Strudel boogies AND ets peas.

OH YES it is time for girl drink drunk. Cheers, Zmobie.

HEY FUCKERS For a week now I have been trying to think of a way to tell you what happened when I was in Portland in a way that is PG-13 or lower and will not be used against me in court. I cannot. You will have to look at the pictures in my set and try to piece it together yourself. Suffice it to say that THAT happened and Franny’s former teacher and my friend, Hazel, was a fabulous hostess.

I can tell you one thing: Franny was in fine form. I realized recently that I am going through a thing where I am in love with Franny right now. She is becoming so freaking hilarious at times I get disabled with laughter and cannot move. I am not saying I am some kind of comedic genius, but I have decided that I am going to teach her everything I know about being funny. That will be an awkward twenty minutes.

YES YOU DO want to hear something shallow about me and Franny, and that thing is that when she was a wee parasite my biggest fear was that she would turn out to be some fugly stick terror (keep it classy, twenty-one-year-old self), which is ridiculous because SeaFed was handsome and my genes get drunk sometimes but mostly sit quietly and get overwritten. And now that she is so pretty I feel like I need to give her more.

I act like I have one ounce of control over any of this, but I will not allow her to be The Pretty One. Franny and Strudel were playing Nancy Drool the other day (Caroline Keene I will drive a stake through your hateful undead heart) and Franny asked Strudel if she wanted to be “The Pretty One” or “The Funny One,” because you bet your fucksocks Franny was going to be Nancy.
Can girls be the pretty one AND the funny one? Unsurprisingly, I guess, encouraging this is my hobby now, since Franny shows such an aptitude for it. I prefer this to my mother’s program, which was a major in Disordered Eating (Breakout Session: There Is Nothing Worse Than Being Fat: T/T?) with a minor in “Good Luck With That One, Kid.” (Seminar: Walk It Off, Pussy).

So Franny has taken on a new personality all of her own doing, and that personality is Hobo. Hobo refers to (himself?) in the third person and is quite FYCL* vociferous on the subject of Cheetos, Doritos, beer, and public urination. [Sample Dialogue: “HOBO LIKES EATING CHEETOS, DORITOS, DRANKIN BEER AND PEEING INTO BOTTLES.” I dunno man.] When Hobo goes away and Franny is sweet again Poodle comes out. Poodle liek you. YOU LIEK POODLE?

Traveling alone with Franny made me remember how much I like traveling. P. and I and the girls used to all travel together in a clump just like a real family (guilt and fights over stupid inconsequential shit sold separately) and it was HELL. Traveling with P. is like traveling with a Jack Russell on meth. You could practically see his face pressed up against the window by the time we got to Sodo, clawing like an abandoned dog in a hot car. By the time we got to Tacoma? FORGET IT, it is not printable. If he was driving he would swear like Christmas Steve on a malt beverage bender. Who doesn’t like driving, I ask you? Oh. Now I know.

Plans for Fuck Off England Day? Yes, I have some. I bought some books at the OG Powell’s in Portland. I have been reading the “biography” of Betty Crocker, which is a funny thing, since she is a fabricated brand, of course. The book contains a selection of letters of the thousands that were written to “Betty” during wartime and beyond. On one hand it marries stuff I enjoy, American history, domestical history of Ladees, and insanely awesome marketing schemes. On the other, it is sad to read these desperate letters to a corporation: “How can I cook a meal to keep my husband?”

IN CONCLUSION, it is making me want to make an orange chiffon cake, the recipe for which was apparently kept under lock and key for twenty years until the originator sold it to General Mills. I also found a recipe I copied down for Any Fruit Cobbler from Fanny Farmer last summer when I was on vacation. I am remembering through the vacation haze of sangria and I FOUND THESE PILLS AND I EATED THEM that the cobbler was pretty dope. I’ll tell you what, Ima find some any fruit and bung it in.

I am reading other books right now…women and Islam (The Caged Virgin) and Victorian Era courtesans. I guess I am in new mode right now. I also have new music: new Mos Def, which is SO GROOD, and Kidz in the Hall. Mr. Lif and new K-Os did not rip over to my MP3 correctly, but I am getting there. There seems to be a stampede at Pirate Bay at the moment as it changes hands.

*

Hot ginger girl

I see your boob hickey

through your shirt gap

Tonight, I go running for the first time in a month. You probably didn’t know I broke my toe, which really put a damper on things. Funny story–I had a migraine and was stumbling around my bathroom looking for Advil when BAM! I hit my toe on the tub. Then it is the ecstatic FML feeling as you lay in bed with a sore head and sore toe.

I think this is all serendipitous timing as I called my friend who I am going with Franny to visit this weekend in Portland. She used to be a chain smoker but has quit, and just today was going out on her first run. This will keep me motivated. Monkey chow out.

Franny took physic all weekend (yes, I am still on my Pepys jag, thanks for asking) and was feeling very happy this morning. So happy, in fact, she was in the mood to tell stories. Sometimes when Strudel is super tired she wakes up and puts on a second pair of underwear over the pair from the day before, so she will be undressing at night and will be rocking the modern petticoats or whatever. We discovered this had been the case this morning as I was chucking her into the shower, and I reminded her to take OFF one pair before putting a new one on.

“That reminds me,” Franny said. “One day my dad was home with me and my other sister, and he let her get dressed and she put on her pants and THEN her underwear, so it was on the outside!”

“WHAT?” P. said from downstairs, incredulous. Franny repeated it. “Nooo,” P. said. “For how long?”

“He didn’t notice until the middle of the afternoon!” Franny said. “I decided I was going to let him notice himself.”

I was laughing so hard at this point and P. still looked skeptical.

“He still has kitties running around in his head, Mom.”

“Ohh,” I said, “that is TOTALLY a SeaFed story. I believe it,” I said.

Later I was still kind of giggling about it and Franny walked by and said “LOOOOL underpants story. I’m going to tell that again in like two months.”

In Related News

Franny’s stepmom is pregnant again! I was subjected to the subsequent mental images brought about by the phrase “We have been TRYING for a long time” AUGGH but I held it together and congratulated. I am very excited. That is all.

“Why is it Father’s Day, Dad?” Strudel said.

“Because your father’s a motherfucker,” I said, so only P. could hear.

“WHAT?” Strudel said. She hates being left out.

“Look, in the street, is that Xmas Steve?”

“NO MOM, he’s on his boat drinking sock beer in the summer!”

“UP TOP,” I said to P., and got my five.

I almost had to kill him this morning because I caught him RUNNING UP THE STAIRS with this bucket of dry ice from the grocery order and he ALMOST TRIPPED. I don’t know what would have happened, exactly, if he would have spilled it on himself, but if I had to take his ass to the emergency room I would have been HELLA PISSED.

FROOTY!

In Other News: Eggbags for Sale, Ten Cents a Pail

So, I am putting a little line out there now. The cute chooks I got when I was on hiatus yon these two months are now halfway grown and need new homes. This was my plan all along, to have some spring chicken raising funtimes and then move them up and out. Here we go! Write a blog! Tell a friend! Say it was horrible!

Fifteen per or all three for forty. You pick up and bring crates/boxes. Hatched March 29.

Saffron is a very elegant and sexy Easter Egger who will lay pink, blue, or green eggs. Dunno yet. She seems smart, like most EEs I have known.

Aloha is a Silver Wyandotte, and so named because the girls thought I was saying Hawaiiandotte. Of course. She will lay brown eggs and is VERY OMG PRITTY.

My favorite, who I will be sorry to let go, is Rose the Giant Blue Cochin. She is pretty mellow and has the cochin waddle and the fuzzy feet, so probably not ideal for a super wet run. She is extra sweet like Marty McFly was last year. I love this breed.

Anyway, drop me a line if you’re interested. If I don’t hear anything for a month or so I will move on to Backyard Chickens.

Me: HEY I am making you a mixtape.

Z: Hooray!

Me: I am going to call it “Music You Will Hate When We Break Things Off.”

Z: Ha ha!

Z: :(

ETA 6/21/09: HELLO VOYEURS. I have been given special dispensation to post mixtape. This is aimed at someone who has rock/electronica sensibilites. And I think the order may be off, but it is all G in the H. Oh yes I did. No Hall & Oates, WISEACRES.

DeVotchKa “The Clockwise Witness” [from A Mad and Faithful Telling]

Dengue Fever “Tiger Phone Card” [Venus on Earth]

Sufjan Stevens “To Be Alone With You” [Seven Swans]

Kings of Convenience “Gold for the Price of Silver” [Versus]

Amy Winehouse “Just Friends” [Back to Black] (Glastonbury ‘07 was her last good concert, I think.)

Los Campesinos! “My Year In Lists” [Death to Los Campesinos!]

Neko Case “Lion’s Jaws” [Fox Confessor Brings the Flood]

Andrew Bird “Armchairs” [Armchair Apocrypha]

Beirut “Cliquot” [The Flying Club Cup]

Brazilian Girls “Pussy” [S/T]

Sufjan Stevens “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhhhh!” [Come On Feel The Illinoize]

Space/Catatonia “The Ballad of Tom Jones” [?]

The Whitest Boy Alive “Courage” [Rules]

I was having one of those periods where I felt like everything was slipping through my fingers—that I couldn’t get a hold on anything. I was working constantly, doing evictions and digging trenches. It was ungodly hot, even for Illinois in July, which was scrambling my brain further. I was living in my first apartment, which was cheap, and clean, but a hole, with neighbors who did not enjoy hearing KMFDM through the walls at midnight, oddly. My family wasn’t speaking to me and I was on shaky ground with my remaining friends, who were sort of horrified at what I seemed to be transforming into.

It’s funny how periods like that get burned into your mind. Some things are lost from then, thank god. But I can remember the exact layout of that apartment down to the fixtures and the pattern of the tiles. Makes sense, really, as I spent enough time on the tiles. Rice for breakfast, beer for dinner, sometimes the other way around. On payday there was sweet and sour chicken, Boone’s Farm, and a pack of Marlboro menthols, and for a few months this was all I wanted out of life.

This was the summer I was horribly, fatally afflicted with poison ivy, which I deservedly got fooling around on my live-in boyfriend in some unfamiliar woods. I think I have mentioned this before, but it is worth saying again, when I get poison ivy, it does not go away. EVER. Steroids will knock it out, as it turned out, but when you are scraping so hard it is a daunting thing to even think about seeing a doctor.

So I was vaguely out of it, covered in a rash and various swellings, and working in the sun every day. Finally I ponied up to see a doctor who took pity on me and cut his fee once I told him I had been afflicted for six weeks. He prescribed me some generic steroids and I was on the road to recovery. I slept without a fever for the first time in two weeks, which was heavenly in our 90-degree non-air conditioned apartment.

I had been spending a lot of time with one of my oldest friends, who was letting me couch surf at her house that winter once my parents kicked my useless ass out. I finished high school and got the apartment, and we still hung out a lot. She, my boyfriend, and I were a tight threesome, and often our other roommate would hang with us too, which was somewhat awkward because the two of them had dated and he had moved on and was entertaining female guests with power tools and vegetables.

I went out of town, abruptly, and when I returned the predictable happened, considering how sloppily and drunkenly we were leading our lives at the time. I put my things down in the room I shared with my boyfriend and found a woman’s ring on my bedside table. I picked it up; it was bits of shell set into a silver band and recognized it as one of the rings my old friend had been wearing in the past couple of weeks.

I slipped it onto my finger and it was tiny like she was; she had small bones, delicate tapering fingers, long limbs. I had spent my whole life feeling awkward and large around her. When we played, she always made me be the boy, which I didn’t mind. She was always the boss and got shirty if I tried to decide what we were going to do, play, eat. I have always been happiest as a follower.

The ring gave me a strange feeling as it sat on my pinky. I wasn’t angry or surprised. I just had a cold, sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach. All I could think was that I had known her since I was five and the sheets hadn’t even been changed. I saw her little freckled face in my mind with her braids, tan, eating ice cream and us running away from her annoying little sisters. Now her face was hard, angular, and her hair was short after her mother’s sudden aneurisms and death our senior year. She was sleeping with everyone and it never lasted longer than a couple of weeks, and my roommate told me why.

I knew this situation was coming to an end. I wasn’t getting anywhere and had to find another way. I left the ring on and it amused me somehow to wear it throughout the week as I threw people’s shit into garbage bags and got blisters on top of my blisters.

Friday was coming around again and payday was coinciding with yet another party. Sometimes it was one group of friends or another, but this time it was to be a mix. People I knew from high school came, my boyfriend’s friends came, and our roommate’s as well.

The party was in full swing and I was working on polishing off my second bottle of Boone’s Farm Sangria (sophisticated), had a stomach full of fluorescent sauce, and was sucking down cigarettes like there was no tomorrow. This was after my rapid fire series of unfortunate head injuries and I was often feeling a little off, especially while drinking. Did this stop me from drinking? It did not.

Finally my old friend had drifted over to the couch, next to me. It was a fine couch from our roommate’s parents’ basement and had scratchy upholstery that dusty rumpus room smell to it. He had drilled holes in the back of it and we had stuck the lawn decorations I had stolen from the neighborhood when I had gotten bored during a party we had thrown a few weeks ago. Plastic spinny daisies and flamingoes looked down on me where I was slumped, exhaling cloud after cloud of smoke.

As I was wondering if she had noticed her ring was missing, I was also noticing the corners were starting to bend. The spins were coming on and I knew I had about five minutes before I blew my stack, ten before I was face down somewhere.

“So,” I said, turning to her and slurring through the malt liquor to be heard over Lords of Acid. “Have you been looking for your missing ring?”

“What?” she said in a genuinely confused way. No one was paying attention to us; people were shouting or laughing or dancing.

I put my cigarette in my mouth and held up my right hand. Her eyes widened. She knew the look on my face and that I was serious. My mouth started watering and the time to get up and hit the bathroom or the bushes would have been right then. I saw the window close in my mind.

“Oh,” she said, trying to emulate the expression of the remorseful. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, I know it won’t happen again.” I said, putting out my cigarette.

“Why’s that?” she said.

“Everyone knows you’re a lousy fuck.”

I moved as if to get up and leaned over her lap, letting go two bottles of Boone’s farm and a takeout container of sweet and sour swimming in pink sauce into her lap. I was a horrible vomit waterfall. I could actually see the pineapple in her lap, on her skirt. I got up and staggered to the bedroom and closed the door. My sleep was uninterrupted and untroubled.

Up betimes and into my office, to commit further acts of devilry.

Notes:

“Half” refers to No Brane Babby. If you don’t know about Babby Hope Faith, you should look into it so you can be fully appalled by my tastelessness. I understand that some people enjoy being appalled and I am here for you.

Also it is interesting to note that a GIS for Denise Richards (I almost used Denise instead of Cleese) yields mostly full body shots including nude ones one the first page of results. This was not the case with Abraham Charles Vigoda.

In Other News: Two Short Stories About Last Night

Ruby took me to KEXP last night to snap some local rock dudes, which she does on the regular. It was tiny and hot in there and I was starving, so I ate and drank at the adjacent Holiday Inn bar.

After the first show, one of the rockers offered me a CD, which is presumably full of their rockings, and Ruby took the opportunity to say, “SJ listens to (stage whisper) HIP HOP but we are trying to get her to branch out.” The rocker guy withdrew his hand after giving me the CD as if he had just taken a great risk by giving a poore leper some alms. I think he was mostly reacting to the tone of Ruby’s voice, but it was pretty funny.

Translation: “Here,” Ruby says, “take pity on my friend Herpes Helen and give her some REAL music.”

When I walked into the Ho-tel Mo-tel Holiday Inn bar a familiar sight greeted me: a white guy, probably in his 50s, drinking alone. Countdown to comment on the personal appearance of woman entering who just wants a fucking cheese burger in 3…2…

“HEY you should probably get out of the SUN,” he bantered. HYUK HYUK.

“Yeaaah I always look like this. I’m Irish.” No eye contact.

“Oh, I was talking about your hair…er…sorry if I’ve offended you.”

“What can I get you?” interjected the bartender, who was attractive, looked to be about my age, and puts up with this for a living.

I ordered scotch and the dude continued to flail a bit. “That one’s on me,” he said.

I considered being huffy and prideful and shutting him down, but you know what? That’s a stupidity tax, man. I enjoyed a free scotch just as much as I would have enjoyed one I paid for myself.

“I’m really sorry,” he said again, awkwardly.

“You have to try harder than that to offend me,” I said. “Cheers.”

So, Strudel finished school! Now she is ready to apprentice with the village tailor. Ha ha, don’t I wish. We went to lunch at the Rocking Wok, which changed my favorite dish, the honeydew beef. It was still good, but not as delishus as before. It used to have little crispy basil leaves in it, and now has minced peppers.

We went for ice cream and a walk around the neighborhood after. She surprised me by ordering the lavender honey ice cream instead of a more kidalicious flavor like chocolate.

I have also decided to emerge into the amazing year 2003 and actually use my flickr bucket instead of spamming my blog all the damn time. YEAH five years from now I might even have a Bookface.

Behold a flickr ZZZZ

Going out with Ruby tonight. Apparently she is going to snap pix of musicians and then we are going to drink Not Absinthe.

Up betimes and out in the garden; peas and radishes coming along. The new batch of chickens is utterly indifferent to my presence and the old ones still cleave like burrs. It’s amazing what a difference handling a batch of chickens to the point of smothering makes. It’s fun to walk around with them. It’s like wearing a giant pair of fuzzy slippers that makes cross noises. Components break off and stop to eat bugs or peck at a spot before rejoining the ankle entourage, Voltron-style.

I am thinking the last days of new computer approaches already. I seem to be the 1337 Widow when it comes to computers since about November. I have that disoriented feeling where I don’t know where my files are or what’s on a box at any given time. I am constantly redownloading software, reformatting, rebooting, whatever needs to be done. I think I have lost years of photos and music files but I am unsure; they could be two machines ago on the laptop that just lost display capabilities. Half my novel is on there as well. I just don’t want to make time right now. I’m starting to think the lesson here is about halfassing things or looking for an easy fix, but that would imply the universe makes sense somehow and there’s a plan to it. HA.

I am being challenged because there is this part of me that loves starting over, releasing whatever I have made into the wild and forgetting about it. The challenging part is putting my money where my mouth is on this and being able to live in this advanced state of disorientation for however long it lasts and to still retain some kind of functioning. I think I am a different person than I was in November; it’s kind of sickening how symbolic all this computer mess is. Breakdown, restart, repeat. I need to decide now if I want to be more organized and have things like external hard drives and sensible filing systems. Destroying paintings and erasing writing is different than this, somehow–that feels discrete whereas somehow my hard drive feels like a more complete mirror of what’s in my mind.

Everything we create is an expression of what is happening internally, our past, and our thought processes; what does it say about me that parts of me, the reflection of me is a complete tangle right now? Once I was trying to figure out where the old stopping point is and where the new one starts, but I don’t believe it’s at all that simple anymore.

When I was in college I was obsessed with the Western mutilation of the idea of wabi-sabi. I think a tree that has a dead part is most beautiful. Things like perfect gardens or anything that implies there is nothing left to be done is completely uninteresting. I like people with an edge who have figured out how to be nice, to function. People who can take the dark parts and the good ones and put them together. At the same time I was surrounding myself with chipped pottery and domestic work with a repetitive nature I was squeezing onto myself so tightly I almost cracked. The asymmetry would be that I was perfect somehow and my external world was not. What a load of crap that was.

Now I guess I have to accept that I am wabi-sabi everywhere. The change now is not the shame of being brought to my knees several times, rendered mortal repeatedly. The change is balance and growth. I am taking it a little at a time.

Could I be any further up my own ass? No, I could not. I can tell this is one of those notes to myself for six months from now, when things have shifted again.

Tomorrow on I, Asshole: vengeance puking. Have a good day.