It

It.

That's all that's left. A gristly problem stewing in the back of my head suddenly boiled over and I sat down catch the steam. I caught it all and it burned my hands and made me happy. Whew. Got that down, now I can move on. Save. Time to go do some other non-writing things for a bit and happily so because I'd boiled down that particularly unpalatable piece of meat and made it tender, fall off the bone, delectable spicy BBQ.  And then, the horror.
Sitting down to review and pick up where I left off, I found It. Only It.

Shakespeare never used a laptop. He never sat down and scribbled out drafts in disappearing ink. Maybe he did. Maybe his pet parrot screamed once and startled him and knocked his ink everywhere and he had to say OK, that's it. You are banished. Banish-ed. You have to pronounce the ed separately when you are speaking of Shakespeare.

I don't think I'm like Shakespeare, no delusions that grand around here. I will say I don't particularly care for Shakespeare. I can't decide if that's an ignorant or pretentious thing to say. It's not that I don't understand him or his import. I'm just a little lukewarm about him. Meh. His sonnets are dreadful. I'm not sure that's his fault, though. Sonnets seem to be designed to be dreadful. All that clapping and rhyming. It's clamorous. I wrote a sonnet for a friend of mine and that was dreadful, too. He said it was a little depressing. I have managed to combine both ignorant and pretentious now, with a side of depression. Shakespeare's like Buddy Holly. I understand his pioneering ways, his influence on so many things to come. I recognize his importance and I respect it. But still, meh. Don't tell my husband I said that about Buddy Holly.

It.

You know when macaroni boils over on the stove and then you don't wipe it up right away and there's that gummy crusty mess that's left around the burner? That's what's left in my head from my flash of insight. So I'm picking the crusty bits up and licking them and they taste kind of like macaroni, but you know, it's just not the same. Not at all. It's gross and kind of desperate and strange, actually. Maybe you don't do that. Maybe you wipe off your stove when something boils over. I should probably wipe off the stove and make some lunch instead. Maybe a crust-less PB&J. Something safe, benign and comforting.
Like how I sit here and yammer about Shakespeare and macaroni and llamas.

You don't know about the llamas. That was another place I said something about the llamas. I have typed the word llama at least once every single day this week in vastly different contexts. How does that happen? A huge dromedary takes up residence in my brain and asserts itself whenever possible. Not even where it's possible. She shoehorns herself into the most impossible of places. I kissed a llama on the mouth once. More than once if you must know. It was at a kangaroo farm and, as you probably know, at a roadside kangaroo farm just about anything goes. So. It. I have a luscious dromedary in my brain batting its ridiculously glamorous eyelashes at me. Llama kisses are not as smelly or as lippy or as llama-y as you would imagine. I have kissed worse things on the mouth. Like that guy that had that one dangly baby tooth behind his permanent teeth. Is a llama a dromedary?

It.

Macaroni is supposed to be comfort food, too. I don't really like it, though. Meh. Like Shakespeare and Buddy Holly. I'm not listening to those men right now. I'm listening to raw and uncomfortable alt-country that reminds me of such a tender, broken time for me. Decidedly not Buddy Holly or macaroni. I poke these bruises and feel the warm spread of pain and I kind of like it. Everyone does that. I used to sit on the toilet and count the moles on my thighs and push on all of my bruises. Get out of there if you're done! My mom would holler, You'll get hemorrhoids if you sit in there that long! How does a four-year-old get hemorrhoids? I didn't even know what they were, but you know, just the sound of it. I just noticed an unacceptable typo which I will now fix, but boy, what on earth? They're waiting for you over there with their straight-jackets. I like to pronounce hemorrhoids like this: hemmer-hoids. Saying all the H's. I also say Pinot Gringo instead of Pinot Grigio. Sometimes I forget and say such things in front of strangers and they think me, at best, odd. At worst, ignorant. Sometimes I also say expecially on purpose. What I did not do on purpose, though, was order a black anus steak sandwich at Quizno's once. Even though my husband insists I did.

It.

A friend and I have long believed that some people have It and some people don't. By It, what do we mean? A certain joie de vivre? I can't pronounce French words without sounding like a llama. It is a certain creative spirit, approach to things, an effervescence. Do we all have It? I think so. I think some people forget or lose It. I think some people just don't really care and would rather be comfortable in their brains rather than having llamas and such in there. An oh, what's for dinner tonight? kind of approach to things. Rather than an if I make this for dinner tonight, what does that say about me as a mother or a wife or a person? What does it say about the future of the human race?!  kind of cud chewing. I sometimes pine for the former, but there's a faucet in my kitchen that if you don't shut it off just right will drip, drip, drip and make you completely insane, but the plumbing is old and explosive and I'm afraid if I get in there and monkey around with it, there will be no water at all. Do you know what I'm saying here? So some people see It wandering about their psychic houses and say no thank you, that's a three mile stretch of bad road looking for a heart attack in a handbasket or something like this and they keep on with their dinner plans that are simply dinner and not some manifesto and they are the peaceful ones. The lucky ones.

It.

I'm the one who spends the afternoon chasing down a slippery insight and all I have left is

It.
There is very little peace in that. But apparently there are llamas.

Horrifying children. Check out the poor little dude in the striped shirt.

One Love

He wasn't the first, nor was he the worst. He certainly wasn't the last.
He just... was.
He was neither good looking, nor smart. He was a tedious and dull conversationalist. He didn't have any passions, to speak of. He didn't believe anything. He wasn't a very hard worker, but he wasn't spectacularly lazy, either. He wasn't particularly good-hearted, but he wasn't evil. He didn't seek any kind of greater good; he didn't really seek anything at all.
He just kind of... was.

He was a friend of friends. We ran loosely in the same circles. He was always just kind of... there. He wasn't particularly outgoing or funny. In fact, the only reason I noticed him at all was because I found him vaguely repellent. He had bad skin. Not acne, per se. Not the sort of grotesque acne that, when outgrown, would give him a certain pockmarked ruggedness. He just had random pustules. Mammoth whiteheads in odd places that would stay around for days. I couldn't talk to him without wanting to reach out and pop them. His chin was minimal and it seemed like all of his teeth grew in on top of each other right in the front. He was a little bit shorter than I am, and a little bit pigeon-toed. He laughed at his own jokes and did Beavis and Butt-Head impersonations. We had nothing in common. Except Bob Marley. We dated for six months.

He bought me a One Love bumper sticker for my car, which pretty much guaranteed my getting pulled over all the time. He said we had that One Love. That universal, all encompassing, gather up the world in a happy ganja haze kind of love. I nodded and averted my eyes. I am not a Rastafarian, but I do understand One Love. It's the kind of love that sees a boy whose parents are in the midst of a messy divorce, whose lifelong friend and older brother-figure is dying of AIDS. A boy who dropped out of college because it was just too hard and it made no sense to him. A boy who loved a girl who was maddening and foreign to him. A boy who was trying to be a man and had no idea how. A boy whose heart had been broken by people he loved the most; a boy who needed love. It's the kind of love that sees through the pimples and the pigeon toes and commits to six months of excruciating boredom and squalor because she wants to help this boy.

But people are not puppies or kittens. They cannot be gathered and cared for and fed and then released back into the wilds of their own lives. I mistook my compassion for humanity in general for commitment to this one particular person. For six months he tried so hard to be someone he wasn't, could never be, for me. He hurled himself against the wall of my expectations over and over, always coming up short. Even worse, I degraded him with my loving efforts: I paid his rent, I gave him rides to work when his own car got repossessed, I tried to dress him and feed him and convince him to read. I didn't let him be who he was, find his own way, make his own mistakes because I was so intent on improving him. I am ashamed by the sheer hubris of this notion as I write.

I was young, inexperienced, reeling from my own broken heart. Rather than face my own mess, I went about trying to keep someone else's house. In my effort to hide from myself, I coated my intentions with love, with generosity, with compassion. When he asked me to marry him, I almost threw up. I told him no, that couldn't possibly happen. When he sobbed and said "Where am I supposed to go?" the ornate Emperor's clothing I had constructed fell away. I stood there in my naked cruelty and had no answer for him. He wasn't an intellectual, but even he could see that I had never really loved him. I was in love with the idea of transformation. I was in love with myself. I had been using him for half a year to tell me the things I didn't believe about myself: that I was beautiful, that I was good, that I was lovable, that I was loving. I told myself I was helping him.

I shared this story with a friend who said I made my ex-boyfriend sound pathetic. "I think you should talk more about his good qualities, in more detail. The way you've described him, nobody would want to date or be him." I didn't disagree with this critique. In fact, I spent several hours trying to think of good qualities to balance out the portrait I'd painted. I couldn't think of a single one. Not because they weren't there, but because I had never bothered to see them. I spent six months of my life in a relationship with someone I found repellent, someone I didn't see except for his flaws. I spent six months of my life looking into the mirror his adoration held up for me, admiring nothing but my own warped reflection. I never looked around the jagged edges of myself to see the person who stood before me. No, he was not the pathetic one in our scenario.

He moved across the country after we broke up. I have no idea what happened to him. I haven't thought about him in years. As I remember him now, this half a person I dated but never really knew, I wish him well. I hope he found someone who, unlike me, treated him well. Someone who appreciates him for who he is. I hope that he continued to believe what we used to sing along with Bob Marley: "Every little thing will be all right."

Keeper of Corpses

I've been working on a post about reality, but it will be waiting in the wings as I deal with an actual, nefarious, and unavoidable reality.

Remember the foot smell? It was suggested that it was the pipes, or the produce, or the Hooligan. Well, drain cleaner a-go-go to no avail. Sparkling clean kitchen, refrigerator, fruit basket (I even checked all my shoes because sometimes produce ends up in there. Don't ask.) The Hooligan is an advanced little boy and he can generate some very mature smells for his stature, but alas, I have never known him to smell like a corpse. I sniffed him just in case.

Yes, foot has progressed to corpse in the continuum of bad smells. Dead, rotting, bloated, reeking corpse in an, as yet, undisclosed location. It is beyond a mild "did you catch that whiff?" kind of smell. It is evil incarnate, winding its sticky fingers around the back of your neck and breathing its hot, fetid breath right up your nose. It assaults you. It bludgeons you with slime covered billy clubs and then kicks you while you lie there in a fetal position gasping for your life.

I have long been convinced that there were hobos living in our garage, and now I think one of them has crawled under the house and expired. It may be a squirrel or a raccoon. Possibly a rat. Our neighbors keep chickens and you know what they say - where there're chickens... I don't suspect it's our resident donk-um ('possum the size of a donkey) because he died under our other neighbors' house last winter. It can't be a mouse. The stench is just far too large. So tomorrow will be spent in the crawlspace under the house, looking for remains among the mud and the shanty town that I'm positive exists down there.

I have joked about this. The Chief Lou emailed me last week about an outstanding bill (it wasn't just great, it was outstanding!) and I promptly replied: "I've taken care of it. I put a horse's head in the appropriate bed." Sometimes I tell the monkeys to "hide the bodies" when we do that last-minute blitz clean before Daddy comes home. When the fire dies too soon and it's chilly in our bedroom, I tell the Chief Lou that I will warm up by slitting him open so he can be the Tauntaun to my Han Solo. I have joked about this. This isn't funny anymore.

As I type, the Chief Lou and the monkeys are en route to the airport to pick up my mother-in-law, who will be spending a few days with us. I have an amiable relationship with her because her only son has been happy with me for nearly 15 years and I raise and feed two of her grandchildren, but she has always thought I was a little bit odd. I have lit heavily scented candles in every room of the house. I have burned incense. I have scrubbed all that can be scrubbed, including myself (just in case.) I have done everything short of calling in a priest for an exorcism, and yet it lingers. In a very few minutes I will have to welcome my mother-in-law into a house that smells like the lowest circle of hell (with heavily scented candles) and concede that I am, in fact, odd. Yes, that's me, your strange daughter-in-law: sewer of clothes, lover of underdogs, breast feeder of babies, protector of trees, eschew-er of make-up and bras, keeper of corpses.