An old lady in blue with a matching blue bonnet rides down the road on a tractor. It jerks and pops and comes to a stop, almost throwing her off. She clambers down and kicks a tire. It’s raining. A man, a neighbor I don’t recognize, helps get it going again and she rides home in the downpour. Cut to the woman in our house, no taller than a pencil standing on its end, living amongst the garbage under our couch. We decide to give her a doll’s rocking chair, something to occupy her time. I get on my knees and call to her. “Excuse me!” But the chair is now a white kitten, which she coos over and accepts with tears in her blue eyes.
Company’s coming. We’re told to clean under the couch, even though no one would see the mess. I worry for the old woman; I don’t want to uproot her. [Liz] refuses to move the VHS tapes she’s let pile up, and I stalk off to the kitchen where I find Robin Williams hovering over the sink. I ask him for a shovel.
The white kitten is now black and has emerged from beneath the couch to chase our shadows.
– September 17, 2012
c. 1840s
Lawrence T. Jones III Texas Collection
Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library
So my Blackberry keeled over last month. I made the switch to Android and upgraded to a Samsung Captivate Glide. I’d intended to get the Captivate minus the glide feature since I’d read so many reviews comparing it to the iPhone, which I’m not a fan of. My mom has one. I don’t get the hype. After seeing this one at Wal-Mart, I figured, hey, I text a lot and the extra keyboard will be handy. Turns out I hardly use it. What’s really impressive is the camera. At 8 megapixels the pictures come out almost as nice as the ones I take with my Rebel xt.
One of the first apps I installed was Instagram, since I have a happy trigger finger and like the option of updating people with pictures instead of words. Fewer words, anyway. I also use Magic Hour (infinite, custom filters!) and the Vignette demo (because I just can’t justify paying $4 for an app yet). I’m getting a lot more enjoyment out of it than I thought I would, probably ’cause the camera on my Blackberry was horrid even in bright light. Now if only I had more to snap pics of than trees and cats and what’s on my desk.
I’m weirdosayswhat. Follow me if you wish. If you don’t have Instagram on your phone, you can still follow my updates on Statigr.am. You can even leave comments if you have a Facebook account. I really want to start posting photo updates again so no sweat; I’m sure a lot of these will make it in there.
If you’re a fellow user, feel free to leave your name below. I need more pretty photos to look at!
Somehow, I don’t know how, I find myself housesitting for Amanda Palmer.
I can’t tell if we’re in NYC or Boston, but the view from the second floor apartment is incredible. The walls are purple and in the fading light it almost feels like I’m underwater. A pug scampers in and out of the kitchen, where most of the action happens. When I first step in, I’m confused. I’m suddenly too tall for the room and the ceiling, well …
It looks a lot like this. I duck, then I realize the cutouts are just the right size to fit a person’s head. There’s minimal furniture – a fridge, a chair in the corner, an end table. Molly Crabapple is there, brewing coffee and swearing when the percolator spits at her. I look in the fridge and find the two soggy tacos I made the night before. Mark of RENT fame straightens his scarf and announces he’s on his way out, and I ask if I’ll be able to take a cab to Columbus. I get some funny looks and decide it’s best to stay put or prepare to do a lot of walking.
I’m alone now. I sit in the corner against a potted palm, mulling over what I brought to read, trying to plot what to write in my journal. Neil Gaiman arrives that evening and we share a lovely meal. The sun is cresting the skyline when he leaves, nary a word spoken between us, soft pink light filtered through the tattered curtains and lighting up the kitchen wall.
I wake to the same pink light creeping across the sheets.
The Brick House, as we call it, may not have actually been brick. I can remember riding the bus home from school and getting off at a friend’s house across the street where I’d wait for my mom to pick me up. I don’t recall her working then, so I’m not sure why I did that other than to play with my friend’s awesome Video Painter. But every day as I stepped off the bus, I would look to my left toward my own house, perhaps checking for my mom’s car, and I swear to this day that it was brick. Not that it matters. It’s amusing to talk about around my parents, though, as the only brick house they remember is the one beside my Aunt Elaine’s, the only two houses on a dirt road with no name that ran alongside a railroad track. I suppose I’ll talk more about that in another post.
So, the Brick House. Apparently, we were renting it from a sketchy old man who would routinely sneak into the unfinished attic and smoke cigars while flipping through Playboys. Imagine our surprise when my dad told us this while we were discussing the cigar smoke we often smelt there. I guess he thought that would explain things. My mom glared at him for a moment before launching into a series of questions like “How would that old man even get up there?” and “If you knew he was doing it, why didn’t you say something?” The only way to access the attic was via a stairwell behind a door that we weren’t allowed to open – it was full of black garbage bags bursting at the seams. There was a window upstairs that faced the front yard but if anyone had tried to climb up there and slip in, especially a humpbacked old man, hell would have been raised. Unless he did it after nightfall, in which case … ew. I was five at the time, my sister would’ve been three or four. Alone all day with our mom sound asleep, our tuckuses parked in front of the TV with only three easily spooked cats and a hyperactive poodle to protect us.
Yeah, no. I don’t buy it, but it’s been the most logical explanation for the smoke smell thus far.
I watched a lot of TV back then. Besides standing in place and spinning in circles, it’s about all I did. I would set my clock for five till five so I could catch Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers every morning. David the Gnome followed, and I’d spend the afternoon watching Captain Planet and Pirates of Dark Water (now that I think about it, Dark Water had probably stopped airing by then – I would have watched it the year before). With a few exceptions – Sonic the Hedgehog, a fluffy white cat with a big blue bow featured prominently on the cover of some kids book, Barbie – all of my imaginary friends were swiped from cartoons or horror movies I was too young to be watching.
This has a point, I promise.
I have two very vivid memories from our brief time at the Brick House. The first is of staying up till sunrise, watching TV, and my dad coming home from work and fixing himself a bowl of wheat cereal. He worked nights, and most of the time he’d come in and change out of his boots and head for bed without me ever noticing. I was too enamored with whatever was on the tube. But one morning I noticed, and he sat down on the couch beside me and ate his cereal and neither of us said a word. I was laying on the same couch when I found myself flying around the living room, looking down at myself, my back pressed to the ceiling.
Had I fallen asleep and dreamt the whole thing? I remember it well enough. My sister was playing on the floor beside me while our mom pecked away at the ancient computer in the hallway. The TV was off for once and the sound of clicking keys reverberated through the whole house. I was on my stomach with my right arm hanging over the edge of the couch, my knuckles brushing the floor, and I was thinking about my friends Chip and Dale and Zip and Gadget. They were passing around corn dogs, and for some reason Gadget was wearing a white muumuu. Golly, the things you hang on to. At some point, my mind began to wander and I sensed I was hovering over the couch rather than resting on it. Weird, I thought, before pressing my face into the cushion. Only the cushion was no longer there. I opened my eyes then, really opened them, and stared down at the room from eight feet above. I was snaking around in a wide circle with the hideous popcorn ceiling snagging my hair and the back of my shirt. I was smiling but I never laughed. I was quiet, so quiet my sister hadn’t noticed the transformation despite sitting right next to me. Too quiet.
I blinked once and raised my head from the couch, my arm numb and my eyes dry, my toes starting to tingle. My sister chirped something unintelligible and our mother stepped into the room, swinging a heavy book at her side.
What I’m currently reading. Not pictured: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente, The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Black Ships by Jo Graham, Make Your Own Damn Movie by Lloyd Kaufman, The Grief Frequency by Kealan Patrick Burke, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, Orwell and the Refugees by Andrea Chalupa, and The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. Some of these I’ve been reading on and off for years.
I’ve always been a juggler, but this is getting ridiculous.
I‘ve been sick for what feels like an eternity. We all have. When I was in school, I stayed sick. I was so used to it that when the coughing spells and sinus infections magically stopped1, I kind of freaked out. Being able to take a deep breath without gasping was foreign to me. But since we moved out of the shithole2 four years ago, my allergies are making up for it big time. The grass here is toxic; even the dogs break out in hives. There’s ten times as much pollen which means I spend all spring weeping from one eye, and the carpet – at least in one place – sports the ruin of one of my exceptionally heavy nose bleeds.
I wish this was just a bout of heinous allergies but oh, no, we’ve most definitely contracted the cold from hell.
I read once that honeysuckle was an excellent cough remedy. Last year, I tossed some into a glass bottle with apple cider vinegar, pushed it to the back of a cabinet and forgot all about it. I pulled it out the other day and curiosity got the better of me. I popped the top. I didn’t taste it, but the stench was enough to make me wretch. I still haven’t tossed it out, don’t ask me why.
Next time, I’ll try it with honey.
The honeysuckle’s chokehold on our fence.
1 I dropped out at 16. As a result, I got very little exposure to anything past my mailbox. Amazing what that does for one’s sinuses (assuming you clean your house which, ironically, we rarely did; I’m shocked the mold didn’t kill us). 2 My name for what’s also known as “the other house,” where we lived happily for the first two of ten years. Then things went to shit. The last couple of years, we had neither air nor heat nor running water.
