the Harlequins!' he warns all of his wives and lovers that he has the potential to become insane because of his inability to reverse a mental map. I think my warning signs are far more prominent, but I have told no one. Until now.

So, tell me, is this normal, or do I need some help?

On Matthew Barney

2006-01-16T08:27:00.000-08:00

The Cremaster Cycle is a giant work. Five films, collections of sculpture and stills and self-lubricating portraits that travel the world again and again. Masonic symbols. Elaborate vision. And I have a problem with it.

Maybe my problem stems from the fact that, beng unable to go to New York and spend a day in the Guggenheim, I will probably never be able to see the full cycle. There is one thirty-minute section from the third film out on DVD, and that's all, and that's all there will ever be, presumably. I can understand if you want the films to be seen in a controlled environment, surrounded by sculpture. But then why allow this one part to be seen outside of that environment? Why does the exhibit go to only major museums in large cities? Because they can pay enough? But what is the price on art? I find it self-defeating to spend aproximately ten years creating a huge world in films and their ephemera so that only the percentage of the population who can afford to go to Munich or Prague or New York can see it. That's a pretty selective audience. That's really narrowing down your critics. What is art without audience? Can it succeed or fail if it can only be viewed by so few? Shouldn't an artist, no matter how rich and famous, still care to have his vision seen by as many as possible?

The second problem I have is with the portrayal of women in the cycle. Once again, having only seen stills on the website and the tiny slice of the much larger work that is currently available to us plebes, I may not know the full story. But I have it on good authority from two friends who have seen the entire cycle (in the Gug) that it is a continuous problem.

Now, normally, I take a while to mull things over before I uncover disturbing aspects of films or art works that offend me as a woman. Immediately after the DVD went off, I turned to Clurg and said "There's a problem here." This section of Cremaster 3 contained five homogenous 'Hostesses' wearing thongs, pasties, and stiletto heels. It contained a kickline of blue-eyed women all dressed as sexy sheep. And the only other woman portrayed was Aimee Mullins, a double-amputee actress-model-athlete, who wore the most painful-looking prosthetics I have ever seen, who transformed into a cat after being embraced by the main male character (how Duran Duran, woman painted like animal both sexy and dangerous) and who had to be brutally murdered by the main male character because of her dangerous transformation (sexuality dangerous to your spiritual growth, not your own sexuality but theirs, you must defeat the temptresses if you want to achieve enlightenment, no woman could climb to the top.)

I'm fully aware that the title 'Cremaster Cycle' makes it a male thing. (The cremaster muscle retracts the testes into the abdomen when it gets chilly or when there is danger about.) But is objectifying women a male thing? Or is it a people thing? If a woman did a Clitoris Cycle, would she have men beaten or arranged into colorful formations like pretty toys? Somehow, I think not. Somehow, I think that either she would treat men fairly well or not at all, just leave them out entirely because it would be a work about femaleness, why involve men at all?

Then again, I haven't been to the Gug in a while so what the hell do I know.

Disturbing Performance

2006-01-13T07:21:00.000-08:00

Let's face it people; I am not a performer. It may seem like I would be good on stage because I talk a lot, and loudly, and am prone to sweeping gestures that destroy any and all breakable objects in the region of my arms. I have very little shame, but that does not make me a thespian.

Dress rehearsal for 'Anatomy' took place last night, and my friend, the choreographer Stella Hyland, told me that she would 'really, really like it if you memorized the poetry'. What? No! Didn't I just explain that I don't do that, that I will get very, very nervous and forget everything? I will paste my poems into a composition notebook and I will read them, goddammit, and when I get to the parts I know really well I will look up at the audience and try to speak them soulfully. Except that I'm not mic'ed, so I will be screaming them soulfully, and probably delivering some upper-respiratory distress to the front rows.

During this performance, I have to move in and out of a spotlight on the stage. This sounds easy. I even have a piece of glowtape so that I can see where I need to stand. But there is nothing more painful than taking perhaps ten steps to remove oneself from the sight of an audience while silence swirls around you. It's never dark enough to hide your shameful retreat.

My original idea was to record myself reading the poems, and just have the sound people play it back at the appropriate moments. Why, why couldn't that have happened?

I am not a performer. I like to sit in a room by myself and type things. This is what I am good at, and I think we all need to accept that fact.

Booklist VI (I think)

2006-01-11T19:54:00.000-08:00

Have you ever read a first novel that was just depressingly good?

Vikram Chandra's 'Red Earth and Pouring Rain' is just that. Expansive, intelligent, engaging, and ambitious. Successful. Just good writing. And this is his first time out of the box.

The story encompasses about three hundred years of history, as well as the story of a young Indian who goes to college in America and a monkey who, due to a near-death experience, realizes that he is the reincarnation of Sanjay Parasher, poet.

Yes, the monkey types.

Characters include: The East India Company; Yama; Hanuman; Ganesha; Alexander the Great. And they're all fully-developed, independant characters who jump out of the book and sit in your lap.

The paperback edition is 542 pages, and they're 542 good, honest pages that you really have to read. No skipping around in here, people. And what's more, you want to read them.

Is it wrong to find this mortifying? I mean, even Harper Lee only wrote a novella, practically, and then saved the rest of us from undying shame by never writing anything again.

Vikram Chandra must be stopped.

Wearing Art

2006-01-10T06:34:00.000-08:00

'Anatomy' is being performed this Friday and Saturday. Rehearsing is hectic and it's painful to read my same three poems again and again, but I'm getting more and more excited about it as the time draws near, and I have to admit that I'm getting a lot of play out of it. Yesterday I did a five-minute radio interview on the local NPR station and probably didn't embarrass myself as badly as I had feared. I'll also have copies of my 'Compendium' for sale in the lobby, so perhaps I can actually sell some rather than just giving them away.

As soon as the radio interview was over, the announcer thanked us, then turned back to his mike and said, "That was poet Amethyst Vineyard and dancer Andrea Serra. And now, music from Bershwana the Bagpiper." I almost blew Diet Coke out of my nose.

But I think the best part of this gig is what I get to wear to the performance; one of Rachel Wright's anatomical slips. In it, I am art.

The Nature of Art

2006-01-06T06:15:00.000-08:00

My friend Nikki, who is an amazing visual artist, said this about art the other day:
"People look at my drawings and say, 'Why did you decide to make that beetle blue? Beetles aren't blue.' Then I have to explain that it isn't a beetle, it's a drawing."
This makes so much sense to me. I play with magical realism and surrealism in my stories and novels, and, generally, when I'm having someone read them, they want to know why this totally unrealistic thing has happened in the middle of a realistic story. "Well, you see, this isn't a story about real life. It's not journalism, so I don't have to make sure that everything is the way it would be in the world. It's a story, and it's my story, and so I can make these characters turn colors, or ghosts could appear, or they could go away to Fairyland if I wanted them to. It's all my decision."
What I'm concerned with in my writing, prose writing, anyway, is being lucid and concise. I want to be understood, I want the reader to see the weird stuff immediately, recieve the images represented by the words in their minds' eyes, and then to read on. The surreal fails without a real; it has no rules to break. The reader should have the notion of the real world with them when they come to the story. In that way, we are already halfway to an understanding of what it is I am attempting to communicate.
The other half is that willing suspension of disbelief that makes bad movies seem very good when viewed on the giant screen at the theater. It is much easier to believe that the little girl from 'The Ring' is coming for you when you've seen it in the dark, many times larger than life, with other people who also appear to beleive. For me, this experience begins as soon as I open a book. I never question. I only move forward, and my judgement of a good or bad book relies more on how many times I had to read over difficult sections in order to grasp their meaning, or how many pages I skipped that turned out to be unneccessary, as I knew what was happening anyway. These things are errors in communication, as far as I'm concerned.
But, then again, that's the way they wanted to write it.
I think this is the core of what art is, exactly; the contrast between what is observably real in the world outside of the work of art, and what is observably real in the world within it.

Better

2006-01-05T06:56:00.000-08:00

You know, I'm feeling a bit creative today. Like I really want to do something great. Like maybe I will sit down and actually finish writing chapter two of The Black Maiden, and then print it out and then do revisions. Like maybe I will write ten pages of anything.
On Monday I opened my laptop and did some actual work. On Tuesday I thought I was dying. On Wednesday I was so happy that I wasn't dying that I thought almost exclusively of food, since I hadn't eaten since Monday. I've watched a large quantity of television, so maybe that has something to do with getting my creativity going; television is so terrible that just about anything, even my own writing, has to be better.
I always do this when there's no actual time for me to sit down and work. Aside from my regular three jobs, I have to get at least a hundred copies of my book ready to sell at the performances on Friday and Saturday, do a radio interview on Tuesday, rehearse on Sunday and Thursday, and, somewhere in there, pay all of the bills that I haven't gotten around to yet.
This will lead only to frustration. And pain.

Deathly

2006-01-04T07:01:00.000-08:00

Monday night I had a dinner party and three good-sized glasses of wine. My bedtime is eleven o'clock and I stayed up until two. So, when I woke up Tuesday morning feeling like absolute crap, I figured it was an aftershock.
Then came the nausea and the aching joints. Somehow, perhaps helped by the fever I was already developing, I managed to ignore it and still went to work, although conceding to my body enough not to take the bike, but to let Clurg drive me instead.
I was standing in the sunshine outside, smoking a cigarette before going in, when I realized that I was freezing and that it was seventy degrees outside. That's just not right.
I went in to work and told my boss that I probably shouldn't touch food. He told me to go hostess instead. In the next hour, I vomited twice, and told him that, you know, I don't want to seem like a complainer, but I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to make it to the bathroom next time. "Go home."
I spent the next six hours in bed, the comforter pulled up over my head. My lower body was freezing, my upper body was too warm. I called my mom, hoping that she would have some mommy advice, but she wasn't home. In fact, she still hasn't returned my call.
At six o'clock I moved from the bed to the couch and watched several episodes of 'Law&Order:SVU' and 'Scrubs'. It didn't really matter what images flitted across the screen; the idea was to take my mind off the fact that I was obviously dying.
Today I feel a bit better, but I keep remembering this story I heard on This American Life, in the Conventions episode. This man and woman, who met at a convention, have fallen totally in love. They have decided that they will get married as soon as the woman comes back from a business trip. She gets on the plane, falls asleep, and dies, because the flu she had a few weeks earlier has gone to her heart.
That could happen.

Mom Way Cooler than Daughter

2006-01-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I hung one of my mom's art pieces on our wall. It's a six-foot-long collage of sexy lady's underwear and strange jewellry which hangs from a series of garter hooks and earrings. She made it sometime in the seventies, so the backing is a little worse for the wear, no thanks to me and my ungrateful treatment, but it's still pretty amazing.

It's hard for me to reconcile this artist with the woman who once told me that my room was the room of a child with a severe psychological disorder. But this is who she was before she was a mom, and who she has been, somewhere under the surface of registered nurse and mother of three. I wish that she had been able to be that person always, without ever having had to subvert it.

I grew up around my mom's canvases, but I never saw her working on one. Lately, she has taken out unfinished work and very, very old art supplies, and has started a new piece, a large tapestry that she embroiders in smaller blocks. It's amazing to watch her thread a needle, pick up a blank square of cloth, and a world blooms across it without any planning, without any hesitance.

In our house, artistic talent was highly prized. While she always hid it well, my mother continues to be proud of my writing, and has saved my juvenilia even more assiduously than I have. She is always quick to point out the flaws in my work, criticism that it was difficult to disregard once I found a poem she had written in college that was absolutely amazing. She never wanted to be one of those moms who are uniformly encouraging; she prefers to make us work for it.

Two years ago, Clurg and I attempted to get into a Mardi Gras ball in New Orleans and were rejected because our costuems weren't good enough. My mom, dad, uncle, and aunt all got in and stayed out until seven o'clock in the morning, while Clurg and I had to go home burning with shame.

I just can't compete.

Scooter-Rama: Opinion Poll

2005-12-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

This could be the most important question of our lifetimes:

Should I go with lime-green, which is bright and fresh and just a bit unusual?

Or classic red, for a more sporty look?

Or maybe that sexy black number?

Or is sunny yellow the right color for me?

Some people (okay, most people) say that I'm crazy to think a scooter is a replacement for a car. I look at it this way; I could spend a lot more money on a car I really can't afford, or buy a cheap hunk of junk that will be unreliable and inefficient, or I could get a brand-spankin'-new scooter with 80 miles to the gallon and a limited warantee for $899. Yes, there are safety issues, even my motorcycle-riding, whisky-drinking father has lectured me on those. However, I think that they are neglecting to factor in the fact that I have absolutely no wish to die anytime soon. I'm an excellent driver, excellent.

So please, refrain from the chiding, and just tell me which color would look best on me.

Less Smut

2005-12-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

Because I embarrassed myself in the last post, I will try to un-embarrass myself now by writing about something other than nude photography, mucous-filled head colds, and Clurg farts.

I don't like Poets&Writers anymore, but I was reading a recent issue today and stumbled across an article called "Talking it to Death", about writers who spoke often and at length about book projects that were basically unfinishable, thereby forcing themselves to work on books that they couldn't write until they all died.

The article implied that the act of talking about the books was what had drained the creativity from the projects; too much talk, not enough action to back it up. This worried me, because I always talk about my writing projects. (Because really, what else is there to talk about. Don't answer that, it was rhetorical.)

I had this great idea last week. I had just read a biography of Shirley Jackson, and I was riding home on my bike thinking about it, and it hit me. Two years ago I wrote this novel that's hard to describe. There's a girl who's writing a book about a wunderkind writer who died fifty years ago, only as she's writing she starts to unintentionally novelize it, even unto changing the ending so that the writer lives instead of dying. What if I took out the whole girl-writing-the-book story, and just wrote it as a biography, only letting the novelizations slip in here and there, in footnotes, forwards, the occasional dramatized scene. A transparent biography, through which one can see the also fictional author putting things in the order that suits her own needs best.

Now that I've written about it, have I cursed myself? Is this why I have only finished three separate 150-plus page versions of my new novel which I love like a baby, only to have to start all over again, because I told someone about it?

Poets&Writers always makes me paranoid. Oh my god, I have to get an MFA. No one will love me without a terminal degree. John Updike doesn't do anything the way I do, I must be utterly worthless. Someone else got their first novel published, and it tanked! Now they have to write under a pseudonym! Maybe if they could lay off the practical advice and just focus on interviews with good writers, it would be okay. Because the act of writing is intensely personal and everyone goes about every part of it differently, because the world of publishing is perhaps best left unexplored, because really, shouldn't writers stick to making art, just for the sake of it, because if they don't they run the risk of letting business dictate the type of writing they will do.

I will talk my novels to death, and they will rise from their graves, maybe a little rotten and gooey, but still mine.

Is it Art?

2005-12-27T15:17:00.000-08:00

My friend Stella just came over. We rode bikes together, and she accompanied me on a few errands. In the course of this, she mentioned a photograher friend who wishes to hone his craft with some more 'artistic' photographs, and who expressed a desire that Stella, in his words, 'get him some girls'. Because he said he wanted unusual-looking girls, she immediately thought of me.

I don't know how to react to that. What is 'unusual', exactly? I said I'd do it and all, because hey, naked pictures. But I'm 'unusual'? And if he doesn't call, does that mean that I'm too 'unusual' or not enough? And what if he takes the pictures and I see them and then I have a crisis because I will actually know what I look like without any clothes on? (I prefer to pretend that I'm clothed at all times, even if I'm not.) And will they really be artistic? Does he have an airbrush?

Stella implied that if he does agree to photograph me sans jeans and sweater, then he really is looking for something in the nature of art rather than just pictures of pretty girls. Hey! What the... so if it's me, it's art, and if it's someone more attractive, it's porn?

This spirals into my life-long discussion of girlhood, in which looking 'attractive' is a reason for being. Yes, I wear makeup, buy nice clothes, paint my nails, etc. But I'm not looking to "catch a husband" with my eyeliner. I am really okay with the way I look, until someone tells me that I look like I've lost a few pounds when I haven't, which makes me wonder why they were weighing me in the first place.

I catch myself doing it, too; checking girls out and comparing them with myself. And then I want to slap myself around the face. But I think too few people have that reaction to their own judgements.

In conclusion, I think that if the photographer doesn't call to take some nudie shots, I was a little too unusual for him.

Sick

2005-12-26T18:31:00.000-08:00

That's right. I'm sick. I was sick for Christmas. Last night I had a fever, and when the fever side of it finally hit after hours of chills, I was actually happy.

Because I am sick I have been absolutely non-productive today. Even though on Friday I had a scathingly brilliant idea about how to make my first novel readable again, so that I can maybe get on with my new one, I have not lifted a finger. Instead, I have watched 'Jeeves and Wooster: Season Two', 'Rock Star' with Mark Wahlberg, and 'Grease', which I had been proud to say was a movie I had never seen from end to end. Until today.

The problem with my sickness is that only my head is affected. The rest of me feels perfectly normal, but, because my head sometimes gets swimmy and has a general malaise, I am totally worthless. The healthy remainder is wasted underneath a hot pink furry blanket on the couch. Because my head refuses to cooperate, I had to ask Clurg to toast a bagel for me, something I am generally quite happy to do on my own.

Plus, the excess and zeal others showed me in their Christmas gift-giving made me feel like a giant, poor, Christmas heel. I will never measure up to the gift-giving of others.

Boohoohoo.

It Feels Like Christmas, I Guess

2005-12-21T06:39:00.000-08:00

Christmas used to mean something. It used to mean that I wouldn't have to do anything for two to three weeks, that I would get a lot of presents, and that I could sleep through half of December.

That's what Christmas meant for fourteen years, including Kindergarten and the one year of college I managed to pay for. Fourteen years is a long time. Time enough to get accustomed to something. I would almost call it a 'Tradition'.

And then, Bam! At nineteen, I was out on my own, working for a living, and being forced to spend money on others to a much greater degree than ever before. Before, the money I had spent had been extra, seeing as my food, clothing, and the roof over my head were taken care of. Now, I ate peanut butter for a month after Christmas, somewhat dampening my joy.

Four years later, I'm still trying to come up with the solution. Making gifts? Not really that much cheaper than buying crap, and you have to, like, make them. Used books and DVD's? Know why they're used? Someone already threw up on them.

Luckily, my family has almost given up on Christmas. They deposit money to my bank account, I send them their gifts two months after the fact, and we're all okay with it. Clurg's family, on the other hand...

Well, let's just say that it's lucky Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, because Clurg's grandparents are going to church. This means I won't have to wake up at six on Christmas morning so we can start opening presents at seven so we can be done by two. Yes. Two in the afternoon. That sounds like work, doesn't it?

I think we need to get back to the Christmas basics of no-work-sleeping-in-two-week-vacationism. Because it was a fine old tradition and I miss it. I really do.

Belle of the Ball

2005-12-18T08:11:00.000-08:00

I went to a party last night. When I walked into the house, I was greeted by cries of 'Amy!!!!', with just that many exclaimation marks. While discreetly sipping a single glass of wine the entire night, I was witty, and interesting, and I looked almost pretty. So almost pretty, in fact, that a former boss of mine attending the same party felt compelled to speak to my cleavage rather than make eye contact. Sadly, I was flattered, cleavage not being my strong point. I applaud anyone who makes the effort to see something of interest there.

I whirled about the room, chattering and meeting people, and re-meeting people. I found someone willing to hold me when it got too cold outside for me to finish my cigarette in comfort. I told compelling stories. I laughed heartily.

And then the night was over. Having finished my glass of wine in just under six hours, I was terribly tired. I located Clurg and positioned myself underneath the back of his coat, which served a dual purpose: keeping me warm, and providing enough of an irritant for him that he would begin to move toward the door in the next half-hour. Things were going swimmingly. I had my hands in his back pockets, and I had almost regained feeling in them, when the unthinkable happened.

He farted on me.

Boring Week

2005-12-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

Monday: moved small sofa for friend Nikki. Went home and gave massage to friend Ryan. (Don't worry, I'm a licensed professional.) Ate ice cream. Slept.

Tuesday: New server came into work profoundly high/drunk/mentally ill. They let him stay and work anyway. He told me that he was high on Jesus, Christianality (sic), and that he had hurt his hip the night before in his eight-inch platform stillettos. He then sang me a song about the life of a female impersonator and flicked a towel in my face. Then went to Stephen's parents' house, gave his stepdad a massage (professional), ate dinner, watched 'Bones'. Nikki came over to do laundry. I slept.

Wednesday: Went to work, came home, ate fast food and then un-ate same fast food unintentionally, went back to work. Slept.

Thursday: Went to work, bought a few Christmas presents. Became unambitious gift-giving-wise. Forced Stephen to buy me Lebanese dinner. Was so bored, cut own hair to relieve monotony. Doesn't look good. Watched 'Bruce Almighty' on the USA Network. Could not sleep because feet were painfully cold.

Friday: Woke up and found that Stephen and I were both using the dog as a pillow. Gave another massage to a client (I passed a test and everything, Alabama License no. 1462) went to work at restaurant, trained new girl badly. Came home. Am writing this now. Will return to work in a few hours. Am anxious to see all of this cleaning Stephen promises. Have party to attend tomorrow, but have to wait to arrive until the musical act is finished as said musical act is the saddest. most pitiful old man ever. One shouldn't cry at other people's parties; a whole song was once written about it.

My Name Is Amethyst Vineyard

2005-12-14T20:09:00.000-08:00

It always startles me terribly when someone questions the fact that this is my real name. For one, do I really look like the kind of person who would take the liberty of renaming themselves? And, if I do, why in the hell would I choose Amethyst Vineyard? It's crazy and impossible to spell.

My parents have a long and involved explaination for choosing the name Amethyst, but what it boils down to is that they were both profoundly stoned and have only the slightest recollection of having named me anything at all. Also, my sister's name is Crystal, so we make a nice pair.

The Vineyard comes from the German 'Weingarten', meaning vineyard, and which was apparently not quite English enough for anyone. Here is how my Dad puts it: "They ran like hell from running hotels on one Godforsaken mountain, came to the new world, changed their name to something that means exactly the same thing, and ran like hell to the nearest Godforsaken mountain most closely resembling the one they had just left behind and immediately opened a hotel." He also describes his side of the family as being "A long line of carpet baggers and horse thieves", which I can neither prove nor disprove.

I could not spell my first name until I was ten years old. I was always called Amy, which is nice and easy when you're in kindergarten, and I remember burning with shame in school on the first day of the year when I had to listen to yet another teacher struggle to pronounce 'Amethyst', and then quickly correct them with "It's Amy. Just Amy." My name is misspelled on my first driver's license, my social security card, and numerous other important documents. I always thought it was supposed to be spelled 'Amythest', which makes phonetic sense, but is totally wrong, and I was really embarassed when my name came up as one of our fourth-grade vocabulary words and I missed it on the test.

Clurg didn't know my name was Amethyst at first, and when I said something about Amethyst Vineyard, he said "Amethyst Vineyard? That sounds like some kind of high-class porn star."

Nope. Just me.

I guess it's better than 'Moonchild' or something. My parents were really into Frank Zappa.

Booklist IV

2005-12-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

'Midnight's Children', by Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie makes you start thinking like him. Before you know it, your internal narrative is full of 'yara's and compound words and mythical language and connections. His first chapters always scare me off, but God, once you get used to it, you can't stop. This story was wild and rambling and fairly insane but oh, so good all the way through.

'Love', by Angela Carter. This is my least favorite Carter novel thus far. Annabel refuses to accept the consensus reality, which is interesting, but she is so awful with it. She thinks that she controls reality, that all people are her characters that she can do with what she will. The two brothers, Lee and Buzz, are gutter-children trying vaguely to pull themselves up to bohemian status, and are hardly better than Annabel as far as reality goes. It's a tiny book that took me three days to read, I don't know why. In the end, Annabel kills herself.

'Kiss, Kiss', by Roald Dahl. Oh, the wicked little man. I'm not through with this one yet, but Dahl's adult fiction is so very adult that the first time I read one of his stories I was absolutely shocked. It was about wife-swapping! From the author of 'James and the Giant Peach'! You can always expect a nice kick in the head from Dahl, the stories are nice and breezy and full of venom and all in all a good, fun read. And his granddaughter Sophie is seriously hot.

Next stop: Non-stop Nabokov! Whose name I have only just learned to spell!

Dear Saint Nicholas,

2005-12-10T13:09:00.000-08:00

I know I haven't been a good girl this year. I have lied. I have thought ill of others. I have muttered gypsy curses at those who have annoyed me, and they didn't even have to annoy me a lot. I have been avaricious, but in my defense of that one, I would like to point out that I'm still poor, so wanting money and posessions hasn't helped me a lot in that department. Since you're Catholic and all, being the former Bishop of Turkey, I suppose I should also include the fact that I have impure thoughts almost daily and have committed a ton of sins of the flesh (living in sin) and I've never confessed one of them. And I'm not Catholic.

So, all of these things are going to be pretty big black marks against me. But consider this: have I actively gained any ill-gotten goods from this behavior? Absolutely not. So, should I really be punished more than I already have?

All I'm saying is, hasn't life already given me the switches and coal of poverty and failure? And if the Dutch are right, and you plan to invade my house with six-to-eight of your burliest friends of African descent, stuff me into a sack, and take me to Spain for a year or so, what makes you think I won't like it?

Think about that, Santa, before you make value judgements as to my 'goodness' or 'badness'.

Where are my Underpants?

2005-12-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

I bought six pair in different colors, all the same style. I currently have light blue, pale pink, khaki, and lavender. So, my question is, where did turquoise and hot pink go?

I don't take my underpants off in strange places. I take them off at home and put them in the hamper where they belong. From there they make the short trip to the washing machine, then the dryer and then they usually sit on top of the dryer until I feel guilty enough about my slovenly ways to put them away. Four pairs have survived this treatment for two months now. Turquoise and Hot Pink are MIA.

It must be terrible to be a pair of underpants. I can fully understand that it's no way to live. But underpants can't move of their own volition, so I have to rule out the possibility that they've taken their own lives. Has someone been stealing my underpants? The only option would be Clurg, and they would look terrible on him, he just can't pull off hipster bikinis and he knows it. My dog Lucy is a known underpant-thief, but she is not good at hiding the evidence of her treachery, and I haven't found any underpant scraps about the house.

Will my underpants continue to go missing until I am left with nothing? I'm not comfortable with that. I was planning to splurge on a WIFI card for my laptop, but I guess that money will have to go to underpant replacement instead.

Hot Pink and Turquoise, if you're reading this: please come home.

People Should Wear Hats

2005-12-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

What makes me say this? you think. Some people look ridiculous in hats. True, I'll admit; but only because they're ridiculous hats.

Because I choose my hats with great care, there is a massive difference in the way people treat me when I wear a hat. I could be wearing the most horrible arrangment of clothes on the rest of my body (something I do frequently and unintentionally), but if I top it with the right hat, people run up to me to tell me how lovely I am. Once, wearing a hat earned me forty dollars as a hatted artists' model.
At other times, I've noticed that people who would normally look around the room for someone more important will actually hold a conversation with me when I'm wearing a hat. At other times, folks just pay more attention to what I am saying when I have a hat on my head at the time. Which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how intoxicated I happen to be.
Normally, I look pretty goofy, and I'll be the first to admit it. Sometimes, when I greet customers at the restaurant where I work, I see a look of stunned horror at my big pale smiley face. It's just too much to take in all at once. A hat pulls the attention away from my cartoon-y looking self, allowing the viewer to take their time and get acclimated to the terrain.

In bygone days, people put on a hat as a matter of course when leaving the home or office. A hat was more than an occasional accessory; it was a part of your identity. You would naturally take a man in a bowler hat more seriously than you would just another bald guy. Just as a lady in a lovely cloche looks much more dressed than one with dry, overprocessed hair.

Let's start a hat renaissance.

Second Edition!

2005-12-06T05:58:00.000-08:00

That's right. 'A New Compendium of Anomalous Behavior' is going into its second edition this week, seeing as I've given away the entire first edition to people who looked grateful but maybe weren't. And this one won't have as many typographical errors! They have a two-dollar street value, are bound in 100% card stock with 100% staples, and include my crappy collage work. Did you say TWO DOLLARS?!?! That's like 22.222222 cents per poem! And they're all about mental disorders? Even Better! I have a sample poem up somewhere on this blog, so have fun looking for it, and if you have two dollars lying around, you can send it to The Lucky Duck Press, 166 Crenshaw St., Mobile, AL 36606, cash, check, or money order. And I promise not to spend it all on drink.

Vineyard participates in Modern Dance Extravaganza, has Scathingly Brilliant Idea

2005-12-04T15:51:00.000-08:00

All I need is a girl who can sing a little and dance a little and is willing to cut her hair like mine, and a guitarist and a bassist and a drummer, and I'll have The Greatest Floor Show on Earth.

We'll bill ourselves as The Fabulous Devlin Girls, twin sisters of Irish extraction who sing and dance for their supper. We'll do old jazz numbers; 'Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby', 'Don't Cry', etc, with softshoe dance routines. We will be amazing.

I got this idea a while back, but, there being a certain shortage in girls willing to cut their hair and dye it red, I haven't been able to put it into action. Yet. I was reminded of this plan today as I watched a dance rehearsal for 'Anatomy', a piece choreographed by my friend Stella Nystrom, with poetry by me interspersed throughout, music by Clurg, and amazing set designs and costumes by two artist friends, Rachel Wright and Nikki Burkett. But as I watched it, I thought, 'What ever happened to Showmanship?'

The Fabulous Devlin Girls will be all about showmanship. If I can just find a twin sister, we'll be set.

Booklist III

2005-12-03T18:27:00.000-08:00

I like to think of myself as a good reader. My process is: read once at high speed to find out how things end. Read again at more leisurely pace to pick up on things missed in initial speed-read. Read a third time to get the more subtle aspects that you completely ignored the first two times when you were reading everything literally without weighing the symbolic and structural value.

Djuna Barnes' 'Nightwood' did not really allow for this process. I skipped over perhaps one-fourth of the book because it kept giving me a brain fever, and I don't like being feverish, so I might not go back and read those parts again. The oddest thing is that the feverish bits were all monologues spouted by a single character (with occasional help from another character).
The third-person narrator is fine; eloquent, engaging, enlightening, it delves into the characters through the objects surrounding them and is not afraid to make editorial comment as to their states of being. But these monologues; I felt like I was missing something so important while I tried to read them, and then when I put the book down, I realized that I had the whole story mapped out in my head, although I still don't know exactly how I got there.

In fact, where am I?

The story itself is amazing, and very pertinent to me and what I'm writing now, so that's all fine. Robin Vote is an animal trapped in a woman's skin. She moves through lovers without any will of her own, and only shows her own will when she engages her interior animal in the last pages, attacking her former lover's dog while on all fours. The other characters are so complete; a false Baron, unaware of his Jewishness, a woman who wants a lover to be also a child, and a woman who piles herself with things of the past in order to gain some sort of history. It's the Doctor who killed me, and who almost drove me away. And I think he was supposed to be the character that I loved. But I didn't. I like to be lucid, and he was anything but lucid, and I just couldn't handle the pages and pages of him, drunk Irish cross-dresser waxing eloquent on filth and whores and other things I don't even know about because I just read the filth and whores parts because they seemed most interesting.

This book is giving me a crisis.

What I ended up noticing most of all was the actual book. It was printed on really lovely linen paper with rough edges and nice, wide margins, cloth-bound with beautiful deep blue interior paper.

Southern Lit I

2005-12-02T14:25:00.000-08:00

I have a theory, and it is this: southern family sagas are the story of the land through three to four generations. The first generation grabs the land, the second lives in harmony with it, the third rejects it, and the fourth is diaspora. That's really all I have to say right now. It would take a lot of work to come up with all the books that support this theory, so I'm just going to leave it alone. Also, I've had a difficult day, what with finding out that I don't have enough credit history to finance a scooter.

The best piece of southern lit I've read recently is 'In the Hopes of Rising Again' by Helen Scully, who is living right down the street from me at this time because she used to live in New Orleans.

Spooky Store

2005-12-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

I saw two scary things at the grocery store last night; unrefrigerated bacon and fleece blankets.

I'm sorry, but should bacon just be out like that? Even if you've already cooked it, shouldn't you keep it cold, just to be on the safe side? Haven't we learned our lesson yet?

As to the blankets, the grocery store is the last place I'm going to go if I'm chilly and need some fleecy comfort. I'll go to the gas station, where they have genuine Mexican burro blankets (for the burros, not made of them) for five dollars.

Things I Might Need to Pack When we Move to Minnesota

2005-12-02T05:57:00.000-08:00

Here is a list of things I'm worried won't be available in Minnesota:
Conecuh sausage
Grits
Collard Greens (I don't eat them, I just like to see them lying around)
Southern Living Magazine (I don't read it, I just like to see it lying around)
Warmth
Decent Crawfish (non-Japanese)
People who add uneccessary syllables to all words (I usually don't have an accent, but I do say 'ham' 'ha-um')
Abita beer
Sweet Potato Pie
Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning (can be added to everything to make everything taste better)

So, could someone in Minnesota let me know what I will need to bring with me? Or, if you have an equivalent item, you could let me know about that, too.

To All the Fellows Who Think It Appropriate to Scream at Me:

2005-12-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

Stop it. Really. No, you can't ride wit' me on my bicycle, because I have enough trouble pushing myself around on it without your added body weight. Could you maybe stop talking loudly about how fat my ass is, because really, I know. I've heard from very reliable sources that my ass is freakish, and it's cruel of you to remind me daily. Also, please remember that I am on a bicycle and usually you are in a car, which makes you a direct danger to me, and so I will be forced to call the police the next time you drive along beside me asking me for a ride. You have a car! Had you forgotten that you were driving, so stunned were you by my beauty?

What is it about me that makes you think I would enjoy such things? Is it the way my mouth hangs open? That's just because my sinuses are stuffy.

Leave me and my awkward ass alone.

The Black Maiden, Chapter One, Part Three

2005-12-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

May worked until the light went, ate an apple and watched her newly dark fingers curl around its red skin, and turned on the powerful lamps the Artists' Guild had given her. Saint Sebastian was coming along well, with his cigar-smoke halo, his seven wounds. She thought she could finish him by the weekend and start the new week fresh with HIldegard of Bingen, seated at her typists desk, transcribing the Word.

She went around the house, closing the curtains, and watched her reflection in the glass, a pair of eyes set deep in a shadow that floated over the surface of each pane. It is always our hope, she thought, that we are only a soul in a body, and she watched her lips say that again and again in the bedroom window before pulling the curtains over it.

She sat on the sofa, which released a smell of previous owners like a cloud around her, and for a while looked at nothing at all, resting her eyes, barely thinking. By nine o'clock she was reading a book about the mistresses of Louis XIV, and by eleven she was lying in the iron bedstead, former property of the Annunciation Convent of Fairwell. A soft white light filtered in through the covered windows; no harsh, yellow chemical lights for Fairwell.

For a long time she lay there awake, and when she finally dreamed, it was of a dark forest with wet leaves breaking up into the ground. Through it, she pursued her quarry until morning.

Most of Fairwell slept as May did. Camille Lafayette, finished with her night shift, slipped through the back door of Judge Lafayette's and out into the night, to do, as her sisters said, God knows what. Charlotte Morgan sat rocking in her chair by her front window, her lights all turned out, listening to the fast squeak of her movement, scaring the dust away from her feet. Dr. Retz slept peacefully beside his wife. When she turned, in the midst of her own dreams, a corner of the bedsheet slipped from her shoulder, and the safety light that poured itself into their bedroom lit on a perfect set of bite marks on her white skin, just beginning to fade.

The moon was a small thing that night.

The Black Maiden, Chapter One, Part Two

2005-11-30T14:45:00.000-08:00

Dr. Bill Retz was speaking to his receptionist when a motorcycle went past his office. He waited clamly for the sound to die away before continuing. Did Aileen know where his PalmPilot was? Dr. Retz could not find it anywhere and was lost without it, as she knew. Aileen pushed back her chair and went in search of it. Dr. Retz went out into his waiting room, where pan flute music played over the recessed speakers and fish swam back and forth endlessly in their fifty-gallon tank. He wondered if he should have it redone, if it was too sterile or if sterile was what people wanted when they brought their children to a doctor.

Aileen squeaked back up to the front desk in her rubber clogs, handed him the PalmPilot, and sat down again in front of her computer. It had been in the bathroom, on the tank of the toilet. Dr. REtz thanked her and went back to his office, where he planned to fall asleep in his chair until his next patient came in.

The same motorcycle that had interrupted the doctor came to a stop outside Judge Lafayette's Bar and Grill. There was no longer any Judge Lafayette, but as long as there were people alive who remembered him the name worked well, and when those people died off the fact of the bar and grill would replace the original Judge in the common memory. Inside, one of Judge Lafayette's twelve legitimate great-granddaughters wiped down the bar, two argued in the kitchen about who was supposed to have made the sweet tea, a fourth was upstairs in the office writing out checks and balancing the books, and three more stood out in the courtyard, kicking at dead plants and planning how they would change things. Of the other five, two were away at college, two were at the dance school they owned together, and the last, Camille, was in a room above the office, which stank of mold and dust and untouched things, where she went to smoke privately. At the sound of the motorcycles engine roaring up, idling, shutting off, she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, hid it among the ancient papers, and went downstairs. They would be opening soon.

In this way the morning went on, and, since no one knew yet that the Artist in Residence was now the color of the new asphalt jus layed out on the highway, everyone was fairly bored with it. Dr. Retz saw a few patients and thought that his office should be repainted a robust red as he examined an inflamed throat. Camille Lafayette smiled gently at the customers in Judge Lafayette's and stuffed their dollar bills into her pockets while her sisters did their daily dance of talking and sweeping and pouring around her. Charlotte Morgan ate a lemon wedge for her own lunch; she felt unable to swallow anything else.

And May, in the stucco house in silent downtown, finished dabbing blue onto Saint Sebastian's shorts and moved on to the red of his boxing gloves. Though she sat in the stream of sunlight coming in through the window her new skin did not sweat, and the cut on her ankle itched already with its healing. If she had had nothing else to do that day, she might have noticed these things. As it was, she was thinking that she should never have proposed to do this series in egg tempera because it made everything harder and maybe not better.

A single police car rolled down each of the streets, one by one, past cafes and sandwich shops which proliferated in Fairwell. Even the shops that sold only one thing or the art galleries that served sushi did well there, because the people were proud of them and willing to spend their money to keep things from failing. The only businesses that ever failed in Fairwell were pawn shops and laundromats, and there was not a strip mall to hold them, and everyone who could afford a house in Fairwell preferred to have their own laundry room, and no one pawned anything because their money was enough, always, and they never had the need.

Recipe Roundup

2005-11-30T14:10:00.000-08:00

Amethyst's Ass-Kickin' Chicken Casserole

Ingredients:
One Roma tomato, diced
One cup spinach, finely chopped
One-fourth red onion, diced
Chopped basil
Oregano
One cup sour cream
One loaf nice, crusty bread
Your favorite meltin' cheese
Two chicken breasts
Some Olive Oil
Some salt and pepper
Some water

Cover chicken with water in a pan and cook over medium heat with olive oil, salt, and pepper until nice and white all the way through.
In a greased casserole dish, mix chicken (ripped into chunks), spinach, tomatoes, sour cream, basil, oregano, and onion. Cover with crusty bread and cheese and bake until cheese on top is nice and bubbly.
Eat it and like it!

The Black Maiden, Chapter One, Part One

2005-11-29T19:49:00.000-08:00

May turned black sometime during the night in the middle of her first week as Artist in Residence to the Fairwell Artists' Guild, in the southernmost part of the state, in the first weeks of hurricane season. At first there was panic; she woke up and rubbed her eye with one finger, saw that the finger was a different color, saw that her whole body was now a deep rich shade of black, better than any paint-box. She ran to the bathroom to see herself full-length in the mirror, and then there was a brief and terrible incident with a pair of nail scissors as her half-awake mind thought that she could peel the black away.

She lay on the narrow, creaking bed the Artists' Guild had provided, her foot wrapped in an old shirt that smelled of turpentime but was clean enough to catch the blood the nail scissors had released. She lay there for a long time, feeling unfamilliar in her new skin, and realized that she was holding herself stiff, with her legs turned in when they ached to turn out at the hip, and that her back was straight when it would have liked to sink into the mattress. She let go and recognized herself again.

Feeling a little better, she got up, the little bed swaying dangerously with her shifting weight, and went back to the bathroom mirror. She was entirely black, lips and hair and the rims of her eyelids. When she opened her mouth the red color of the inside looked meaty in the middle of her face. Her irises were still green, the whites around them very white and faintly veined in red.

She decided that the change was something she would have to wait out, and went into the living room to resume work on her Saint Sebastian. She opened the curtains on the long windows and felt the heat pour in.

Fairwell was quiet always, but particularly on weekday mornings when everyone who worked was away and anyone who didn't was indoors, avoiding the heat that had already settled in. In the one high school in town, Charlotte Morgan stood at the front of her class of sophomores and asked someone, anyone, to please say something about 'The Lord of the Flies'. They leaned back in their seats or lowered their heads and were as quiet as the town outside. Very faintly, from the direction of the gym, music filtered in. Square dancing lessons were in progress.

Charlotte gripped the scarred sides of her lecturn. Two weeks left, she thought, and they think I won't do it. When her vision lost its black edges and she felt she could speak again, she told her class that there were forty-three minutes left in the period, and that they could all sit in silence until something worth discussing came up. They settled in and no one said anything at all.

The quiet of Fairwell was so valued that laws were routinely passed to preserve it. Leaf blowers had a single day out of the week to roar. If a car came through town with no muffler, everyone looked up from what they were doing and knew that it could belong to no one who lived there. Motorcycles were looked at pointedly as they ripped apart the air with their engines.

The Other Side of Everything

2005-11-29T05:48:00.000-08:00

While thinking of possible themes for a children's book that I'm hoping to make for my nephew this Christmas, the first thing that came to mind was the idea of another side to everything.

I have very clear memories of sitting on my dresser with my eyes closed and willing my hand to go through the mirror and into the room on the other side. I thought the sky was a screen, on the other side of which was space. I thought that somewhere in my house there had to be a secret door that would take me into another, different house.

Now, the question is, was this a universal experience? Do all children believe that there are other, unseen sides of everything? Or did I read too many books?

Of course the mirror experiment was a direct result of Alice in Wonderland. But the other attempts to break through? The world is absolutely full of books for children that involve getting out of the regular world and into a world where the child takes on adult autonomy and responsibility, then returns to their own world where all of their newfound power is totally useless, but I guess they learned something on the way.

Why do the children have to become adults? Why can't they stay in their own world and be children? It worked for 'Where the Red Fern Grows', except for the whole dead dog thing.

Ode to the Magic Bullet

2005-11-28T18:41:00.000-08:00

Aside from the fact that it sounds like a vibrator you might find advertised in the back pages of 'Cosmopolitan', the Magic Bullet has many endearing qualities.

I have been trying to make decent soup for a long, long time. Tonight, in five minutes, I made such spectacular asparagus soup that Clurg, who had already gorged on leftover fajitas, tasted it and said "Wow. Wow, that's really good." Five minutes. I cut the tips off some asparagus, I opened a can of chicken stock, I added a little butter and salt and pepper, I microwaved it for two and a half minutes, I added a tablespoon of sour cream, and I put the "Tall Cup" on the "Torque Power Base" for five seconds, and I had soup!

The possibilities are endless. Tomorrow I will make portobello and sundried tomato soup. The next day I will make fresh pesto sauce. I will even make extra and freeze it so that when I don't feel like cooking I can resist the temptation to bicycle to Foosackly's (local chicken finger emporium). The Magic Bullet is going to change my life. I can feel it already. Why should I continue to eat the giant bowls of pasta rosso that I get half price at work, when I can just bicycle home and have gazpacho in five minutes? Huh? Why?

Booklist II

2005-11-28T07:07:00.000-08:00

'Shirley Jackson's American Gothic', by Darryl Hattenhauer, is a really, really good piece of criticism on the major works of Shirley Jackson, who I have a new obsession with that was set off by James Harris in the collection 'The Lottery, or the Adventures of James Harris'. See American Nerd for full details.

'Gothic' begins with a really insightful chapter on Jackson's life, and, my God, how could the woman not be damaged? Apparently her husband, realizing that her stories for women's magazines were keeping them in high style, set regimented work times for her, forced her to do all of the housework, childcare, and driving, as well as signing her up for extracurricular activities so that she wouldn't have time to be depressed. Comparing that with her two longer works on domestic foibles, 'Life Among the Savages' and 'Raising Demons' and you can see places where the fiction and the reality merge. However, the husband in the books never fucks a coed while his wife is in the next room yelling at them.

So far, so good, but I'm only to chapter three.

genetics

2005-11-27T07:16:00.000-08:00

I heard a very telling story about my grandmother the other day. My grandfather had been asked to go to a salesmen's convention and either couldn't or wouldn't take my grandmother along. So, smiling sweetly, she offered to pack his bag for him, saying that she understood perfectly and would miss him terribly while he was away. She then sewed all of his pajama legs together, packed her nylon stockings instead of his socks, put a big patch on the back of his swim trunks, and wrapped a block of chocolate flavored laxatives in a Hershey's wrapper. "He fluttered the whole weekend," my grandmother said, and laughed.
All the women in my family are destined to be mean. It's just what happens. There's nothing anyone can do about it, and even if you start out all nice and sweet and not giving people diarrhea, someday you will. My mom is so mean that her husbands and boyfriends have all found themselves, at some point or another, cowering in a corner with their arms thrown protectively over their heads. My sister's mean genes haven't surfaced yet; I think she's waiting for elderly cantankerousness as her cover. And I'm getting meaner every day. This morning, my boyfriend woke me very sweetly, asking if I would please make some of my famous breakfast wraps. My eyes flew open, I sat straight up, and screamed "I am not getting out of bed just so I can go to the grocery store!" At which point he dropped the nice act, too. But really, shouldn't I have been more trusting?

Thanksgiving: Fun!

2005-11-26T08:17:00.000-08:00

My north Alabama heritage. One day, one-third of this will be mine.

2005-11-26T08:15:00.000-08:00

This describes Clurg's attitude for the past forty-eight hours.

2005-11-26T08:14:00.000-08:00

Lucy Jailed!

2005-11-26T08:12:00.000-08:00

Clurg photographs self with the night-vision setting on our camera, which is totally unnecessary.

2005-11-26T08:11:00.000-08:00

My nephew turned Clurg against procreation. I think we can all see why.

2005-11-26T08:03:00.000-08:00

This is how I looked before I was filled with shame, for the poop story my mom chose to tell was the one we call The Disaster of '92. The Disaster began with a reasonably priced Mexican meal, my then-three-year-old brother, and a gas station bathroom. It ends with an enormous quantity of human waste everywhere but the gas station toilet, paper towels, disinfectant, and trash bags bought from the gas station itself, and my brother riding home standing in the back seat of my mom's car, holding on to the headrest. It is important for me to clarify one thing; I did not lock my brother in that bathroom and leave him. The door had an automatic lock on it. I had no choice. And I couldn't just walk out with the key, I had to turn it back in. And I was only ten and could not really deal with that amount of poop.

2005-11-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

Clurg munches it up. The poop stories are about to begin.

2005-11-26T07:58:00.000-08:00

Modesty pursued.

2005-11-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

Clurg asks why I'm taking so many pictures. He is so cranky because he has a premonition that soon the family stories involving poop will start.

2005-11-26T07:53:00.000-08:00

Uncle Erik and Hazel, possibly the best dog I've ever met; two New Orleans refugees making a new life in Jasper, Alabama. You can see the sadness in Hazel's eyes.

2005-11-26T07:49:00.000-08:00

Our dog can be very cute sometimes. Her name is Lucy. We call her Stinky Lu.

2005-11-26T07:43:00.000-08:00

While my sister and I carried no less than fifty platters from my grandmother's house to my mother's, Clurg held down the tailgate and kept our dog company.

Today

2005-11-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

Today I am writing chapter two of my novel, The Black Maiden. Today I am writing a section on a high school English teacher who performs small acts of treachery uon her most hated students, such as leaving dead animals in their cars or breaking into their bedrooms to place ominous objects near them. Today I am also writing a section about a sadistic pediatrician and, of course, his one willing victim. Today I am writing about a girl who turns black and tries very hard not to undergo a religious conversion because of the experience. Hopefully in the following weeks I will be able to start posting bits and pieces, and hopefully someone will follow the link to this blog from stephen mcclurg's blog and read them and enjoy them. Although I hate to ride his coattails.

I'm sorry

2005-11-15T20:37:00.000-08:00

I really didn't realize that someone had ever looked at this blog, so I would like to publicly apologize to louisjones33341917 for never responding to his very kind comment. I feel like a bad person.

booklist

2005-11-15T20:18:00.000-08:00

I've been working my way through a mound of things that have been on my mind lately. The first stop was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Orlando'.

I first read this in high school and was astonished by it. It felt so fresh, it was magical realism before magical realism was anything, it was science fiction and feminism and history. I recently read 'Melymbrosia', an early version of Woolf's first novel 'The Voyage Out', and I wanted to make sure that 'Orlando' wasn't just a dream. There could not have been more difference in the two books. 'Melymbrosia' felt long. It took time to relax into it, it felt like it was so close to saying some things but it just couldn't manage it. 'Orlando' is more immediately engaging and, I think, says just about everything it needs to say with a carrying voice.

My boyfriend says he doesn't like Virginia Woolf's fiction. He says James Joyce used all of her techniques first and better. But he hasn't read 'Orlando', so there. Also in Woolf's defense, I have to add that she is actually readable, unlike Joyce, who seemed to take vicious pride in writing important books that are so annoying I have thrown them across the room many, many times and uttered curses upon them. 'Orlando' is awesome, and sadly ignored. (At least I think it is, but I have to admit that I'm a Virginia Woolf naif, and so can't tell you whether one or ten books has been written about it already. I would say probably yes.)

In conclusion, people should read 'Orlando', and know that my boyfriend is a fiction snob.

2005-10-09T20:39:00.000-07:00

I have not forgotten the blog.

2005-10-09T20:06:00.000-07:00

I have not forgotten the blog. Sometimes, in dreams, the blog comes to me and says "Amy," for that is my nickname. "Amy," it says, "Why have you done nothing to make me beautiful? Why am I all orange and ugly and why are your posts so stupid and why hasn't anyone visited me?" I wake up in cold sweats all the time. This blog is an albatross, except that it doesn't have the enormous wingspan and it isn't remotely interesting.

Nevertheless, I have made a commitment to this blog and I will keep that commitment, if only because I have one of the most profound senses of guilt I have ever seen.

In the next few days, I will be printing a small collection of poems, all about mental disorders. Here is a sample:

Lycanthropy

I.
It’s always the same dream.
You, crouching on the forest floor,
A small warm heart
Falling to pieces between your teeth.
Summer, and the air is too thick
To breathe. You feel the eyes
Before you see them,
Like tiny bulbs
Lighting the spaces
Between the trees.

But when you wake,
Sweating into your striped pajamas,
There is only you
In a half-lit bedroom.
You can still feel the fur
Blooming beneath your skin,
Pricking like the acupuncturist’s needles.

II.
At the office, they whisper
About your cubicle’s décor:
Those magenta-tinted faux-Navajo
Posters of gray dogs baring their teeth
With eyes like bug-zappers,
Glossy photos of prize deer
Torn messily from hunting magazines.
And your lunches are enough to turn stomachs,
Parts of the animal no one else would
Think to eat. You think, so what
If a little blood drips down my chin,
Everyone likes their meat cooked rare.
But they don’t know how you prowl the aisles
Of Winn-Dixie, hoping to find something
Still warm beneath the cellophane.

III.
Your wife turns over
And exposes a moonlit flank
From the folds of the sheets,
The white of her skin broken
By the bites she takes for
Passion. You rise
And go to the backyard.
The damp grass reminds you
of something you can’t quite name,
And you run the only way
You can remember, using all
Of your limbs to push off
From the freshly-mown grass.
When you reach the fence
You can’t remember what it
Is called, and you turn to run back again.

The collection is called "A New Compendium of Anomolous Behavior".

2005-06-15T05:42:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's been a while. Instead of talking at you, I'll give you a story. I think it's the best one I've ever written, which isn't saying a whole lot.

Archaeology

She lived two houses down. There was a baker in between, his shop in the front, his house in the back. He used to give me extra cookies for my dog, and he baked my mother’s wedding cake, and my sister’s.
I never knew her husband, he was long gone since I could remember. We never saw her son, he lived over in Mississippi someplace, no ne ever asked after him. I knew that our pond had been dragged once, by the sheriffs, for her husband’s body.
When we drove past her house, I would watch my mother’s eyes slide off the road and settle on it. I think she wanted to see her, out on her porch, pulling weeds in her yard, but we never did. I think she wanted some signs, some clues, to confirm whatever she thought had happened. My mother thought she would make a good detective.
I watched my mother’s eyes for years before I asked her why, before I pressed for details, wanting to assemble things for myself. In the meantime I sometimes dragged our pond, too, with a net I found rusting in our barn. What came up were handfuls of tadpoles, thin-shelled crawfish, thick black beetles. Rotting leaves.

We never talked to the people on our street. We had been zoned commercial, we watched as they moved or died and their houses were taken over by accountants and machine shops. We never met these people, either, and I think it was my mother’s idea, like most things. She had grown up in this town, left and come back with three children and no husband. She didn’t like to meet people she remembered. She had been wild and pretty before, and she wasn’t so much anymore.
Years later, in a sudden fit, my mother made me walk over to that house, to the new family that had moved in. Her house. I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to knock on that door, walk in and smell her smell still lingering in the walls, see the marks on the carpet where her furniture had sat for years, see any stains in the carpet or the tile of the kitchen that might be all that was left of her husband.
I cried. I said, “No, you go, I’m just a kid,” but my mother didn’t listen. She was sending me as a scout for her, to investigate that house and these new people. She made me go, and I wonder if the lady who answered the door noticed my swollen red face, the catch in my voice from crying so hard.
They turned out to be bad, anyway. Their daughter taught my brother to light matches, they had to call the police all the time to settle family arguments. I never had to go over there again.

The sheriffs had combed through our woods, dragged the bottom of our shallow pond. They need not have bothered, it dries up in the winter. They searched our barn, which even then had not held horses for years, only a tractor that was once red, then faded to pink. They had looked for him all over the place before they put up a headstone in the cemetery down the street. There was no date of death, just the year he stopped coming home. There is nothing under that stone.

I learned to crawl through barbed wire fences without cutting myself. You have to find a weak point, a place where the wires have gone slack. Hod it between your fingers, between the barbs. Suck in your breath and swing your leg high, your body low, and before you know it, you’re through. Don’t trust the places where the wire is down entirely. Put your foot wrong and your whole leg will sink through, you’ll cut yourself into ribbons, long curling slices of yourself all over the place. I have the scars of experience, because I never would walk around to the end of the fence. I had to go through.
Behind our house was a gravel road, barely big enough for two children walking side by side, but it still had a name, Eighth Place. Deep tracks cut into the woods off of the road, and I had a catalogue of the things that swam into view along these tracks, the deep ruts of four wheelers and dirt bikes, the things you could find if you looked hard enough through the thick green.
First there was the fir tree, which was perfect in winter, glazed with ice. Then the huge truck tire half-covered by dirt and weeds, almost a part of the ground again. And then there were the foundations.
I cannot imagine that those were once houses, with whole families held inside. The cement squares were only as big as my bedroom, and the houses that used to be on top, “Fire,” my mother told me when I asked. There were little things scattered around, and then I thought they must have been part of those houses, a half-rotted mattress showing it’s rusted springs, part of a toilet, a tricycle, a broken pot. But these must have been other people’s trash.
Farther along is a nice, flat place, the creek that feeds and empties the pond running down in the bottom of the gentle slope. There are huge rocks back there, and the ropes my brother and I used to swing around on still tied to the stunted trees, now swollen with years of rain. The hum of the back of the grocery store drowns out the sound of the mosquitos. Cross the creek, and there is her back fence.
She used to hang her clothes out on the line, old lady clothes, polyester pants in pastel colors with elastic waists, printed shirts with ties at the neck. Aprons.
She had the only backyard with kudzu covering it that I have ever seen. It was a heavy green curtain in the summer, a tangle of brittle brown wire in winter. It strangled the grass underneath it. My mother used to lift that curtain and hide under it, when she was still wild but not yet pretty.
I thought that maybe he was the reason that kudzu was so green, her husband, lying under there and feeding it, lying with the snakes that cooled under there in hot weather. Maybe the sheriffs were afraid to look under there, afraid to hear a sharp rattle, feel fangs in their ankles.

“He beat her, so she killed him one night. Then she called up her son, and he came and got the body, and took him and dumped him somewhere.” My mother’s eyes cut over to that house again; she only wanted to talk when she was driving. I want to know where she thinks the son put his father, if he’s somewhere around those charred foundations, the rotting mattress. I think about maybe finding bones out there one day, breaking through the dirt like that tire, bones that have been there so long they seem like they belong. For a while after that, I looked down all the time I was walking, even when I go swimming I look under the surface of the brown lake water, waiting to see part of him, waiting to find him.

When I was eleven she called our house. She had gotten older without our noticing, and she was scared now to be alone, scared of falling without help nearby, breaking something that wouldn’t heal. She didn’t want to leave her house. She wanted me to come and live with her.
My mother told me this and watched my face and laughed. “I already told her that I needed you here. You’re too young anyway, to take care of her all by yourself. She really wanted your sister, but since she’s at college, she asked if she could have you.” My mother stopped smiling and rubbed her forehead. “I suppose she’ll have to go to a nursing home, but she’s afraid. Someone should call her son,” she said, knowing that she wouldn’t be the one to do it.
They were all getting old; the baker would retire once my sister’s cake was done, my grandmother now paid me to get her mail from the box for her. I lay in bed that night and thought about it, counting the triangles in the patterns of glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. She would have to go to a nursing home, and leave her house, and maybe her husband’s bones with it.

A For Sale sign came up in her yard, and then that first bad family moved in and out again. There were others, a whole series of loud crowds of relatives fighting in their yard, making me scared to walk through my woods at night. I thought I could smell beery breath near me, I heard footsteps in the leaves that nearly matched my own, but not quite. Then the chiropractors who moved into the bakery took that house, too, and the police stopped coming, and there are no more cars rusting in the front yard.
Our pond still dries up in the winter. Sometimes, in the muck that’s left behind, I’ll see something long and white and glinting, but it’s only a piece of bleached and twisted wood.
Since I’ve started looking for him, it’s hard to stop.

A Day Of No Work

2005-06-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

Today I woke up at seven o'clock in the morning. I put a load of laundry in the washing machine. I took the dog out so that she could pee next to the butterfly chair that I keep out there. I read a few chapters of this really wonderful book my boyfriend got for me last night, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, by Haruki Murakami.

I took a shower and actually blow-dried my hair so that I could go and get my driver's license renewed, as it's been expired for two months and I am terrified of the police. There was no line, no wait, and I had brought along my wonderful new book for no reason.

I went to Wal-Mart, which I chose for its cheapness. I made a sandwhich and attempted to unclog the bathtub drain. I don't think it worked.

Finally, at ten-thirty, I ran out of other things to do, so I sat down in my 'writing chair' with my laptop and got to work. In the first thirty minutes I finished perhaps a page.

I did not like it. Sometimes you have to write boring things that are meant to answer questions you raised earlier but don't really care about anymore, sometimes you have to move a person from the bedroom to the bathroom and it's not easy. Add to this the fact that I give myself a really strict page quota for each day, one which I haven't actually met in quite some time, and you get an Amy who is pretty damn frustrated. I read more of the Wind-Up Bird.

I think I'll go to the bank. I've only got five more pages to do today.

Working

2005-05-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

Waitressing (or Waitering, or Waitin' Tables), is a way to make money every day of the week that you hold in your hand and take home with you right then. Therefore, it attracts a certain type of person. Or, rather, several types, which I will list here:
The Student
The Drunk or Drugged
The Lifer
The Artist
The Unlucky One

The student does not care about waitressing particularly. Waitressing is a job that provides them with money to shop at Abercrombie, helps pay tuition until they go on to a 'real' career, or otherwise supplements them on their path to a brighter future. Therefore, the Student views the job as a 'fun' thing to do while in school, they go out with their restaurant friends after work because, even though they don't get off work until midnight, that's when all the fun starts anyway!

The Drunk or Drugged are people who will be hired, show up for perhaps two shifts, collect whatever tip money they can, blow it on the mindbender of their choice, and will never be seen again, except as they walk around whatever scary, economically-depressed neighborhood is nearest the restaurants they are routinely hired to and fired from.

The Lifer is a special breed. The Lifer can come in two forms; those who could have done something else, and those who have reached the zenith of their potential. Not that there's anything wrong with waitressing, but some people get bitter with time. Lifers smoke a lot. All of them.

The Artist is allowed to be older than the student. They are also allowed to waitress for the better part of their adult lives without becoming Lifers.

The Unlucky one is someone who had an actual career, white collar, in an office, and then either messed it all up or got downsized.

If you are lucky enough to get a job waitressing, it's fun to decide which one of these categories you fit into. Go ahead, pick one!

National Public Radio

2005-05-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

One day, I will work for National Public Radio. I will be paid to listen to NPR all day long, which is what I try to do for no pay as it is. I will make NPR even greater than it already is.
Here are the greatest NPR shows, ranked by greatness:
All Things Considered
This American Life
A Prairie Home Companion
Fresh Air

I award the lowest possible ranking to Hearts of Space. On the jazz station that I could pick up in Jasper, Alabama, this tribute to minimalist Bay-area composers would interrupt the sweet, sweet flow of tinny-voiced jazz that I liked to fall asleep with. I would wake up at around 2am, say very loud 'What the hell is this New Age crap?' and fall asleep again. Restlessly.

Honk if you love NPR.

I Need to Find this Book

2005-05-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

I misspent many, many years reading my sister's hand-me-down young adult novels. This was in the early nineties, my sister's books were from the eighties or earlier, and so they rarely had the positive, progressive messages one can find in almost any YA novel nowadays.

I have one remarkable ability, aside from my Billie Holliday impersonation, and that is the power to recall books I read only once twelve years ago. I can't recall the title of this particular gem, but I can tell you that the main character was named Ophelia and her best friend was a fellow named Amadeus "Mad" Hatter. One day, she finds that Mad is tutoring this teenage supermodel. The supermodel gives Ophelia a makeover and she is suddenly popular and has a boyfriend.

Phrases from this book have been running through my head for two weeks now. If this sounds familiar to anyone, if you have any clues as to the identity of this book or its author, please tell me. I can't keep thinking about this.