i obsess.

ad-libby.

Dear People Who Email Me Requesting That I Write an Entry About Products For Their Sake:

Get Your Own Blog.  Write your own pushily-rad posts about products people (possibly) want (desperately) (but you'll have an easier time discovering that if you attempt it yourself instead of asking me to do it for you).  Stop trying to dry-hump my bloggal crotch without bothering to take me to dinner (of course, you're smart to not try and take me to dinner, since I wouldn't go.  Unless it was Somewhere Really Fancy, in which case I probably would go.  Sigh.  Even my fingers betray me when it comes to fine dining/prostituting myself for fine dining).

ANYWAY, as you're obviously planning to not invite me to French Laundry at any near point in the future,:  Do you see ads here?  Do you?  Any ads?  Any at all?

ANY?  AT ALL?

No.  I'm serious.  I can't fucking fathom why people who represent companies who would like to work through bloggers to sell their shit would ask me to do it.  No, no, there are no flashy thingies on my sidebar.  I DO have a link to the site my friends Cristina and Janet built, The Green Mom Review, and of course I link to MOMocrats (even if my time there in the last year has been sort of more as a phantom-presence than otherwise), and there's a link to my dusty group-sex, er, group blog, Did You Buy That New?, and that I don't recommend you visit unless you enjoy choking on a back-log of dust animals larger than my neighbor's ancient greyhound.  But those links aren't ads.  They're just friends, and/or me.  (I may or may not be suggesting that I'm friends with myself in this scenario.  I mean, I *am* friends with myself, because that's what self-therapizing is all about, being friends with oneself, liking oneself, hell, loving oneself, and self-snuggles, and self-absorption, and self-admiration, and jesus but I'm filthy-rad and want to shut out the world and stare at my reflection for eternity and WHO AM I FUCKING KIDDING, I WOULD BREAK A BITCH WHO TRIED TO MAKE ME SERIOUSLY STATE THAT I CAN BE IN A ROOM WITH MYSELF AND NOT START A FIGHT.  WITH MYSELF.)

Don't mind me.  I'm crazy, 's all.

Anyhoo, please stop emailing me.  You see, I read your emails, and I feel bad for you.  I feel bad for your apparent inability to notice that this joint is, for better or worse (although how it could be worse is beyond me), pale and bland and sans blinky, flashy attention-getting shit-for-sale.

(Except for my ten-year-old rhinestone-encrusted pasties.  Since, you know, they were made cheaply and of course they're all cracked and worn and shit, and OH GOOD GOD I DON'T OWN PASTIES.)

(Although I wish I did.  I would've liked to have learned how to spin 'em 'til they resembled old-fashioned sparklers.  STRIPPERY REINVENTION OF FOURTH OF JULY, BITCHES!!  Which is kind of how it already is.  So, hello, I'm redundant.)

I'm not trying to be a slag, PR folks, so much as I'm just asking you to stop asking me to give up my crotchal grinds for free, because even if you were to ask how much a pony-ride is, you couldn't afford it.  I HATE writing under duress, and I also suck at it, so if I did it, I'd be miserable and trying desperately to not produce doo-doo which would make me turn to drink, and then I'd be in a blind, drunken chaotic whirl for days on end and all of that costs A LOT OF MONEY.  Booze:  it's not handed out compliments of the store it's sold in.  (Also, all of the things I steal and wreck when I'm on a bender.  Those things are also not handed out compliments of the zoo/hotel/police station/swingers club/elementary school wherein I choose to rampage whilst stewed.)  Your free product provided for my reviewing pleasure would not go far in bailing my old-fashioned crazy ass outta the clink.  I need SCRILLA for that, yo.  Scrilla you ain't got to give.  Or don't wanna give.  Not without a struggle.  One I'm disinterested in.

I'm sure your shit is A-numeral-uno RAD and everyone needs twenty-seven of them, but -- find a road more traveled and better suited for your needs.  This one's unpaved.  With signs up.  And an old lady standing in the middle with a bottle of Bombay Sapphire in one hand and brass knuckles on the other.  Shaking her fist.  Slurping gin.  Passing out.  In the road.  Dust swirling around her nutty old head.

(That's not me, by the way; it's just some old bat I employed to repruhsent in the road so I don't have to.  I prefer to bask in comfort, poolside, with attractive young people spritzing me lovingly with Evian while others bring me food and wine and still others massage my feet as old-ladies-for-hire do my dirty work.)

I could go on, and I will, by golly.

Just as soon as I finish off this bottle of Blue Sapphire.

*gurble*

so that's what you think you want.

Her hair, strewn back and across her sharpened shoulder blades, so much seaweed but in a champagne tint, wet and soft.  It came around as she whipped her neck in a quick arc, slapping her cheek, moistening her nose, surprising her.  Slurping audibly on her skin as she turned back, now, slower, motivated less by his words and more by her desire to move away from it all, from the light and the speed and the anger, away, away, away.

If you think you can treat me like, like -- why.  Why, I could -- I could just, just snap, and things would be SO different, you can't imagine.  You think you're so important, such a key element in my life, but actually?  NO.

She snatched up her wine glass and hid her slightly tottering movements as she paced away from him, back toward the campfire where her mother and husband and child laughed and looked a picture of comfort and cozy near the yellow-orange spires of flame.  Her dad, with a sour grimace she could barely discern, simply peered, with pinched gaze, into the vague middle distance and away from her softly crumbling beauty, once statuesque, once impressive, now gentling, like couture removed, several seasons beyond sharp-chic recognition, at first blade-harsh, at present a thing that goes on and on and on until it suddenly is akin to your mother's curtains:  dated.  Garish. 

Unpleasant.

The window streamed, angular, with highway lines of irregular water, her eyes tracing through its tracks, waiting for a rhythm, an ancient quiet of steady logic, where none would exist, not today.  She turned blearily to her husband's ruddy cheek and remarked on its stoic length without fingers to aid her.  Fingers that ache, now, a little, fingers she flexed upon the thought, beneath the salmon-pink blanket, fingers too taut and congealed to be her own, too old.  Too soon.  

The little boy, his voice a dusty, delightful LP of scratches in the cobwebbed morning, brought his arrow-straight body into their bed as a catapult of energy, still surprising despite its being routine of late.  She saw the man wince as the harpooned child hit its mark, the father's body lanced with his offspring's weight straddling his gut.  She put her hand over her mouth to catch the laugh, so the child wouldn't think it was a move he ought to incorporate into his routine just to amuse her. 

The man and child rough-housed as she lay, static, her mind skipping lightly over the conversation she'd held with her own male parent the previous evening.  The feeling of its being the newest rendition, a cover of all their attempts at this very conspicuous, repeated piece of disastrous wreckage recorded on warp speed and played back in a screech in her mind.  Not just a feeling, a true truth, her knowledge of their inability to find a groove to fall into in their talk that remotely resembled the other's, and how lifelong-harsh that frustration, that frustration.

Then she remembered, with an ease, a sliding-down toward the thought, of the day when she had chased her brother down from the attic in their rented house that lay outside the tiny town in Missouri, chased him, with hoarse screams, down the ladder from the attic that led to the top of the carport, she crawled down as quick as she could but still trailing him as he leapt, sprung to the first of the rough 2x4s nailed into the stately tree's bark, a rung too high for her six-year-old state.  She railed at him, screamed more, even wept.  But he was on and on, higher into the tree, until he'd simply - disappeared.  His usual trick.  Going where she could not follow.

And then her father, behind her, catching her up, in his strong, steady arms, and suddenly there they were, bursting through the dark, guarded leaves and into the strong light that shone on their bright heads.  They lay on the warm, wooden platform, then, all three, side by side, and picked out the bunnies and giraffes and monsters and the profiles of beautiful ladies in the massive white ships of cotton drifting easily above them.  It was the longest afternoon of light and warm and safe, safe, safe.  And she felt its beauty in her small hands, gripped it.  It felt like golden light and green winds, soft and swaying, and the bluest blue ever written about by the greatest of wordsmiths.  And her father and her brother, their camaraderie together, they three.  

Her father interrupted her reverie to ask if she would like a cup of the coffee he was pouring into a thin white cup.  A curt head shake was her response, after which she felt guilty and gave a further explanation, messy and overwrought and altogether unnecessary.  Then she got up and walked outside so she could catch her breath. 

Small fires were already smoldering in the early morning drizzle, their pungent scent a meager offering to her bruised emotions, her own gaze into the gray mist a study of bitten lip and creased brow.  Her rancor and her acquiescence a braided chain to tuck into a sequestered spot somewhere deep and still accessible so that she could remind herself without too much digging about.

un-news.

Jack got in bed with us at 3:30 this morning, which is when I became a captive audience to the fireworks of what I can only assume was a miscarriage. The cramps, some of them like a white-hot poker through the abdomen, weren't as alarming as the blood. The blood made me scared. Now, after a few stolen half hours of sleep between sorrowful waking, I'm afraid to speak or move. Maybe if I don't get up it won't be true. Maybe I'll still be pregnant and I won't have to face my period or anyone who thinks I have a baby in my belly. Namely, Jack. Caleb *really* didn't want to tell him. Why don't I ever listen? Sorry for the false alarm, folks. **** Addendum: I'm fine. (It's almost lunch time and we're at Jamison Square Park having a nice morning splashing around in the water. Jack has been funny and sweet with all kinds of people we've encountered. It's heartening.) I only disliked telling him that he's still, for now, an "alone kid." That part blew. Caleb was right that we oughtn't have told him. I'm really fine. Honest. We'll get it right. Anyway, like I said yesterday, it was so early. And who, aside from the most egregious of idiots, shares that they're pregnant like, five days after they find out, with a) their MIL, b) one of their best friends, and c) the internet? Hi. I have prioritizing issues. Thanks for all of your well wishes *and* your sympathy. I appreciate all of it. You're good people. (I'm really fine.) (Mostly.)

news.

So I'm pregnant, and I'm excited, but I'm also scared -- no, frightened.  Yes.  Frightened that just by saying it here I'm, no, it, the pregnancy, is doomed.  Actually, that's a lie.  I'm frightened it's doomed because I don't feel deserving of it, for all of the same reasons that I'm a negative nelly, that I'm not deserving of success or rewards or anything other than the abject failure liege I've convinced myself of being.  I'm only just the narrowest, sliverest slice of this side of conception which means it's a very gray area of being pregnant, it means I'm, for good reason, dubious it will last, harrowed by the thought of accepting/acknowledging/loving.  The room for pain and horror.

Pat Benetar had it all wrong; hell isn't for children.  Children are hell.  AND heaven. 

Maybe that's why they look like a yin/yang symbol in the initial stages of conception.

Huh.

******

Updated because somehow people are still reading this post and not the latest one, which I'm posting in its entirety below:

Jack got in bed with us at 3:30 this morning, which is when I became a captive audience to the fireworks of what I can only assume was a miscarriage.  The cramps, some of them like a white-hot poker through the abdomen, weren't as alarming as the blood.  The blood made me scared.

Now, after a few stolen half hours of sleep between sorrowful waking, I'm afraid to speak or move.  Maybe if I don't get up it won't be true.  Maybe I'll still be pregnant and I won't have to face my period or anyone who thinks I have a baby in my belly.  Namely, Jack. 

Caleb *really* didn't want to tell him.  Why don't I ever listen?

Sorry for the false alarm, folks.

Open/Shut.

“The important thing to remember is that we don’t need any of this,” she whispered to herself.  Once upon a time, she would possibly have muttered it.  But muttering is for beautiful, slovenly twenty-four year olds.  And muttering would’ve interfered with the silver-thin horn belonging to Coltrane that filled in the edges of her profile as she hunted about for this and that, puttering in the seemingly cavernous house/existence that smelled like dispelled ideas and wet dog.

Hearing the phone ring startled her away from her beginning-musings upon why that stupid incident from beyond the brink of ten years hence ruined her life, or at least ruined her, and she backed away from its shiny-jawed aspect and into the arms of the phone.  “Doll!”  And, “Darling, you know I wouldn’t do you like that.  Our standing weekly phone date stands.  I just – got caught up.  You know.  Shit fucking happens, and all that.”  “Do you realize the earth could catch fire?  My son informed me of that just moments ago.  It boggles the mind, non?”

The conversation played softly, picking up where the horn-music had quit and packed it in through a lovely segue within moments of the call.  It filled in her profile and she imagined the way it would look wrapped about her face, filmy and soft, as she preened, her chin waggling in chattering spasms.  If she could possibly, somehow, this time, in this seeming-intimate moment, explain herself, convince her levels of head that the woman on the other end of the length of rope attaching their twin cans understood her, in the unspoken manner she had taken for granted as a quality she would eventually unearth in loads of people throughout her life, she could quiet the burbling in her chest.  She cut a hunk of cheese to quiet it, instead.  The yelping of child and dog careening about outside in a hair-and-peach-flesh’d frenzy reminded her of such physical things as hunger, anyway.

If you could only imagine, only pierce the surface of the swirling morass of volcanic emotional action within my deepest, most hidden depths, she thought.  I would be at peace.  I could stop being haunted by it.  I just want someone to know, and to reassure me as to its not being consumptive.  Goddam, this room is a fucking dust museum. 

The call ended with a dissatisfying lack of firm clicking noise.  That minute element of closure never comes anymore.  She wanted to call the woman back to tell her that, to point out how their conversations never really ended because of that distinct lack of a finish, that mechanic element that had always so profoundly completed a long-distance conversation as far back and away as she could remember.  Her son would never know that satisfying, heavily completed click.  How it pained her to consider such an existence.  There’ll be other things, she whispered to herself.  He’ll know and be discomfited by the beginning of something and the end of it, too.  Too many things.  And he’ll wonder why it, the thing, is cause for such a deep, dismal unrest, and why it comes to mind at those dark, small hours of thin, watery-gruel (grueling) mornings when the day is a thing to be dreaded and not chirped at and he’ll blame her, and he’ll blame himself, and he’ll blame his father, and he’ll blame his ex-girlfriends and he’ll blame his career or lack of, and he’ll point his mental finger and draw a line around the world and that’ll be that.

It’s okay, though, she breathed softly through her nose.  It’s our version of flying headlong into a street lamp and falling down, down, fluttering with wings askew and limbs bloodied, down and gasping out the knowledge as we begin to alight and the death pall creeps o’er us.

She clasped scarred fingers together, suddenly gladdened by the dust and the dog hair and the cheese and the whirring life of minutiae and mirrors and Sunday mornings all punctuated by the bittersweet knowledge of this eventual - eventuality.

hurted.

If you've been doing nothing but reading my posts from the inception of this blog, which would mean you've probably, by now, hung yourself often enough due to the rather long-ish breaks taken between entries to have become a porn star for how well-hung you are, oh, that was weak, anyway, ANYWAY, you might recall that I had a brother, and he is gone.  Well, not gone, just far.  Beachy.  Beachy in a lives-in-a-homeless-institution full-time.  In Florida.  But as I've poorly joked before, if you've gotta go homeless, why not go beach?

Why do you read this?

You need to really pause and reflect for a moment.  Seriously.  It's almost more sad that you read this than that I write it.  For I am truly a low, despicable creature in the game of the writerlies.

So it occurs to me, as I work and toil and sweat back here in the creating area, the area where I create things, I won't extrapolate for your unknowingness even though it may vex you, because I haven't time.  I am supposed to be churning and burning, bitches.  To the point, ho!  (Ye thundercats of glory and, gee, where are *those* plastic fast-food accessories for the movie that is yet to be?  Unless it already was.  I would not know if it came prior to my child's birth.  I'm unsavvy in the realm of kid-meal plunder from before a certain time.  Yeah.  I.e., uncool.  What.)

Point!  Ho!

*ahem*

(Pause for effect; or, more earnestly, pause to pretend, well, not pretend, but actually DO work.)

But I am back, and it is only to say that I think I'm afraid to have a second kid, because what if it makes my first kid hate me and us and everything and become mentally ill (but in a way that's completely un-hip and un-trendy and doesn't land him in art school and then showing in a gallery or whatever the fuck those kinds of mentally ill people end up doing) and end up homeless, in a very non-homie (yo) way?

In a way that hurts more than ever because it's already happened once?

Then again, what are the odds?

And yet --

My dad, his eyes.  Those hollowed-out eyes.

I can't commit onlineicide, it seems, because every time I'm ready to plunge into those soft, easy-on-the-brain waters of not-writing-blog-posts-in-my-head-every-waking-and-non-waking-minute bliss, I run into this:  the urge.

The bloody, inescapable urge.

Forgive me, I must beg, because while my desire to prevent you from having to seethe in my madness, or see the madness at all, my physical thundercat takes my arms and shakes the words out like flying bits of dirty fur.

I'll try harder, next time.

Promise.