Rock throwing punk

I was finishing up my run this morning (which means I was at the point where I felt like hell, was sweating buckets, and had to keep playing the Rocky theme in my head to even keep moving), when I rounded the corner on a bunch of kids waiting for the school bus, about 10 of them. I've seen these kids before. Our town has this dress code for elementary kids where they have to wear khaki pants and green polo shirts with their school logos on them, and thus appear way more harmless and collegiate than they really are.

So there they all are, looking like a Pink Floyd video, waiting in the dark for their bus. The few other times I've seen them, there's always this one pariah kid, a little weird looking, maybe a little too soft in his manners or features, a little weird in his habits, maybe a little too smart for his own good. I don't know. He's always sitting on a curb as far away from the rest of the kids as he can possibly get. Some days I see a car parked there on the street with its headlights on, and I think it may be this kid and his mom, like she's giving him a safe place to wait, but at the same time probably making the others kids that much more pissed off at him.

As I came around the corner today, there was no car and several of the kids were throwing handfuls of gravel and little rocks at this other kid. I had my dog with me, the iPod was blasting, my lungs were exploding, and I had a block to go before I was home and could stop timing myself, but seeing this, I had to slow down. I fixed my most heinous stink eye and the main rock thrower and get this: he didn't stop. He picked up another handful of rocks and pelted this kid right in front of me. I stopped running, yanked out my earphones and amplified the stink eye, walking right towards him and he threw another handful at the kid, some of which hit me in the shin as the other kid ducked and ran.

At this point, any adult would be justified in yelling at this little shit, perhaps addressing him accurately as, "Hey, you little shit," but I was exhausted, breathless, and stunned, and trying to think how to address the kid without profanity and coming up with nothing, and then, THEN I think I hear this, muttered under his breath: "What are you looking at, bitch?" This is possibly the one instance in my life where a hard core dose of happy-feeling endorphins has not served me well, because in that moment I made the decision to let this go because I could already see the bus rounding the corner and I knew that for now at least, the rock throwing had to stop. I gave him an extra dose of glare and memorized his face, but said nothing.

As soon as I picked up running again I regretted it. I should have given that fat little fuck the yell-down hell-ride of his life. I should have humiliated him in front of his peers. I should, at the very least, have gotten his full name and found out which house he came out of. But I did none of that and instead stood in the shower raging and scrubbing and coming up with vicious things to say to a 10-year-old that he would remember for the rest of his life. I even considered making the bus stop a regular installation on my morning routes to head off any more rock throwing and maybe even give my anti-people dog another chance to be scary.

Back when we lived in the last town, my husband gave a kid a yell-down hell-ride for throwing a handful of gravel at our brand new car as he drove down our back alley. He slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse, and leapt out of the car in his uniform and yelled at the kid, who was trying to mount his bike and escape, to freeze. He then yelled at the kid until he admitted that yes, he'd thrown rocks at the car on purpose, and no his parents wouldn't appreciate that. Then he made the kid ride his bicycle back to his house, and my husband followed him and then told the kid to go inside and get his mom. When she came out, he told the kid, "Either you be a man and tell her why we're here, or I will." The kid fessed up, the mom was embarrassed and apologized and made her kid apologize, and my husband said it was all right, but that if he were a parent, he would want to know if his kid was throwing rocks at people's cars.

Now, I have no idea if the mom then went inside and told her kid, "I'm not mad-- but that's what you get for messing with one of those asshole military guys," and then blew the whole thing off, but I do know that my husband felt a hell of a lot better, and that every time we saw that kid thereafter, he was headed at a full run in the other direction.

Me on the other hand, I'm now thinking about all the times I was bullied, and all the times I did the bullying (mostly to my little brother, which counts double since we'll know each other for the rest of our lives), and I've just got this sick feeling in my stomach for not doing anything. Was it really the exhaustion and disbelief, the hope that surely I'd misheard or misinterpreted the scene I'd stumbled on? Or was is that old kid fear speaking in me, saying that the best way to stay safe was to keep quiet? Either way, I still feel angry and ashamed.

I attend, but am not present at, a party

Have you ever been at a party where you just wanted to ask somebody if maybe they had something for you to read off in a quiet corner until it was over?

I went to one of those this weekend. It was actually nothing to do with the party itself, this rising desire to be Away From Everyone, somewhere dim and quiet where things happened at a measured pace, preferably to other people and on paper, so that they go away when you close your eyes. As parties go, this one was well-equipped. It was in a club, the club, on a nearby base next to the water, which meant the night was humid, windy and dank-smelling, and the little glass airlock hallway that leads to the main doors was covered in condensation and smeared footprints.

I'd never been to any of the clubs at any of our previous bases, but this one was about how I imagined them-- an older building with many layers of paint on the baseboards, respectable floral carpeting, quaint little restroom doors and brass plaques on the walls, but lively, thrown open, and completely given over to the party in progress. Kind of like your grandmother's house if she routinely hosted frat parties. The bar was in full swing, lit like a cathedral with personalized mugs and patches and emblems all over it and a giant brass bell bolted to the countertop-- supposedly anyone dumb enough to ring it buys a round for the whole house.

Who knows why I wasn't feeling it, but I wasn't. I found myself thinking about frat parties I used to go to in college, and how bizarre all of their various paraphenalia looked hung on the walls next to pictures of men long dead but neatly arranged, looking just as arrogant and intent as the ones standing in front of me with jello shots, their fingers down inside the lips of the cups to hold five or more per hand.

The female cast seemed familiar as well, skillfully styled just like something out of a magazine with their war paint, sequins, and violently flattened hair. Considering the humidity, the hair was quite impressive. As always, the unattached ones looked the best and also the least comfortable. One in particular caught my eye. Actually it was less that she caught my eye and more that she stumbled into my chair, because she was already well into her evening before most of the party even arrived. Amazingly, she appeared to be drinking with her father, which is something I just don't get.

I've had friends who claimed to have gotten drunk with their parents, or even smoked weed with them, and this is a barrier I just can't imagine crossing. A few drinks with your folks, sure, a looser evening where everyone gets a little loud and tells stories, why not?-- but this girl was hammered. One eyelid was at half-mast and she reached out to steady herself on passing landmarks, living or inanimate, as she shuffled from table to bar and back, carrying on the conversation as she went and just adjusting her volume. Several men came to the table over the course of the evening, and I couldn't tell if they knew the girl or her father, but she slumped towards each like the passenger in a swerving car. I started calling her Stumbles McTitties for the impressive valley of flesh she had on display. Just watching her I felt like I was already experiencing some of the rocketing headache and landslide of dazed regrets she was bound to wake up with the next day-- and there was her dad, absently swirling his drink in one hand as he joked with another of the young men stopping by the table.

I'm no saint. I've had my moments-- hurling someone's plastic reindeer, which had just been named Uncle Buck, off a balcony and into a swimming pool, tiling someone else's refrigerator door with white bread, using peanut butter as mortar. I just haven't had these moments in front of my parents, with their consent or aid. I think my father's or mother's face, rendered in the flickering reel of utter drunkenness, would be enough to set me screaming in terror. Or at least get me to focus every last atom of my energy on sitting up straight. They're not hardasses, they're just my parents. Some people shouldn't have to see you clinging to a kitchen counter making muppet faces into the reflective side of the toaster because it's funny looking.

The rest of the evening was long, and seemed to get longer as the hours went by. I spent most of my time wandering around outside in the foul-smelling humidity, trying to avoid surprising anyone hidden off in the shadows. This is something you learn after a few frat parties-- approach inviting corners of solitude loudly, with much theatrical coughing and stomping, and then if you find them unoccupied, stake your claim and guard the perimeter with your own carefully measured warning sounds. The darkness was thick, though, and there were ants, and I had to see an older man gruffly vomit near his shoes, like it was an annoying inconvenience, so I took regular loops back into the shocking coldness of indoors to make a lap or two around the party before heading back outside.

My husband was having a good time, so I was trying to be inconspicuous about how utterly separate I felt from the current of energy that seemed to run through everyone else. I felt an eerie calmness when I was outside, savoring my silence like hard candy-- it was a separate pleasure not to have to explain to anyone what I do, where I'm from, where I went to school, how my husband and I met-- but after a while it got old and I wanted very suddenly and very sharply to leave. Luckily he and I have developed matching piercing gazes for these occasions. When one of us catches the gaze from the other, we know a countdown has begun, and social disentanglement must commence forthwith.

Handily stone sober, I enjoyed ferrying him first to Whataburger and then along the black expanse of rectilinear country roads home. All the roads back home are marked out along the property lines of large fields, and you get the disorienting sensation that you're traveling straight the whole time but the faint pinpricks of distant city lights are making 90 degree shifts around you.

Mostly, though, I enjoyed talking to him, and knowing that even though I'd had an off night and nearly every other human had set my teeth on edge and I felt all tangled, I still got to go home with this one, easily the best by my estimation. Sometimes it seems like all the parties I go to, people are engaged in a focussed and active search for someone, like a bunch of radio towers blasting off in a all directions at close range. This weekend I enjoyed casting my needle back into the haystack and then reaching out for him and finding him, true as any magnet without any digging at all.

Feathers

Turns out I'm not a hunter.

This is something most people who know me could have probably guessed, but now we have official confirmation. Over the Labor Day weekend, my husband and I went on a dove hunting trip. Despite not having obtained a hunting license, I was fully prepared to enjoy the spectacle of doves spiraling crazily out of the sky for the simple fact that they have regularly spackled my car with shit for past 6 months. They have also hurled their thick, soft bodies directly against the windows of my house at the exact moments when I have been carrying something scalding hot and/or breakable, and each time I have spectacularly dropped whatever it was I was holding.

So when my husband said he wanted to buy a canvas pouch in which to store dead, bleeding doves around his waist, I made a terrible face but I agreed.

The hunt itself was even rather peaceful, given that I sat in a folding chair in the shade of a mesquite tree and read a book through most of it, only glancing up occasionally amid the thunder of shotguns and the intermittent soft thuds of doves landing among the grain stalks. The hard part came at the end of the day, when the clouds drew together and a stiff wind raked across the field as everyone gathered to clean their birds.

My husband handed me one and began to explain how to clean it, first pulling out the soft belly feathers. That was as far as I got. The dove in my hand was still warm, its head gently dangling and flopping over the back of my hand. Its eyelids were translucent gray and closed, and as I took hold of the first layers of feathers, they fell away easily and scattered in the wind in front of me, like rice at a wedding. Laid bare, the dove's breast was a mottled purplish color, thinly concealing the dark muscles and veins beneath. I laid my hand over it and felt the warmth draw away.

I don't know if you've ever found yourself here: standing in front of a blue plastic barrel full of bloody dove entrails, flanked on either side by people knuckle deep in bird, and suddenly realizing, with equal parts shame and tenderness, that you can go no further, you just can't break the skin. My reaction was to stall for time, spreading the dove's wings and manipulating its scaly red toes and acting as though I was pondering the finer points of avian anatomy, when really I was wondering whether I have any right to eat meat at all if I can't clean a dove.

Hunting is honest, and, done right, it's respectful of animal life. There can be a certain elemental reverence in cleaning a carcass, one that honors sacrifice and abhors waste, and as it turns out, this is an honesty I haven't mastered. I relished filet mignon on the night my husband and I got engaged, chicken is the cornerstone of my diet, and I firmly believe that bacon should be classified as an antidepressant, but there was something about that shower of delicate, white feathers blowing away from me, some catching in the grass and the barbed wire, that held me still for a moment, half scared, half sad, and for the first time, fully connected to what it means to kill and eat something.

I'll save you any suspense-- I immediately fell back into my dissembling ways and had a huge turkey sandwich yesterday, but the limits of honesty are on my mind. Just how much am I willing to gloss over in order to maintain my own comfort? The gas devoted to my heinous daily commute certainly comes with a price far greater than what shows at the tank. And as a military wife, I am constantly juggling the shifting, and sometimes conflicting, realities of what I believe, whom I support, and how I show my support. Sometimes though, it's all I can do to hold together all these scattered alliances and keep them from blowing away from me and losing all meaning.

Cotton and Crank

Cotton season has just ended and there's at least an inch of false snow tangled in the broken, desiccated stalks of now bare fields and gathered in drifts along the road's edge. It looks like there's been some kind of stuffed animal massacre, the Antietam of the plush toy world. The visual miscues are unsettling-- snow-like patches on the ground, the wintry haze and diffused light of dust storms (once the fields are cleared, the earth loses its mooring and takes off in big swirling clouds for more exciting places), and the uncertain horizons warbling in the silvery heat of mirage. Going on vision alone, it looks like December, but in reality it's just that the world is so hot everyone's given up tending it.

My geraniums are dead. This is just as well-- in life they looked fake, and in death they've taken on a much more believable and interesting shape. Now they look like the dirt-caked fingers of monkeys reaching out of the pot at nothing. The caladiums are going too, and have moved from thick, white heart shapes veined with green to collapsed, yellowed lace. I'm taking a special pleasure in watching the zinnias meet their apocalyptic end, since they were so aggressive and overbearing in their prime. Plus, I always thought their blossoms looked like the fake flowers on some moth-eaten old lady hat.

I watched a documentary on crank last night, which was interesting, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I have this fascination with documentaries that, whether on purpose or by accident, end up capturing someone else's absolute dog days, and then try to make some sense out of them, scrape together some salvageable truth to justify having filmed the whole thing. The wreckage on the screen was compelling in its simple portrayal of human misery and grief, but the truths I got out of it were uncomfortable: this too is rural America, not just my fields and skies and birds and trains. The other disturbing thing was how simple rock bottom can look-- a woman in her kitchen, the kettle on the stove, the embroidered potholders hanging on hooks, the free calendar from the insurance company tacked next to the fridge, and her husband filling a syringe with bubbly liquid the exact same sunny color as the paint on the walls, and then gently pulling her arm to him and flicking the reddish bruise hidden in the crook of her elbow. They're both crying. This is the Worst.

When I was a little kid, my parents used to shop at the first Whole Foods, which was in a small storefront on Lamar Boulevard in Austin. It opened in 1980 and a year later, there was a huge flood, the Memorial Day Flood of 1981, where all the creeks rose from their beds and came downtown to wash away cars, furniture, trash, people, and all the pianos from Strait Music, two of which were never found. On the north corner of the building, near the bicycle racks, an artist later painted two different high water marks, lovely little white-capped waves with scrolly dates. I remember standing next to them as a kid (one was higher than my head), and imagining water all around me and Austin floating by like too many toys at bath time. I was enchanted. (I was also, of course, thinking of the clear blue ocean water of childhood fantasy, not the fetid soup of actual floods).

It would be nice if there was a way to mark life's worst points with pretty painted watermarks, and hope that after the flood recedes (assuming it does and you don't have to go with it) this public monument would give some meaning to your loss. As a nation, we're fumbling with that-- there's still no 9/11 monument, despite all the elegant concept drawings. We can't seem to get a handle on how to represent it-- two giant beams of light? a reflection pool? a remembrance wall? a tree for each person? Or some silly movie (with Nicholas Cage of all people) trimming and wedging the whole mess into an easy cinematic formula with a touching Coldplay song in the background?

I don't think there's a clean answer, a neat way to tie up our low points for future remembering. When it happens, it's mostly a mess, and I say this from personal experience, having tried repeatedly to write an accurate and readable account of my own personal dog days. The past, I've found, is slippery. It means different things on different days, and there's no such thing as a complete inventory of the things you've lost or gained from living it. I've tried, many times, to make such an inventory, as if my life were one big cargo ship and I'm in charge of documenting the manifest for the safety and stability of the whole ship. But containers don't stay put; boxes don't stay packed. Life, for me at least, has a way of rocking the same types of things loose to rattle around in the hold and bash into other things, until I trudge down there and lash it all down again.

Custom markings

One block south of the town square, there is a small shop over which a faded yellow plastic sign hangs that reads, simply, "Shoe Repair." Inside, a man named Felipe Mejia makes incredible, handmade custom cowboy boots for people all over the state. His counters are stacked with photo albums containing pictures of his finished works-- boots with elaborate threaded scrollwork and punched-out leather designs of ranch brands, prickly pears, broncos, guitars, angels, hawks, roses, barbed wire, lightning bolts, skulls, crosses, hearts, longhorns, and volumes of initials. His boots are short, tall, pointy-toed, square-toed, rounded, high-heeled, flat-heeled, medium-heeled, and made from all types of leather in a rainbow of colors, all stacked in giant fragrant rolls in an unruly heap behind the counter.

This weekend was my husband's second visit to the store and my first. He and Mr. Mejia were striking up a deal on the pair of custom boots my husband has long dreamed of-- boots that will accommodate his "duck feet," which are broad in the front and almost dainty in the heel, and will also somehow solidify my husband's identity as a non-native, but enthusiastic, Texan. They converse easily and quickly in Spanish despite my husband's bashful request for patience as he "practices," and I flip through albums trying not to appear strained as I concentrate on understanding.

Like many things in this town, the boot shop is old. A yellowed notice on the wall announces the October 1985 tax rate change, and much of the ceiling is patched with crumbling cardboard to catch the leaks. Mr. Mejia has been working out of this shop for 25 years, and making boots since he was 9 years old. He's easily in his late sixties now, if not older. Flipping through volumes of lovingly made boots, it's easy for me to see that this man is an artist and a craftsman, an original, and when he's gone, there will likely be no one to replace him.

The inevitability of decline in this town, its slow and constant decay, is no longer novel and poetic to me-- if anything it's grown irritating and tends to make me feel even more isolated. The long list of what's not available here, from organic hippie macaroni and Asian pears to bookstores and Argetinian wine, grows longer by the day, and less funny. But in things like the boot shop, things that are unique to this part of the country and saturated with its history of struggle, migration, and its ties to the cycles of nature, the process of loss and decay seems much sadder. Something will really be missing when we lose this.

My husband has decided on chocolate brown leather, calfskin for its softness instead of the wrinkled, weathered look of bullskin. He's chosen a personalized logo, a symbol of his occupation that he's proud of, and has found the perfect color of leather and stitching for it. Mr. Mejia traced and measured both of his feet onto a long white sheet of paper, six different measurements per foot, and scribbled notes to himself in Spanish in the margins. He's even adding a special tuck in the leather of one heel to accommodate the massive callous my husband has from years of ill-fitting footwear.

Well satisfied, they both turn to me with the question I've been dreading: what type of boots would I like?

I'm stuck here. For all the reasons of beautiful craftsmanship and one-of-a-kindness, I'd like a pair. Plus, we've agreed that moving around so much brings with it the pleasant responsibility of finding one nice thing per posting that really reflects that place, and to invest in it as a way of keeping track of each place and honoring the time we spent there. Boots definitely fit that definition.

My problem is this: being from Austin, I've never quite felt comfortable in flexing my Texan-ness among other Texans. Out of state is another story-- in Florida I caught my accent thickening when I was totally clueless and needed help with something, the implicit message being, "Cut me some slack-- I'm not from around here." Out of sheer homesickness, I even bought a shirt online that says, "Fuck Y'all, I'm from Texas," and wore it to dive bars and drunken Marine parties.

But every time I go back home, the message is clearer-- Austin is different from most of Texas. With every anti-Bush bumpersticker, every cross-dressing hobo, and every vegan diner I pass, I realize that what used to look like normal old city to me is in fact consciously, and even aggressively weird compared to much of the rest of the state. So for me to don something as Texan as cowboy boots is cause for more than a moment's cognitive dissonance-- am I allowed to do this? Does this look pitifully wrong on me?

Added to this is the pressure of personalization. What image symbolizes Me? I've wrestled with this one for years, even back in the comforting bizarro world of Austin, because there everyone has at least one visible tattoo. The utterly blank canvas of my skin has nothing to do with chasteness or notions of future employability-- it simply reflects profound indecision and the inability to identify something important enough to want it carved into my flesh with a vibrating needle. And this is not for lack of looking-- I'd guess that I've weighed ideas for a tattoo at least five times a week since I was 16. It's just that nothing has tipped the scales.

I've even designed tattoos for other people and sat in during the disturbing moments when my drawings were permanently etched into someone else's hide. But when it comes to me? To my translucent Irish skin? Suddenly up comes the image of local police on the evening news, having to identify my lifeless body by a silly tattoo; or of me trying to blend seamlessly into Latin America after having committed some terrible crime and being given away by my tattoo; or being captured by hostile terrorists, stripped naked, and trying to pretend I'm not American, only to be betrayed by a tattoo; and, perhaps the most improbable scenario, me on the red carpet of some gala event, dressed in Prada and bearing a tattoo that long ago lost all its significance to me but remains trapped under my skin until I can pony up the money for lasers.

Why does all of this come up when I'm considering whether or not to get a pair of custom cowboy boots? Because they're expensive, and I know someone will work hard on them. Because this man, who will not be around forever, will spend four months on them, leaving his personal mark on them, for me, and I'd like to think that if he's going to do that, I could do him the courtesy of choosing a design that has some meaning for me.

And why is it so hard to choose something? I know pretty much who I am and what I like in this world, and I like to think that in some ways I'm unique. Perhaps the problem is the editor in me, the overthinker with the big red pen who loves to cross out huge sections of my past with the margin notes, "overwrought," and "muddled-- needs direction." The editor in me always holds back, reminding me that "there's a better way to say that," or "this particular issue will get clearer with some perspective-- best to wait a while and see what develops." Especially now, when I know there are things about myself I'd like to change, and when every eight months forces huge change anyway, committing to any kind of identifying marker, even if it is a special treat, is difficult and anxiety-producing.

What I'd like to know, from anyone who's gotten a tattoo, from "traditional" and "non-traditional" Texans, from anyone who's ever struggled with identity or wondered what the hell they're doing in life, is how do you know when you've hit that sweet spot of finding something purely "you"? And how do you hold on to it?

Lysol for the soul

Right now, surgeons could operate on my kitchen floor. Babies could eat out of my bathtub. People with no immune systems could crawl face down across my living room carpet, inhaling deeply, and there would be nary a sneeze. Why?

This is what I do when things get on top of me-- I go hunting the source of my discomfort with a bottle of bleach and an old toothbrush. Surely it's the scum around the bathtub drain that's making me feel like this! Or the dust on the window sills! Or the crumb tray in the toaster! Whatever it is, I'm convinced that if I look hard enough, and scrub hard enough, I'll find it.

Right now the floors are so spotless they squeak under my feet, and somewhere off at the other end of the house, the cat is sneezing out carpet freshener from his hiding place under the bed. As for the dog, her shepherding ancestry is keeping her vigilant-- something is wrong with one of the flock, and she tails me from room to room, ears flat, eyes sharp, waiting.

I've seen my psychologist once, about a month ago, and until the end of this month, I'm to wait out scheduling conflicts and his yearly vacation, and keep a journal of my emotional responses to food, stress, all the usual suspects.

Usually journal writing is something I'm good at, and something that helps, but lately it's felt like the unsettling equivalent of milking a rattlesnake's fangs into a glass-- what do you do with the venom if you can't figure out the cure?

The journal I'm writing in has a painting on the front that used to be one of my favorites:



The full title of the painting is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening," and next to "The Temptation of St. Anthony," it's my favorite Salvador Dali painting. I read that what he did for this painting, and for many others, was to sit in a comfortable chair with a key in his hand, and a saucer on the floor directly beneath his hand. Then he'd nod off. When he was relaxed enough for his hand to drop the key, it would hit the plate and waken him, and he'd immediately paint whatever messed up dream image was in his head right at that moment. Hence, a woman being menaced by a rifle coming out of two tigers coming out of a fish coming out of a pomegranate with a spindly-legged circus elephant strolling in the background. Happens to me all the time.

But last night as I was unable to sleep and trying desperately to milk the venom out of my own head, I saw something new in the painting that disturbed me. In so many ways, it's an accurate picture of bulimia-- all kinds of hidden menaces rocketing out of a single piece of food and mounting a direct attack on the exposed body, a body which seems blissfully unaware of what's about to hit it. And the elephant in the background-- when you look at "The Temptation of St. Anthony," those circus elephants seem to represent all kinds of impossibly sinful decadence, the frightening excesses that tempt us all. Thin enough, pretty enough, strong enough-- the promises that draw me further and further out.

I stopped writing last night, unsure of whether it's a good idea to relax and let the key drop. What if the ultimate answer in all of this is that I'm just not equipped to handle the life I've chosen? Would I be willing, then, to let go of the compensation of fixating on food and weight if it meant I had to look harder at how I deal with stress (which seems to be the one element of the equation that's not going anywhere)?

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Judging my aggressively sparkling house, I am reading too much into this. One thing I've learned though-- one morning of slinging bleach is no match for years of built up grime.

The A Hole is Now Open

One of my favorite things to do on road trips is photograph ridiculous signage. The hobby has evolved into an elaborate ritual where I pack along a small notebook for writing down names and locations, and, of course, the camera, so that I can shatter virtually any quiet moment with the shout, "Holy shit, pull over!"

Podunk hair and nail salons are usually my bread and butter, since there's an unwritten law that they must derive their names from the most ham-handed puns the gals could cook up after a night of too many cosmopolitans-- "Cuttin' Up" is a popular choice, but I've also stumbled across such gems as "Continental Hairlines," "The Hairport," and "The Mane Event."

The above picture is of an establishment not far from my current hometown, and the only thing I've done to it is remove the phone number beneath the name. Yup, "A Hole" is the honest-to-God name they've filled in on their bank loans and business cards. And just in case you thought maybe these folks were just shooting for that first listing in the phonebook, and that's what the "A" means, they made sure to clarify their real intent by graphically enhancing the "O."

(Incidentally, I nearly clotheslined a cyclist when I leapt from my car in my frenzy to secure proof that someone would name a business after a schoolyard taunt. Sorry, dude.)

Another hobby is going to the annual Art Car Show in Austin, where people openly scorn bluebook values in a quest to turn their vehicles into mobile collage pieces using everything from plastic dinosaurs and Barbie doll heads to welded silverware and shag carpeting. I'm completely in love with the idea of an art car, both for its reckless abandon with found objects and adhesives and for its utter inconvenience on days when the owner is violently ill and just wants to duck into the pharmacy for some Immodium and Advil-- anonymity is impossible when your car is covered in chess pieces and spouts bubbles from the tailpipe.

 

Art Car Shows in Austin have a very pronounced atmosphere of weirdness-- the whole thing takes place on 6th Street with people reeling in and out of the bars to gawk at each car, and usually at least one leathery biker mama shows up in buttless chaps. But coming across an art car nestled in between the minivans and the BMWs in the parking lot of a Houston Linens N' Things is like stumbling across the giant pink vibrator in your grandmother's stocking drawer-- it's a little shocking.

But I maintain that it's a special person who is willing to spend the time, energy, and money turning their jeep into a tiger. I can't imagine the sleepless nights given over to creative musings, doubts, frustrations-- should the headlights be more catlike? Are the glow-in-the-dark tiger heads mounted on either side of the front grill overkill, or the perfect touch? But the true mark of a car artist is the ability to find that one little detail (or two, as the case may be) that really pushes the envelope:

  

Brilliant.

Thank you, dead people

Last weekend I went to see the Bodyworlds exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

I was entirely unsure of how I'd react to a giant room full of real dead bodies carefully preserved in plastic and posed artistically-- I have an intense interest in human anatomy, both from a medical and an artistic perspective, but I've also got this nasty habit of hitting the floor in a dead, twitching faint when anyone gets near me with a needle or even talks convincingly about doing invasive medical things to me. So this weekend could have gone down one of two very different paths-- either I block the flow of museum foot traffic by stopping and sketching the exhibits, or I block museum foot traffic with my inert and unresponsive body, possibly bleeding from the head.

Thankfully, it was the sketching.

The full bodies were just as breath-taking as I'd imagined they would be. I had seen pictures of some of the posed bodies, but the amazing thing was being able to walk around them and sketch from different angles, seeing how the lines of each body, and the character of the pose as a whole, completely change relative to where you stand. Also, the eye-line of the body, where the person's gaze is trained, effects how you feel looking at it, even though these people are obviously dead and no longer looking at anything.

I've sketched living naked people before in a figure drawing class, and the gaze there was significant as well-- if someone's standing there naked and looking straight at you, it affects how you feel about standing there clothed and drawing them. Without getting too New Age-y about it, it's that their essential humanity, their nakedness, their quality of being stripped down to the common denominator of what makes us all human-- just a warm sack of bumpy skin with some battle scars-- is more intense when you know they can see you looking intently at them.

At the Houston exhibit, this feeling was much stronger. The exhibits had a quality of intimacy and sacredness that went far beyond that of a living naked person being studied for form and structure. These people were more naked than naked. Their ribcages were opened, their muscles were splayed back, detached from the bone to show the tendons beneath, their skulls were opened to show the cradled brain. And because I didn't know their names, because they would never be able to look back at me, looking at them and at the revealed mysteries of their insides, was something close to what it felt like to walk over the tombstones in the floor at Westminster Abbey. Gravity, reverence, awe.

What I wasn't expecting was how touching it would be to look at the isolated organ specimens. Laid out carefully in glass cases arranged in rows between the full body exhibits were samples of individual organs, both healthy and damaged, and grouped by systems-- skeletal, circulatory, digestive, nervous, reproductive, endocrine.

I was expecting to see these parts with a much more clinical eye, as things with less impact than if they had been part of a whole. I expected that if I was looking at a spleen, and I couldn't see who it had belonged to, then I could look at it as just a spleen, a thing that manages the recycling of old red blood cells. Without a body to put it into context, it would be like looking at any plastic model from a high school biology class.

But as I gazed down through the smudged fingerprints on the glass, I realized that I wasn't looking at a model, or at an organ with no body (or nobody) attached, I was looking at my own spleen, my very own lungs tired from running, my long-suffering stomach.

Each organ became a humble and heroic reflection of my own, and if it's not too weird to say, I felt a real wave of sympathy looking down at that stomach. It was so small, and so simple-- just a sack with some tubes-- and here I've been waging this war on my own, demanding that it not only digest whatever food I allow it to keep, but also that it bear the weight of all my stress, and in return all I do is ignore its distress signals. Poor little thing, I thought.

For so long I've been worried about whether or not problems with my health show from the outside, but in the margins of my sketches, among notes I took on what other people were saying when they looked at the exhibits ("I don't smoke that much," and "Dude, that's what my dad's liver must look like"), is the phrase "Whatever you do on the outside eventually shows up on the inside."

I have nothing but the deepest gratitude for the people who donated their bodies for this exhibit.

A Plague of Butterflies

*Image courtesy of the New York Times, "In Texas, Conditions Lead to a Rabble of Butterflies" Thursday, July 27, 2006.

I've always thought of butterflies as the hearts with which God dots his i's-- sweet little affectations of the insect world that offset things like the dung beetle and giant bat-eating centipedes. Of course, I've also never witnessed a butterfly migration.

The fetchingly named American Snout is migrating through our town right now. At first there was just a light sprinkling of them, maybe ten in the space of a city block, but now they're coming quite literally by the thousands, in thick, low-rolling clouds.

There's something distinctly unsettling about walking around outside with what feels like a million dead leaves whirling chaotically around you at waist height, in silence, and with no breeze. Driving is even worse-- my windshield is covered in shimmery butterfly gore, and the grill of my radiator is a ghastly congestion of cooked and impaled butterfly bodies. In parking lots around town I've watched grackles wait for the grills of pick-ups to cool so they could perch on the front license plate and peck out a hearty butterfly meal.

Intellectually, I know this is a natural process-- there has been a population explosion of the American Snout down in Latin America somewhere, and now galaxies of them are headed north, as they do every year. There will be a culling of the herd, perhaps half or more, lost to 18-wheelers and predatory birds. But having never before been in the thick of any kind of significant, natural migration, (living in cities tends to preclude that) I feel kind of startled and unnerved finally witnessing one. It's like watching God on a drunken spending spree-- surely he can't afford this kind of promiscuous profusion.

Put another way, it's easy to imagine blinding excess on the part of human populations (we invented the glitzy civilian Hummer and triple E breast implants, after all), but unsettling to see it in nature, even if the numbers do eventually even out.

Oh, World...

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. ~David Friedman



  

"Dear Hezbollah,

SUCK IT!

XXOO,

Dani




There are so many things going so wrong right now that it's hard to know where to even begin reacting to them. But here's a start: Israeli girls in pigtails writing little hate notes on live shells bound for Lebanon, where the civilian death toll, according to the Jerusalem Post, just topped out at 229.

I stared at this picture today for about ten minutes while my brain refused to spool up the rpm's to form a complete thought. When it finally did, the thoughts came in interior head-screams:

What needs to be written on a lethal explosive that the bomb can't say by itself? Do these kids even get what they're doing? What the hell kind of parent lets their child DRAW ON LIVE AMMUNITION?

And then I started thinking about an even creepier aspect of the picture: preteen girls. There is nothing more rancorous and vindictive than a preteen girl, and allowing them to write the kinds of things they write on bathroom walls and in complicated little folded up notes ON BOMBS, to people they've never met, who WILL BE KILLED BY THEM, should be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

I'm a nauseous kaleidescope of disappointment, profound anxiety, and fear. But mostly I just want to grab that little girl by her soft, curly pigtails and shake her...

Science and Shamanism

This morning I watched two crop dusters strafe the highway as they wove yawning figure eights around telephone wires and dusted the fields on either side of me. If I'd had a young, impressionable kid in the car with me, I would have told her that that's where fog comes from-- giant hoppers of chemicals in planes-- and on clear days, it means that the pilots are hung over.

I'm continually floored by how busy farmers are. My impression of farming as a whole was mostly formed by annual treks across West Texas, where cotton and corn seemed to sprout up in rows as orderly as corduroy with no visible trace of a human for miles around. I figured you planted and waited and prayed. If God was home, you got a good crop; if you got his machine, you were financially ruined.

Now that I drive by the same 60 miles of fields every day, I see how much you can do to nudge fate along, and how much of that takes place in the fragile hours of the early morning. Men in white pick-ups (the white pick-up has an unofficial offialness to it-- my grandfather once commented that there was no limit to where you could go in a white pick-up) bump along the margins of fields with all kinds of measuring instruments, prying up random plants, taking jars of soil, sifting powders along the rows like modern day shamans.

I have my own early morning rituals, and one of the best, most soul-clearing things in the world is an early morning run. The high school track is made from shavings of recycled tires and makes up for its boring elliptical shape by being mercifully even and easy on my knees. Across one field is the brand new Lowe's, and when the wind is right, you can hear the same sullen, sleepy-voiced girl making announcements over the loudspeaker.

My brother was always the athlete in the family, and for years I was focussed on other things, things that kept me mostly indoors and mostly inside my own head. In fact, if our bodies developed proportionally to our interests, I would probably just be a giant head that scuttled around on giant hands. I figured that being an athlete was something you were born into-- either you are or you aren't, and I wasn't, but I was OK with that. Lately though, I've been trying to reconnect with my body and learn how it works and if, maybe, it could be capable of something mildly athletic.

Part of this motivation comes from the fact that my metabolism is changing, and lying on my stomach reading a book doesn't seem to burn as many calories as it used to. But another part of it is the belated discovery of how delicious it feels to thoroughly exhaust my muscles and marinate my brain in a slurry of endorphins. It's incredible. It's like natural crack.

Unfortunately, there's also a whole world's worth of obvious things that I don't understand about exercise, having never engaged in it competitively or regularly or with any kind of guidance. For instance, why does the exact same workout feel like delicious crack one day and painful, boring horror the next? Regarding my retardedness with food, there's a whole mountain of questions-- how much of what kinds of things can I eat that will give me enough energy to run?

There's also an element of shamanism that goes into athleticism. What do you say in your head while you run? How do you manage your fatigue, and the despair and elation of either not hitting the mark or hitting it? How do you develop patience with your limitations yet still keep pushing yourself?

I'm beginning to realize that there's a lot that goes in to taking care of a body when you want it to perform, and I've decided to use a white pick-up approach to learning about it. I'll ask the dumb questions, I'll experiment and measure results, and hopefully, through some combination of science and shamanism, I'll get it right.

The little bit that we can talk about

The house smells like freshly baked bread right now, which should not be a problem, but it is. Something in the vicinity of my stomach is whining and squeaking in three different octaves, reminding me that I haven't eaten anything today that's stayed down. The problem is that I'm arguing with the squeak-- in a minute, after I run, after I write this email, maybe after some ice water. Sometimes I win, sometimes it does.

A problem like this is so common, so tired, so done to death that it's easy, out of pride and the deep embarrassment of being common oneself, to ignore it. I've done this successfully for a long time.

Therapy is the slow and meticulous uncovering of the blatantly obvious to someone who, for whatever reason, has lost sight of it. As such, I can't see how it would be anything but excrutiatingly boring to the therapist, and yet, this is what I intend to do-- pay someone for the privilege of boring them to death with my thoroughly common hang-ups about food. These hang-ups are getting in the way of other things I want to do.

I don't intend for my writing to take a sharp detour to follow the goings-on of the professional couch, but I also read recently that writing is, or should be, "honest, straightforward, non-bullshit communication that presupposes two things: intellectual honesty, but equally important, emotional honesty." I'm committed to addressing some shit in my world right now, but I'm also committed to growing as a writer. I can't do one thing without doing the other, and both demand honesty.

So here goes...

iGod

A couple of weeks ago I got an iPod nano and it's no understatement to say the thing's changed my life.

Originally I was just looking for something to run with-- the discus-sized portable c.d. player I'd been running with for the past three years had finally driven me completely insane. I used to run the four-mile loop around Town Lake in Austin, and at the time, tampon-sized MP3 players were all the rage. But that was Austin, techno-geek, uber-hip Austin, and my stubborn insistence on rationing myself to ONE c.d. for the entire run, and consequently developing an over-muscled right arm, seemed somehow virtuously retro. Still, I didn't miss the smirks on my fellow runners' faces when I trotted by with the technological equivalent of a ghetto blaster balanced on one shoulder.

Our subsequent military moves have been measured descents down the ladder of hipness and economic prosperity, so my c.d. player became less of a limiting factor on my coolness. But then it broke, and not in the way I'd expected. I always imagined I would drop it in the middle of a run and it would hit the pavement and burst into a million plastic pieces, but instead my c.d. player broke slowly, dispiritedly. Its motor wore out so that with every forward swing of my arm, the music stalled out and every backward swing would start it up again. Eventually, it even refused to tolerate being tilted in my grip. For two days I ran with my arm hooked out in front of me holding the c.d. player parallel to the ground, and doing my best to absorb the shock of my footfalls with a counteracting shoulder movement. At last the long silent voice of dignity spoke, and it said, "You look retarded." I agreed.

The iPod nano, in case you've been living under a boulder and never seen one, is a small, rectangular white wafer with a color screen about as wide across as two standard postage stamps, and comes with an iconic set of white-wired ear bud headphones. I've eaten crackers that were more substantial than the nano. It holds roughly 1,000 songs, or 3 solid days of music. Apple also developed the "click wheel" for its iPods, in order to navigate quickly among songs, artists, albums, and genres, and as with most things Mac, the device is beautifully simple and eerily intuitive.

Within two days I had my iPod packed with a broad sampling of music from my own modest collection and my husband's vastly more comprehensive one, (reason for marriage exposed) and I ran, hands free, feet on fire, and it was good, so good.

Lately, though, my love affair with the nano has come in off the street, and I find myself clipping it to the waist of my scrub pants (contraband courtesy of my friend Larry and the Aurora, Missouri ER) and singing along with the Eels while I make coffee. Our house has an awkward add-on with a long bay of window seats down one side, and I've found that this is the perfect place to spend a few weekend hours examining my toes and letting the "Shuffle All Songs" feature surprise me.

It occurred to me today that the "Shuffle" feature might be able to answer some questions that have been bothering me lately. The connections it makes from one song to the next are supposedly random, but I've found that if I let my mind wander and concentrate on a particular topic, "Shuffle" will call up a song that says something shockingly relevant. I'm not surprised by this-- in college, immediately after whatever break-up I happened to be going through, pop songs on the radio tended to suddenly take on new meaning, almost as though my name were inserted into the spaces between verse and chorus.

When you think about it, posing questions to a randomly shuffled stack of 1,000 songs based on all kinds of human experience is really about as logical and reliable as any form of prognostication. So today, as an experiment, I took a particularly knotty question and put it to the iPod: am I in control of my thoughts about food and weight and body image? Are the things I do to be thin choices or compulsions, and am I ready to admit to all of them? Does a behavior have to have a name for you to want to stop it? I've been going back and forth on this one for the better part of four years. Maybe it seems stupid to pose a question this fundamental to an electronic device, but honestly, that's about as much perspective as I have right now. I've rationalized this whole thing to pieces and come up with about 17 different qualified answers, none of which spur me to action.

The iPod answered with "Machete" by Moby, which, when you look at the lyrics-- lots of images of darkness and some creepy phrase about "help me broken baby help me break you with my mind"-- don't make a lot of sense. But the ominous and frenetic pace of the song resonates with me. I think of it more for what it's not-- controlled, comforting, coherent, hopeful-- than what it is. And maybe that should tell me something.

Images of South Texas

One thing that's both refreshing and maddening about the nomadic lifestyle is how it tends to make me collect mental clip files for future reminiscence. It's an odd grammatical tense to live in, the imagined-future-past-tense, but one convenient feature of this kind of thinking is that it does a light, little tra-la-la skip over the more obvious question, "What will the next place be like?"

So far, the military has pulled a neat little poker trick where it holds out two options of our next posting. We're allowed to express a preference, and it's filed away somewhere, but it's only a tiny part of the giant, mysterious equation that actually decides where we'll go. Up until our orders are written and posted, we must consider each option with equal weight, even though they may be on opposite sides of the country. Like Virginia and California.

Faced with such uncertainty, I find it's much more productive to think in the imagined-future-past-tense, and that's what I did on the commute to work today. South Texas scrolled before me in a kind of sensory montage as I tried to press each image and sensation into the deepest animal level coils of my brain.

The resulting impression was startling in its otherworldliness, and when I say that I'm thinking mainly about the plants. Sunflowers are everywhere this time of year, along the highways and railroad tracks, muscling their way into the neatly planted fields. They grow up to six feet tall in large, swaying clusters, and since it's nearly always windy, you get the impression of a crowd of nodding spectators, twisting their heads on whiskery green necks.

The crops here are corn, cotton, and grain sorghum and each moves differently in a strong wind. The grain sorghum attracts most of the birds, including the giant population of idiot doves who regularly smack into our living room window, causing me to drop whatever drink I'm carrying and crouch like I've been shot at. Grain sorghum is also given to rogue genetics depending on the variety of the seed, and at regular intervals, one bizarre stalk will poke out high above the rest. It's these rogue stalks that the grackles and mockingbirds like best, and they'll perch on top of one and bob lazily on a reddish sea of grain.

This whole lower part of Texas used to be underwater, and that doesn't seem so far-fetched when you consider how big the sky is out here. Some people need a big sky. My mother talks about how much she misses watching storm fronts roll in from miles away when she was growing up out in West Texas, how you could see the whole thing tumbling towards you, lit from within by the stuttering flashes of lightning. On days like today, when the sky is crowded with an impossible variety of clouds, some solid and bone-white with scalloped edges, others scraped thin across a background of slate gray, I can agree with her-- I need a big sky. But on the days when nothing but a scrim of palest gray hangs between me and the sun, and it stretches from one horizon clear to the next, and all light becomes muted and hazy, I feel like it's too much, like I've been tucked in too tight under a smothering quilt and everything's pressing down on me at once. Then a few skyscrapers would be nice to poke the sky back a bit and give me some room to move.

Mostly I get a sensation of things growing here in wave-like profusion. Hibiscus blossoms as big across as my hand (and I have big hands) unfold like crepe paper in colors so bright they seem to vibrate. Bougainvilleas explode in purple, magenta, light orange, white, and yellow from well intentioned little corners in gardens, but soon take over sidewalks, porches, whole corners of parking lots with their thorny branches.

The most sinister and prehistoric of the plants are the cacti. Impervious to Nature's mood swings, these things grow in more frightening variety down here than I've ever seen. There's one devouring the back fence of our neighbor, and it's well over 12 feet tall, a sprawling, muscular mass of stems as thick as movie pickles that sprout thorns as long as hypodermics. I can understand how our neighbors would be afraid to do anything about this cactus, even if they had children. This thing looks entirely capable of whirling around smacking anyone who dared sneak up on it with a pair of shears.

One of the houses I run by in the mornings has a front yard consisting entirely of horrific looking species of cacti, carefully maintained and displayed, like nature's medieval armory. There are the prickly pears I'm familiar with, who sprout little cup-like pink and yellow blossoms of top of ping-pong paddle-looking branches (are they branches or leaves on a cactus?), but then there are about seven other types, each reaching almost chest high and sporting a variety of violent appendages that seem to me like the kinds of plants only dinosaurs could eat.

I guess it's that-- the feeling that everything I'm looking at has been around for ages-- literally-- before me, and so much of it seems to be aggressively bent on the idea of taking it all back, of shoving up through the asphalt and twining up the sides of buildings until it grows thick enough to snap something off.

There is a century plant down the street and around the corner from us, and in the last month or so it's been sending up its legendary blossom, a stalk that's reached the height of a nearby telephone pole with a chandelier of nobby yellow beads unfolding from the top of it. Lately its begun to lean streetward under its own weight and the constant push of the gulf wind, and what I wonder is, when is it going to snap and what will that sound like? And whose car is it going to hit?

A (tiny) room of one's own

Today is a banner day-- at work, they've given me an office all my own. Yes, it's tiny and windowless and someone's left behind a pile of empty binders, a lamp that doesn't work, and warped photographs of a dog dressed up for Halloween, but it's going to have my name on the door, the door that closes with just me inside.

Workspaces are important. I know because I've had mine rearranged, compacted, and flat out taken away at several of my previous jobs. Nothing underscores the existential stupidity of life like not having a workspace.

Let me illustrate:

My first job out of college was being a receptionist for the dean of the school from which I'd just graduated. Imagine a runner training for a race for four years, and getting down into the blocks all tensed up and ready to bolt, only to do a face plant when the starter's gun goes off. This, for me, was the agony of answering phones and collating stacks of old memos when I was convinced that if I'd only had the balls, I could be in New York, perfecting my affected smoking habit and tapping out brilliant essays on my laptop.

Instead, I slouched behind a giant cherrywood desk in a giant reception area, writing short stories with no endings and occasionally transferring phone calls to people who did real work. In front of me was an empty hall and behind me and on both sides were private offices, whose doors, when they were open, afforded the occupants a clear shot at me for gossip and complaints. But more often, I acted as the yarn between tin cans as my coworkers yelled back and forth to each other and then asked me to repeat the unclear parts. It was a unique feeling of being both totally exposed and completely invisible.

The office also had an antique wood floor that screamed and moaned underfoot, and I suspect the only reason that it was slated for replacement was that it made sneaking out early impossible. A big rhinoceros of a woman contractor came to draw up the replacement plan, and it was her task to figure out what to do with me while they ripped the boards out from under my workspace. She and the dean pondered their options above my head, like I was an expensive piece of machinery.

"Can we move out the desk and the computer?"

"Well... yes, but she's got to be able to get to that phone line and that's the only jack."

The solution: the computer is packed off to a storage room, the desk is carted out in pieces, the carpet is rolled up and hauled away, and I am left in a rolling chair in the middle of the room with the phone in my lap. For three weeks. For added fun, an ex-president was due to speak at the college, and mine was the sole contact number listed in the paper, so for three weeks I sat in my rolling chair and fielded 200 calls a day, repeating the same vague ticket information. The only reason I didn't quit was that several whackos started calling me pretty regularly.

(To the man playing Hall & Oates' "I've Been Waiting For a Girl Like You" loudly in the background while he moaned and yelled, insisting he'd fallen out of his wheelchair, thank you. Your slurred speculation about what I was wearing made the next 157 calls like an Easter egg hunt-- "which one has a nut inside?")

My next job was far more challenging and interesting, in no small part due to the fact that my office mate routinely divulged the sordid secrets of her free-wheeling New Age lifestyle. Trance-dancing, polyamory, duct tape pasties-- all terms that make for an interesting google search, but also an awkward lunch conversation that tends to be a little one-sided. The problem was that I actually had to work hard at this job, and the all too frequent bleats for attention shattered my concentration into crumbs.

When given the option of staying where I was, in a sprawling communal space with my own massive desk and a couch, or moving to a cubicle roughly the size of a bathroom stall in another office, I jumped at the chance to move. Even when it turned out that the ceiling in the new office periodically leaked sewage from the urinals directly overhead, I counted myself lucky.

[Besides, --and this is terrible-- most of the pee ended up on another woman's desk, a woman who decorated her entire workspace with plush toys that corresponded to the seasons. In fact, if I was really going to talk about horrific workspaces, I'd have to devote most of my thoughts to V., who often came in to find biohazard bags covering large brownish pools on her desk, and whose computer was continually being disinfected. In the true spirit of resilience, V. replaced each piss-soaked pumpkin and bunny with an exact replica, never truly losing faith that one day the problem would be fixed.]

My current job is actually quite fun-- I'm evenly divided between teaching (and meeting a lot of characters) and more solitary, introverted tasks, and up until now, I've been hunched in a back corner of my boss's office, working on another person's desk in the hours she's not scheduled. It's a bit like being a tick-- for hours on end I make my living deeply ensconced in someone else's personal space. I see little notes she's left herself, her chewed-on pencils, candy wrappers, a picture of her sister as the desktop image. I try not to leave any traces that I've been there, but still, it's weird.

Now, though... a room of my own where I can work in peace and listen to Tupac and scan the New York Times in my breaks... it's going to be great.

As if bad pizza weren't enough of a reason...

I now have added incentive to keeping avoiding the Papa John's mere blocks from my house: today they forced someone to wear a giant, anthropomorphic, foam pizza suit and wave miserably to passing motorists as the temperature topped out at 98.

Peering through the shimmering waves of heat rising off 14th street, I witnessed this poor soul doubled over and awkwardly flapping the crust/hem of the costume in a weak attempt to promote air circulation. When the Pizza Thing saw me coming, it straightened and performed a little jumping dance that could be interpreted as either a playful jig or a manic prelude to utter despair.

This town has about 20,000 residents, and as a relative newcomer, I am already thoroughly familiar with its short roster of restaurants, so there's no way a manager could justify breaking out the pizza suit for advertising purposes. Besides, I can imagine nothing more off-putting than the thought of how a flacid, faded pizza suit with toppings made of peeling felt must smell from the inside. I am convinced that this was some sort of hate crime, possibly ageism, homophobia, or immigrant abuse.

Add to this the fact that I was listening to sound bites from the President's insanely optimistic Rose Garden press conference after his peek-a-boo tour of Iraq, and you can see where this dark assessment of power motives is coming from.

Which brings up an interesting and decidedly thorny issue: I have wanted to comment more on politics on this blog, but two things have kept me from doing it. First, it's being done far more eloquently and thoroughly on other sites by people who have the time and the resources and the uncrushable spirit to look closely at how our government operates every day. To me, this is a bit like working in a sausage factory-- you see all the unsavory things that go into the final product, and then you risk losing your appreciation for something you used to like. In my case, I'm already unable to stomach many of the outcomes and decisions made by this administration, and I'm afraid that if I start writing about what seems to be going on behind these factory doors, my entire worldview will begin to smell like the inside of a pizza suit-- in other words, I'll begin to realize how truly powerless I am.

The second, and perhaps more obvious reason I don't write about politics more often is because of my husband's job. I support him wholeheartedly and believe at my core that he (and we by extension) is in the right place and doing the right thing, but this is a hard message to communicate when I'm busy coming up with hyphenated F-word names for the president. This is not to say that we don't talk about politics, just that it's something that must be done mindfully, and with a clearer assessment of purpose than just blowing off steam.

It's a delicate balance, but one for which I'm grateful, since it's made me take a harder look at the purpose of disagreement and frustration, and indeed of the true nature of democracy. Paying attention, staying abreast of the situation, is a duty, but without positive action, complaints are just so much hot air in an already uncomfortable pizza suit.

Toobing the Guadalupe

This past weekend my husband and I took a trip to Austin to float on tubes down the Guadalupe River and attend a wedding. In that order. Had we known what had happened to the Guadalupe River, and to the tradition of tubing, in the ten or so years since we'd visited, we might have seen the folly in committing to show up good-humored and clean to an event the following day.

First of all, tubing has now become "toobing" in much the same way fruit can become "froot" or "real fruit flavoring" when bastardized into a more artificial, palatable, and profitable product meant to appeal to a larger and dumber populace.

Tubing was a cheap weekend activity involving the rental of big, black rubber inner tubes meant to convey people and coolers at a stately pace down a stretch of river. It was an activity for families as well as college students.

Toobing on the Guadalupe, however, costs about as much as a nice dinner for four with top shelf drinks, and involves the same black rubber inner tubes, whose flaws (the tendency to chafe your underarms and the backs of your knees with their blisteringly hot rubber, and to poke you in the ass with their six-inch metal air nozzles) become much more apparent when you have to pull out a credit card and start rearranging the month's budget.

Lemming-like you get to shuffle your way to the water's edge with droves, whole platoons, of young sport-drinkers, the kinds of people who can stretch a college career into one long spring break before taking a well-deserved "year off to find myself." They haul along coolers, radios, cigarettes, dip, and long, snaking beer bongs, and periodically test out the well-worn mating call, "Wooooooo!"

The river was low, its grayish watermarked banks receding to reveal faded beer cans wedged into tree roots, and the log jam of human limbs further slowed its movement. I looked down at one point, horrified to realize that my sunscreen (industrial strength, SPF Irish) was melting off of me in giant, oily rainbow rings, but then just as quickly realized that far more horrifying things were being secreted by the people around me-- one guy squirted brown dip juice from a swollen lip directly into the water behind him, and the girl next to me giggled darkly when her friend asked, "So what do ya'll do when you have to pee?"

Only once, during the entire three-hour trip, did I see one of the river's natural residents, a frisbee-sized turtle, a yellow-eared slider. My brother and I watched him poke his head out of the water and blink twice, slowly. In the throaty Spanish accent I use for all animals, I quipped, "Why does the water taste like sluts?"

The Guadalupe has three "take-out points," places where you can get out of the river and catch a shuttle back to the toob rental place, but the cost of the trip is the same no matter what point you make it to. I think this reflects a certain amount of cynicism on the part of the rental companies. There is no financial compensation for having better judgment kick in at the first take-out, which is what happened to us.

The take-outs are arguably the best part of a toobing trip because people who have been lying prone and pounding beers in the sun for hours on end now have to stand upright and negotiate steep banks with a beer in one hand and an inner tube in the other. Years ago, when it was still tubing, I witnessed two burly lesbians fail miserably at this feat, one toppling down the bank and taking out the other, and both yelling at each in slurred contraltos, "Summer! Sum-MERRRR! Get up!" "God, April, I'm TRYING!"

This time, I was reminded of that scene in the first Star Wars movie where Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewy end up in the trash compactor in the Death Star. The trash seems fluid, but it's so dense that you never see any water, or, for that matter, the creature that lives beneath it all and keeps yanking them all under the surface. We washed up at the take-out next to a guy completely passed out in the water, toobless, his head hooked face up over a tree root and his body swaying slack in the shallow, oily water around him. We paused on the bank to regroup and watch another extravagantly drunk guy crash through the underbrush on the opposite side of the river, his knees buckling underneath him like a rag doll's as he waved to the cheering strangers floating past.

It was with quiet solemnity that we watched him slam face first into the human tide-- we were watching the death dive of tubing.

Just putting it out there...

I don't intend to make a habit of issuing broad proclamations about what Should and Should Not Be Done in Public Radio, but my extravagant daily work commutes have begun anew and the local NPR affiliate is probably the only thing keeping me from falling asleep and plowing into a ditch every day.

So I'm grateful, but...

The morning announcer for my public radio station sounds like he wants to kill himself. He sighs with crushing world-weariness in the middle of sentences, as though he's honestly considering throwing in the towel before the end of the period. He also leaves long, ominous stretches of dead air between his station ID's and the start of the NPR feed.

I wonder what he's doing in those blank moments. Staring at the insulated walls that bind him? I wonder this as I stare at miles of flooded corn crops, waiting for the monster 18-wheeler hauling farm equipment wider than the lane to bear down on me and pass me. Being and nothingness in rural Texas, all the intersections of life and death and the pititful in-betweens coming up fast behind you. No way to start a day.

And then there's the melodious afternoon woman, who would have the perfect neutral radio persona were it not for her annoying habit of bringing the flow of information to a screeching halt in order to pronounce foreign words and names with native authenticity. In a region of the country where language is pretty much half and half anyway, this makes for a tortured, Intro to Spanish-like delivery. Plus there's something a little too overeager about it, like someone from up north ordering their first "en-chi-lada and marrrrr-garrrrr-ita."

This is also the woman who does all of the classical programming, so on Tuesdays and Thursdays I get to hear her sprain her tongue on nearly all of the world's old school languages as she introduces German aurias performed by Czechoslavakian singers accompanied by Latvian orchestras performing in Israel. These are the people who make familiar names foreign again-- she adds a giant loogie to Bach and makes Debussy sound almost pornographic.

But these are minor quibbles. Some time I'll have to tell you about public radio in Mississippi.

Motorcycles and Divorce

I've been in kind of a writing slump lately. Days, weeks have gone by without something leaping up and stinging me, saying, "This! Something must be said about this!"

It's not like nothing's been going on. The dobermans disappeared suddenly one day like Latin American dissidents. My parents visited, igniting a streak of deliciously forbidden restaurant meals. My husband and I did a loop of Central Texas for Memorial Day and ate hamburgers the size of softballs in our favorite Austin bar, whose decor is based on the lower pits of hell.

But I've felt no urge to leave a word trail. In fact it's almost like I've been taking a certain pleasure in letting things go by, in wandering off the path for a while. Like all vacations, though, this one has its price.

I dream every night and I always remember my dreams. I've heard people say, "Oh, I wish I could remember my dreams, but as soon as I wake up they're gone." I want to kick these people in the shins and pinch them hard on the back of the upper arm where it really hurts. My dream life is exhausting and demanding, and it becomes infinitely more so a week before my period, during times of incredible stress, and when I've stopped writing. So, fairly often.

When I'm telling stories, I frequently have to stop and ask myself, "Did this really happen, or did I dream this?", and all too often I've already started the story and end up having to ask this question out loud, which just kills my credibility. I've held days-long grudges against my husband for things he did in dreams (most recently he passionately kissed a hippie girl all over her face after she told him he had a nice aura). I've called up acquaintances to check up on them after watching them be devoured by crocodiles in my head only hours earlier.

My dreams are also enormously self-referential, and thus almost completely useless in waking life-- like pretentious grad students, they adore alluding to other obscure dreams I've had, and the whole point to them seems to be to obscure the point. This is understandably frustrating when you remember each in detail, like having to watch French art films every night with the final the next day.

Last night was one of the nights when the bill for not writing came due. I dreamed all night and woke up tangled in sweaty sheets and thick images. I won't lay out the whole 8-hour plot, but the main themes were motorcycles and my parents divorcing, two things which terrify me beyond reason, and about which I feel compelled to say a few words.

First, motorcycles. These emerged as a dream theme only after I'd taken my first ride on the back of a Kawasaki Ninja a couple of years after I graduated college. It was my friend Larry's bike, and we wore helmets and he never went above 50, but the whole time I dug my nails into his sides and screamed inside my head. Originally I'd been excited to try it out, but after an hour of watching the pavement streak by mere feet below my face and picturing myself wrapped around the chassis of ever passing truck, I'd had enough. A dream metaphor had been born. I end up on motorcycles on dark highways in the rain, with no idea how to work the brakes, and no helmet, at times in my life when I feel like things are going too fast. Every time we move I get motorcycle dreams, and I wake up feeling like I've spent the night in a wind tunnel clinging to the walls.

The second theme is harder. All throughout childhood I grew up with the specter of divorce. It happened all around me, and some ways it felt like what I imagine the early days of polio were like-- no one knew how it happened, but when it did, things were never the same. Plus, most of my friends solemnly agreed that I was way more at risk, since my dad had an unusual job that required him to be away from home a lot. The ones it had happened to had lots of advice-- get separate toys for each house and play dumb on the old rules, incite a bidding war for your affections. My parents' "inevitable" divorce was an old, persistent fear, right up there with dinosaur attacks and the nuclear endgame. I had back-up plans for all three.

These two themes dovetailed nicely last night in an episode where I had stolen a motorcycle to sneak out of my parents' house and go to some huge concert, planning to be back in the morning. But I chickened out of the late-night, helmet-less highway drive and instead went to friend's house to sleep on the couch and await the inevitable explosion when my parents realized I had snuck out. Here's the twist, though-- my dad is already sleeping on my friend's couch, and casually tells me I would have been in big trouble were it not for the divorce proceedings occupying him and my mom right now. And then he rolls over and tries to go back to sleep! My dream response is to sit down in the meadow I suddenly find myself in and scream myself hoarse. Each scream is different from the one before it, one for anger, one for betrayal, one for sadness, one for complete and all-encompassing fatigue.

(I can picture my dad reading this and being deeply troubled, and doing that thing where he pinches his chin and juts out his lower lip. Clarifying here: fears are fears, and these have taken on metaphorical, totemic weight for me, meaning they no longer mean what they mean. Motorcycles don't mean motorcycles and divorce doesn't mean divorce. Both just mean fear. Now who sounds like a pretentious grad student?)

Anyway, this is often the cost of being lazy for me-- someone turns up the volume and color saturation on my dreams, and I have to find a way to balance things out again, to make my waking life heavier and more invested.

Mornin'.

In Bloom

Bored half to death on a breathlessly hot day in the tiny town, I've decided to explore the close-up functions of our kickass digital camera. Lucky for you, I'm feeling more Georgia O'Keefe in my sensibilities today and less Diane Arbus, though someday when I get up my nerve I've promised myself I'm going to photograph the proprietress of a local junk store, a large, bubbly bottle blonde who lies way up about her age (like Coco Chanel), and dresses up for the air shows with her horse as "Porker: Texas Ranger."

 

Today though, I've stayed close to home, stalking the wildlife of our backyard. Incredibly, our efforts at plant resuscitation have paid off, and not even the howling serenade of the miserable dobermans who linger on in their tiny shit patch of a yard, thoroughly abandoned by the exiled son of our neighbor, has discouraged the birds, butterflies, and homeless kittens from settling in our yard. It's a veritable toilet paper commercial out here.

 

This lovely guy is a Great Kiskadee from Northern Mexico, and the first time my husband and I saw one, we were in the car and nearly rammed someone's parked motorhome chasing brilliant flashes of yellow down the street. The not very flattering description in my nerd guide calls him a "big-headed flycatcher, sometimes feeding on small fish." Further killing the romance of his presence, I can only assume he loves it here because of the clouds of flies attracted to the nearby stockpile of doberman poop.

 

We're also blessed with random flowering vine-things that do their valiant best to class up the chain link fence. There are even some growing on the tractor and the 1950's dump truck parked in one corner of the backyard, but when we moved in, I promised a friend that the first picture of the broken down vehicles in our yard would have me on top of them, drunk and covered in Christmas lights. (I'm working on it, Lily.)

 

Possibly the coolest thing, though, is this wacky tree that grows right outside the kitchen window called a bottle brush tree. About two weeks ago, it let loose with a profusion of bizarre fuzzy red blossoms that smelled oddly like cake batter. The only way I know how to describe the blossoms is to compare them to severed muppet fingers, like if Elmo was tortured by violent extremists-- and the hummingbirds go nuts for it.

  

One night last week, my husband and I stood in awe on top of the picnic table on the back patio while at least two dozen hummingbirds zipped around in the canopy of this tree chirping at each other. We tried to get a few pictures, but it's understandable difficult capturing nature's tiniest crackheads on film. Nevertheless, we were able to pick out at least four different species, and again the nerd guide came in handy-- we've spotted the Buff-bellied, the Black-chinned, the Ruby-throated, and the impossibly tiny Anna's Hummingbird. Another priceless unflattering description pegs these speicies as "casual vagrants."

 

Unfortunately, a freak hail storm blew through last week and ripped off all the bottle brush blossoms and plastered them all over our house. (It also dinged up one of our cars and stranded Abby and I on the other side of town, where we had been enjoying a nice blazing hot afternoon stroll. Yet another interesting fact about the tiny town is that storm sewers apparently seemed like an extravagant extra, hence flood time in a strong storm is a short three minutes. The streets are just heavily cambered to channel water into the intersections, so at the end of every block, Abby happily waded and I angrily sloshed calf-deep in nastiness.)

Since the storm, we've tried to make it up to the hummingbirds by putting up feeders, and they seem amenable to the arrangement, except when we try again to get pictures. Their faces are tinier than the surface area of a dime, but I swear I can see an almost sarcastic look of shock when I try to slowly bring up the camera to capture a blurred shot of their retreat.