It's a theme, see? Whaddaya think about that, see?

I've decided to talk like a fella stackin' dirty glasses in a speakeasy, so don't give me none a your guff.

I got nothin' but the same old thing. It's the waiting I hate. I should just move past it, find the bootstraps, and yank 'em up to my crotch. There's this job, see... and I wish I hadn't decided I wanted it because now I'm waiting. And this industry is like some big, incestuous family so most likely before they even tacked up the official post, as they must officially do in their officious way, they probably already knew who'd fill it. And it prob'ly wasn't me, see.

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Grey and drizzly sets me on my proverbial and literal ass. My ass, she needs to be moving because all this waiting has grown me a new set of cheeks. Two sets, actually.

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I volunteered to call a bunch of soccer parents about tryouts next week. Doing this has confirmed my suspicion that people are selfish, rude bastards that lack social graces — at least about 75% of them. These will be the aforementioned Old Bats on Wheels that'll be crankily running the show with their self-righteousness and airs of entitlement in the future. This makes me wish for a Granny Bomb to explode over mankind to create a legion of powder-smelling, pie-baking, back-patting, flower gardening, cheque-writing, philatelic old people. You know, like they used to make, see.

Even now apparently 80 is the new 60, and they're all riding their Harleys through Roger's Pass, breaking hips doing triathlons, and spending their kids' inheritances on cultured pearl necklaces and Depression Glass on E-bay. But they're still nice.

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I was discovered by an old friend on Facebook recently. I hate Facebook. I know I have mentioned this before, and that has not changed. And no, I don't want to be your friend. I probably allowed it anyway, but I only put it up because of the lure of old friends and lovers. If you know me here, then know me here and don't bother with me there. I still find the site to be awkward, un-fun, scattershot, and not at all absorbing and I don't understand the "crackbook" nickname at all. Perhaps I am missing something. But I don't care.

Anyway, this old friend was from jr. high and high school and I have not seen her in about 11 years due to my self-imposed exodus, and even before that, our relationship as adults has been minimal. But she is one of those people with whom I'd slip back into something comfortable, and I am excited to hear from her.

She's as weird as ever, too. I know this without really even knowing this. She is Helena so it is thus. Helena was a nonconformist sort of girl in high school — oh, not in that angry, Doc Martened punk-rock way because really, that WAS a conforming, identifiable group — as original as they liked to think they were. No, Helen was different in a much braver way. Though we, as her friends, who both loved her and mocked her behind her back, didn't see it that way at the time. Sometimes, we were embarrassed by her. But she knew it almost encouraged it, the cheeky monkey.

She was the girl with the wrong brand of jeans, the Chinese market maryjanes, the cardigans, the glasses so big several sets of eyes could have peered through them (aka: the Charles Nelson Reilly specials), the hair that would do nothing but hang there, uninspired. She was big chested and slightly pigeon-toed. She was the girl that drew fanciful doodles of brides, who read Harlequins, who lived in a chaotic, messy house full of antiques with doily-topped couches. And for many years her mother suffered from leukemia, by turns very very sick and somewhat better, and then dying shortly after we graduated high school. Only in retrospect, away from the self-absorption of teenagehood do I think about how traumatic that all must have been for her.

Helena was perceived as a geek, as an academic, if she registered on the radar at all in the school hallways. She was editor of the yearbook. One time Helena, Jane and I got on a city bus and we passed a pack of boys as we went to sit at the rear. They snickered and said things under their breath, and Helena, assuming they were making fun of her, zeroed in on them and said in a very prim voice "Don't judge a book by its cover!" That was Helen. (We always found the "a" at the end of her name awkward so everybody called her Helen). Well, Jane and I turned red with embarrassment and then set off laughing so hard tears came. Helen Wheels. Helen's Melons. Helena who named one of her children Beverley. I'm glad to have her back, in whatever way that is.

And so that's me on this tripp Tuesday, see? Time to don some glad rags, pour another cuppa java and see about the hubbub, Bub.

Aggravated Doc-Surge

Sometimes my brain starts skipping in its groove, and something will repeat itself over and over again in random moments of my days and nights. Lately, like for a week or two now, it has been "aggravated doc-surge." Sometimes, I will say it out loud when it comes to mind. I was standing in my garden last night taming the massive, out-of-control arugula patch (picture me with safari hat and machete) and I whispered it a few times. Aggravated doc-surge. The dog next door howled.

I can only surmise that there are times that my brain goes somewhat haywire, and I have no idea what prompts it or how to make it go away. My old therapist would claim it's probably anxiety related and would recommend a regimen of relaxation exercises and squishy ball play. I think my cranial wiring is a bit squiffy myself, having heard about research done on the traumatized brains of children and the resulting neuropathways that are created, and that once those pathways are established, the brain can find its way back to these pathways more than once and with ease. It's a bit of a carnival in there sometimes. I'm especially prone to earworms — songs in my head play so constantly and steadily that they will wake me up in the night.

Aggravated Doc-Surge? Some of you vintage folks like myself might remember it instantly, or not at all even if you saw it on TV. My brain twigs onto things others may find unremarkable or not memorable.

It's from M*A*S*H* (for which I have several afflictions, one of which I wrote about before — the "and Peg pours me a damn cup of coffee" line). We watched a lot of M*A*S*H* when I was a young person.

Captain Sloan: I'm Captain Sloan, Supervising Acc-Fin
Hawkeye Pierce: "Acc-Fin?"
Captain Sloan: Accounting and Finance.
Hawkeye Pierce: Oh. I'm Hawkeye Pierce. Aggravated Doc-Surge.

I love that somebody made a Hawkeye-O-Lantern. Makes me feel much more sane.

I don't know WHAT I was THINKING

I'm certain I was vacuumed into an otherworldly vortex earlier this year. There is a possibility evil female hormones and midlife crisis and life stresses all combined to slurp me into a black hole that eventually spit me out all covered in Poltergeist-like slime, which I had to shower off and simultaneously squeak out "what the FUCK was that?"

Because I can really see no other reason why I'd fall for the rat-bastard likes of Rex-goddamned-Smith! Are you kidding me? Six-and-a-half years of post-secondary, some times of intense tragedy and very little joy, years of rollercoaster living, and what it really comes down to is putting stock, forever and always, in the wrong people. But honestly — goldilocks there? The forces of the universe combined at just the wrong time, is what it is, to play a cosmic joke on me. In a fit of nostalgia last spring, I had ordered a DVD copy of an old movie-of-the-week, Sooner or Later, starring Rex Smith and Denise Miller. It was a movie I remember watching while babysitting and it fulfilled every teen dream that hurt little girl would have had. Rather than the expected lesson at the end of the movie ("never try to be who you aren't," "don't lie to older guys," etc.) — the girl got the guy in the end, much to the delight of every girl who'd theretofore had to sit through the moralistic preachings of most young adult literature.

It maybe was the mist of nostalgia that had me return to the movie. Daily. For weeks. Working around my work and family schedule, I began to buzz to the best parts. Eventually, I could say the dialogue word for word. Why? What a waste of time fawning over the beautiful (and truly, it was Greek-god like) countenance of Rex Smith? It wasn't enough that I became obsessed with the movie, I also became obsessed with the man. I dug deep, and found he'd put out albums with a hard rock band in the very early '70s that traveled with Ted Nugent and Lynyrd Skynyrd. I hit the vintage vinyl shop in town and bought the albums. I downloaded songs off the Internet. I joined a chat group. I began to order obscure and just-plain-bad TV and movie works off E-bay - a Harlequin movie (Ballerina and the Blues!), an ill-advised Knight Rider-ish ripoff, Streethawk. I ordered the entire book series written by Bruce and Carole Hart (who are notable for writing the Sesame Street theme song along with being early SS writers) — the Sooner or Later series, paying close to $30 for a yellowed, two-buck paperback. I found out his brother had been in a demi-successful band in the '70s also, logged onto his odd myspace site, and engaged in some pretty racy flirtation with him (never mentioning his younger brother). It didn't matter how I got close to him — this golden man had entered my consciousness and would not let go until I exhausted every avenue and every single bit of information I could scrape up. I began finding other women in their 40s who were just as inexplicably seized with the same kind of surprising, blindsiding obsession. Always analytical, I started to do research on the psychology of idol worship and began writing an article about what exactly it is that happens to women who end up locking sights onto specific celebrities, especially middle-aged, previously apparently normal women.

That article sits in my files abandoned now. My phase has concluded. It was helped not a little by the experience of an online friend who went to Mr. Smith's live play Pirates of Penzance and was roundly treated like less-than-nothing the two times she ran into the man. I have no doubt about the pool of untapped talent in Mr. Smith's tight California body — I have no doubt either about the scattershot, ADHD-like, get-rich-no-matter-how approach to his life that will forever relegate him to the also-rans and has-was bins. It's a shame.

But I need to wonder in a very deep way about how I could have been ripped from my life's moorings in such a bizarre way, by such a bizarre subject at such a bizarre time. Perhaps the strength of nostalgia had control of me. As a young teen I was equally subject to severe crushes and obsessions, so I was already prone. I do think some weird combination of hormones and the position of the moon and the space aliens that invaded my cerebellum also had to have something to do with it. Whatever it was, it was a very sad waste of my life's energies for several months, and I am pink-faced with embarrassment for having lived it.

And what have I learned from my little Take-My-Breath-Away foray? To seek my joy in my life's realm and devour it whole. Also remain loyal only to Rick Springfield! HA!

Droplets

I rise from the tub weary. Clean and weary of the loop-loop of thoughts that snowball endlessly down a hill, obliterating everything else. My mind is no longer my own and rolls at a crazy speed, toward certain splintering, crashing wall. I choose a jar of cocoa butter encased in an expensive brown disc. I choose cocoa butter because of the keen, nearly physical sensation of memory it stuns me with. It is what I wore back then. Pearlescent cocoa butter in a vat-sized plastic drugstore jar. Back when I rose from the tub, excited and barely taking time to towel off before moving into the open room of all possibility. What would I do that day? I didn’t know, but somewhere along the way something delicious would happen – it could be the whisper of wind lifting my hair, the shiver of a boy brushing past in the hallway, or even a sudden wicked thought.

That was the world then.

It’s no wonder I’m hiding within, breathing bubbles beneath the surface of nostalgia right now.

New doings

This is new for me. I'm ruminating over what and whether to post here. In the meantime, I've been over at this pad for a number of years now, and it may be time for a fresh start.

This is a year of big changes.