thematically fickle

When all the rest of the news—global, national, local—is so very bad, this fabulous, rainbow-colored, boa-wearing tid bit sashayed from within my speakers as I drove along Torrey Pines Road, handed me a cosmo and blew me kisses that tingled my spine.  Of course, petitions to put gay marriage before voters are already underway. And whether this historical ruling is a check-mate for John McCain in the chess match that is the presidential election remains to be seen (Obama and Clinton need to quick grow some balls on the issue if they don’t want to lose this race).  But for now, I cheer right along with my gay brothers and sisters and know this is a huge victory.  We here in California?  We wanna be like Massachusetts!

It began with denial. Several weeks ago, our quiet Toto toilet started making a prolonged and high-pitched hissing sound when flushed. Then one morning not long after, Sam asked whether I’d noticed the shower was slow to drain. I hadn’t noticed, actually. But maybe that’s because I’d decided to boycott bathing until one of the democratic presidential contenders (not the Muslim one) conceded. Or, if that took too damn long, until I got invited to a party requiring that I dress and shave my armpits.

Thank God for the party invitation; I was starting to stink.

Last Saturday, Sam left for work and I stepped into the shower. As I lathered my hair, I noticed that the sound at my feet was—different. It was less pitter-patter-on-the-tile-floor and more roof-leaking-into-a-bucket-during-a-rainstorm.

I swore. I shut the water off. I skittered to the garage for the plunger and proceeded to work that drain—naked, wet, soap stinging my eyes—until an ashy gray sludge bubbled into the standing water. Realizing the problem was bigger than my ability to cope, I did what any woman in my (lack of) shoes would have done: I ran a bath and shaved my legs.

It was hardly a shock when the tub wouldn’t drain but it was a teensy bit disconcerting for the babysitter when I told her she wouldn’t be able to flush the toilet for the remainder of the evening. “Sorry,” I said as I buckled the ankle strap on the sexiest four-and-one-quarter inch peep toe stilettos ever known to man. She’d have to either hold her bowels or let go of looming humiliation. “I sure hope I don’t have to poop,” she said. I was hoping the same thing even as I assured her it was no big deal. “We’re family,” I said, applying lipstick. Truthfully, I didn’t care a whit about the fact that she might have to pee outdoors because I was going out and I looked hot. I was in Me mode.

Or denial, which ended abruptly on Sunday morning with a debilitating champagne-and-pot-brownie induced headache and the arrival of “reality,” a.k.a. parenting a 38-inch spaz while hosting Alyce and his snake. Believe me when I say that the last thing a person—particularly a hung-over person—wants on the Day of the Lord, is her plumber and his snake on her front porch. I know this from experience.

The first time I met Alyce, a former roadie for Ratt and a character for whom I’ve developed a deep appreciation, was eight years ago, when he arrived at the house Sam and I rented in Pacific Beach. It was a Sunday. Our toilet wouldn’t flush. Our bathtub wouldn’t drain. There was gray sludge, there was Alyce, and there was his snake. Are you sensing a pattern?

That time, Alyce’s snake was of no use: Too short. So his work pushed on into the week and I came home one afternoon to find Alyce and another dude in our front yard, literally. They were visible only from the necks up because they were standing in a giant, six-foot-deep hole they’d dug there. In fact, our front yard was the hole, which became a portal to what would eventually become a tunnel, spanning beneath the wall surrounding the property and into the driveway, which later had to be jack hammered. It was special. “It was one of my beautiful moments,” Alyce likes to say when referring fondly to the condoms he recovered from our sewer-line.

Memories of that time haunted me on this most recent Sunday morning. Alyce had to use a Sawsall to slice away the thingamajig that caps the entrance to our ancient pipery. He then sweated his nuts off while twisting a 50-foot snake into said pipery, forcing it deeper and deeper into the main line. I imagined him having to dig yet another hole and this time, there was no landlord to pay for the work. On the bright side, who wouldn’t choose seven hours of a plumber’s Sunday over a European summer vacation? I mean, Al’s crack is nearly as good a view as picnicking on the Seine. Oh, happy day.

I perched my camera-ready self in the bathroom window for the first of five retractions of the snake, not wanting to see what he’d recovered and yet ready to capture the offending detritus for posterity. Could a tree root have grown through our 1954 cast iron pipes? Did Ruby shove Elmo down there without me knowing? Wait! Maybe it was all the Steve Francis and Marti Emerald mailers I’d drowned in there! And to think, I’d been so happy watching toilet water swirl across their posed smiles. Not exactly worth it now, I thought.

Lucky for us, Al found a culprit. There, on the end of the metal coil were strung a series of sopping cocoons. Baby shit cocoons, to be precise. In the process of toilet training—a most unpleasant requirement in raising a human—I’d flushed more baby wipes than Alyce had ever seen. Gold star for me! Sure, it says right on the back of the package: DO NOT FLUSH. Just like that. In bold letters. But I ask you, what kind of parent takes the time to read a baby wipe package before the toilet backs up? A self-absorbed, Veuve-drinking, weed-eating, fiiiine-ass-shoe-wearing mutha, that’s who.

It should be said that before any of the Big Dig tools came out, our Alyce had predicted the baby wipe outcome as coolly as if her were Sylvia Browne. He’s that good. Without shame, I tried to play the green card; I swore on Ruby’s favorite blankie that I’d never flushed a single baby wipe or string of dental floss or The Trouble Shooter running for District Seven.

But you just can’t bullshit your plumber. Fortunately, Al’s a modest guy and he didn’t judge me or do the superior I-told-you-so. He just methodically unwrapped each and every one of the nasties, dropped them into a fetid pile, replaced the guts on our Toto, and drove away into the sunset. I looove watchin’ him go, that Alyce. I do. But I love not ever seeing him even more.

The moral of the story is, don’t party too hard if you’re pushing forty and you have to function the following day. Don’t wear bad shoes. Don’t flush baby wipes. And if you need a plumber who does great work and won’t cause the forfeiture of your world travels, email me.

(As published in today’s issue of CityBeat.)

(Ten-minutes. Word count: 250 or less. Topic: First love. Use the phrase: “Beauty in the shadows.” Okay…GO!)

She pressed the gas pedal, speeding faster than she should have up the winding driveway, nearly rear-ending her rival’s blue and white 1960-something Mustang. It was a hardtop. She knew it would be parked there. What a lame car, she thought. She yanked the emergency brake hard like she’d seen her mother do once. She shut off the engine, stepped from the car, slammed the door behind her.

She didn’t bother to knock. She walked in like always. And there he stood with the beauty in the shadows, acting like it was any normal Friday. Except, this wasn’t a normal Friday was it, asshole? No, it wasn’t. This was the Friday that you got caught. Pep rally, my ass.

She stormed past them both, the lying popular son of a drug dealer and his cheerleader girlfriend. But wait, she thought. Wasn’t she the girlfriend? Quietly furious, she made her way down to his bedroom two stairs at a time. She passed his bed where they’d fucked so many times and where—by the looks of it—he’d just fucked the cheerleader. Happy Friday, she thought.

On the credenza was the picture of him and the cheerleader. From prom. She opened the drawer directly beneath it. There was the framed picture of her. She grabbed the photo. She raced upstairs, three stairs at a time, to find him hugging her. She tossed the photo between them. You deserve each other, she said.

He sells used cars now.
She and the cheerleader are friends.

Spring is here but in San Diego, that means grey and gray. Then, just when you think you’ve had enough grey and gray, there’s ashen, lead, slate, iron and—mixed all together at once—Seattle. I’m having to wear my sweaters again. Bleh. So I’m focusing on the warmth of this shot (a plant in my yard) even as I’m feeling Pacific Northwesty inside.

Thanks to the sub-sub-par genetics of the man who fathered me, john allred, I have astronomically high cholesterol. My combined HDL/LDL score is 359 and the doctor who discovered this almost had a myocardial infarction himself when an MRI of my heart came back clear of any blockages. He practically begged me to drink copious amounts of red wine every night. Then he put me on a statin.

That was five years and four physicians ago, so a new doctor ordered blood work this past Monday to make sure I’m taking the right doseage of a drug so popular, that it’s wide use is footing the bill for the Carribean vacation homes of Pfizer higher-ups. Recent research has shown that statins are somewhat of a racket. Unless of course, you suffer from familial heterozygous hyperlipidemia. In which case, you swallow the bitter pill every night before bedtime.

So Dr. Farber walks into the exam room yesterday afternoon and the first thing out of his mouth was, “So, how you been feelin’?” His brow was scrunched. He looked concerned. “Fine.” I said, freaking out. “Why?” Turns out my CPK levels are in the excessively high range. Maybe it’s due to the statin, he told me, which happens to be working very well at pummeling that LDL. But maybe it’s due to something else, a hard workout at the gym perhaps. He was generally elusive about the implications of the value and I implored him to break it down for me before I typed “C” and “P” and “K” into a search engine.  (Big NO-NO, I know, but who can resist under the circumstances?)  He didn’t give me much to go on besides an order for follow-up blood work in three weeks.

Guess what I did this morning? Yeah, and here’s what Medline Plus via Google had to say about it:

What Abnormal Results Mean

High CPK levels may be seen in patients who have:

• Heart attack
• Myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle)
• Central nervous system trauma or stroke
• Convulsions
• Delirium tremens
• Dermatomyositis or polymyositis
• Electric shock
• Muscular dystrophies
• Pulmonary infarction (lung tissue death)

Additional conditions may give positive test results:

• Hypothyroidism
• Pericarditis following a heart attack
• Rhabdomyolysis

So basically, I’m dying, right? I mean, we’re all dying. I’m just dying faster than the average person. Awesome! I’ve spent the morning trying not to blame my mother for copulating with such an undesirable specimen but then, it wasn’t like it was all that pleasurable for her in the first place. Why make her feel bad now? Right before Mother’s Day? And anyway, if she hadn’t done what she calls “the deed,” I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, worrying about my premature death or contemplating how I should spend the rest of my life to make it truly meaningful.

I’ve said it before: I will never go on a cruise. It’s in my marriage vows. I’ve also said, several times and even very recently: I hate hate. So when I use the term to describe my feelings about something, it’s meaningful in a thoughtful, serious and an I’m-totally-not-kidding kind of way.

This afternoon, as in 13 minutes ago, which is why I probably sound so angry and mean right now—the seething emotion is terribly raw (deep breath, girl)—I watched a clip from this morning’s edition of the Today Show in which Heather Armstrong was “interviewed”—if it can even be called that—by Kathie Lee Gifford. Now, I don’t watch the Today Show because quite frankly, it sucks. As in, it sucks whatever soul the viewer has right outta her. Everything beyond the first thirty minutes is blatant mind control and the recent hiring of KLG was further evidence of their efforts to further dumb down the final-hour for the remaining common denominator.

Seeing this screeching shell of a woman on the screen again after all these glorious Kathie Lee Free years, only reconfirmed that I still despise her and, too, that I will never be a viewer of the Today Show.

In a nutshell (I have to be brief here as I’ve only got ten free minutes left), Kathie Lee turned the conversation toward herself (big surprise!), admitted that she doesn’t know how to use her computer (big surprise!), and that she’s not a fan of mommies blogging about their children (wtf?!?).

This judgment, from the woman who told the entire world over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and ov—you get the idea—for yeeeeaaaarrrrrrs about her lovely life with Frank and their darling little Cody and Cassidy and their ca-ca and their cooing and their drool and whatnot. This judgment, from the woman who knowingly had darling little children hardly as wealthy and privileged as her own, in a third world country, working long hours in sweatshops to sew her WalMart clothing line. The mind reels.

As I watched her, wearing a size Negative 12, seizure inducing polyester dress, screech her staccato laugh in Heather’s direction, stretching her tight orange face beneath her yellow fried hair in front of a pink back drop that made me think of maxi pads, I could only side with Frank Gifford’s choice to boink a flight attendant.

Kathie Lee should stick to Carnival Cruises and stay off the internets, where I’m bound and even tempted to run into her because I do so love to hate her. But no matter what, I won’t be going on any cruises.

(This is my 150-word, written-in-10-minutes-or-less exercise about what’s behind that door.)

She sets her right hand on the door, palm flat against the warm wood. She gives it a push. She finds the door to be much heavier than she’d anticipated. She leans one tanned shoulder against it and puts all of her weight against that shoulder, sweating under the still-hot afternoon sun. The door opens, slowly, quietly to reveal a broad room. The saltillo tiled floors are cool beneath her bare feet. There is no wall on the opposite side. Nothing but ocean down there. Twenty or forty feet in front of her—she’s no good with distances—there is one shallow step down to another level of the room. Another forty feet, another step, a pool with no edge. Just the light blue of the water meeting the dark blue of the ocean meeting the pink blue of the sky, twenty or forty or thousands of feet away.

Eat pot brownie before drinking 10 glasses of champagne.

If you can get past the short advertisement and then the cheesy intro of THIS CLIP RIGHT HERE—which I encourage you to do—you’ll get a small glimpse at the beautiful New Children’s Museum via Hal Clement, who apparently “knows someone” and was able to get in there with cameras. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that he’s a news reporter.

We’ll be attending the FREE! grand opening this Sunday from noon ’til four and not just because we’re thrilled at the prospect of painting on a Beetle and throwing tires at each other. The truth is, I actually do know someone, and that someone happens to be the gorgeous woman from the New Children’s Museum that you’ll see in this news clip. The animated girl with the darling haircut, perfect bone structure and great ass? That’s Ruby’s JesshiCAH! and my good friend. She’s been working obscenely long hours and has put every ounce of who she is into launching the re-opening of the Museum, and in the hopes of seeing that great ass in person to show our support, Ruby will be skipping nap time.

Please, won’t you join us? Throw caution and afternoon snoozing to the wind and come make JesshiCAH!’s big day a success!

What did previous generations ever do without the internets? Need to know the actual lyrics to Blinded by the Light because “wrapped up like a douche” isn’t exactly rock song-y? Ask Jeeves. Have to know where Suriname is located because your friend is assigned to spend the next 27-months there for her Peace Corps stint? Yahoo! has the answer. Subconsciously feel the urge to unravel your marriage by innocently typing in the name of a former lover? Google guarantees success in launching that endeavor. (Note to anyone thinking of doing this: DON’T. I mean it. Just don’t.)

My point is, by plunking out an intentional string of letters on your keyboard, you might find what you’re looking for even when you’re not ready for it. And this is what happened to me last week when I typed out the letters of Ruby’s birthmother’s name. I was totally expecting to find absolutely nothing. So, when there were two hits, I paused for a moment, my cursor unmoving between them as I decided which one to click on first.

After a not very long amount of time, curiosity moved the mouse and I clicked on the first link.

Right there, on my screen, for my viewing pleasure, was an image of the woman who has Ruby’s crackling eyes. For almost three years, I’ve wondered what C looks like, whether Ruby resembles her and if so, how much. Now I know. The connection was undeniable and this woman, Ruby’s biological mother, was no longer an idea or concept. Putting a face with all of the stories I’ve told myself was like reading a novel, creating a physical image of a character in my head and then seeing a director’s interpretation in the movie version. It was quite surreal and yet the reality was surprisingly accurate with respect to the amalgam I’d invented. C was stunning and I was stunned.

But as I sat staring at the image, I felt not only strangely elated but strangely guilty as well, like I’d violated C’s privacy in some way. After all, Sam and I had asked for a photo from the beginning; if she’d wanted us to have a picture of her, surely she would have given us one. Instead we’ve gone without, accepting all of the many things that we—that Ruby—may never know. This is excruciating for someone like myself, a person who can’t shut off even the worst Lifetime Television for Women movie starring Valerie Bertanelli, because I won’t sleep not knowing how it ends. It’s been an important lesson on giving in to, and letting go of, things I cannot control. Whiiiiiiich, is pretty much everything except my craving for peanut butter cups and even that is beyond my mastery most of the time.

Ultimately, we live in the age of technology and if we put ourselves out there (out here?), we should expect to be found. Or, at least expect that this is a possibility. Though I wish for more openness in Ruby’s adoption, I’m not aiming to invade C’s privacy and wouldn’t ever think to contact her through her Email me! icon. Things are as they are, because C is functioning within her comfort zone. I can hardly blame her for operating in self-preservation mode and I am more than happy to respect that. But I’m also happy to have her photo and with it, the weighted decision about when it will be appropriate to show it to Ruby.

For now, we’re keeping it under wraps and letting some experts weigh in as we figure out what is best for our child. And as for future online searches, they’ll center around how to deal with public temper tantrums and  uncovering misunderstood song lyrics.