tuckova

it's not your vault

We were walking home from school, Tracy and I, along the Maryland highway, really just a four lane road. It was faster to walk than take the bus because the bus went all the way through town first, and we lived in the other direction. Some girls drove by and screamed out the window at us. What did they scream? I don't remember, in fact so much of this memory is like a dream in how parts of it are so intense and others strung together by cobwebs of logic. I remember that my bookbag had colorful dancers' feet painted on it and ketchup stains on the bottom (from my habit of collecting ketchup packets for their satisfying spray when they burst, but then I'd forget and leave them in the bottom of my bag and ketchup would ooze through my bag and over my books), but I don't remember what those girls yelled. I yelled back "shut your mouth" and the car screeched around across the median and back towards us.

And we ran. Tracy threw her books down and ran unencumbered; that girl could run like the wind. Sometimes I can't imagine how we were friends. I know living next door was quite a factor but you look at me, with my awful teeth and pasty skin, living in books, huddling against the brick wall during recess and hating when the teachers would notice me and tell me to go out and run with the others. Ballet made it so I could grab my foot behind my head, but I couldn't catch a ball if my life depended on it and I didn't want to. Meanwhile Tracy was summer brown and beautiful, blessed with an older sister's guidance and a younger brother's rough-and-tumble fighting and her hair flew behind her as she ran down the hill, away from the car barreling towards us, me thumping along behind with my bag slamming against me.

And then what? I think we hid behind some trees, or maybe in the shadow of somebody's porch, and then came out when we thought it was safe, but the girls were still there, and "There they are! Get them!" and we ran more, we ran to the mechanic's shop that Tracy's father owned and he turned to the car with the fury of a father, and the fearless fists that winning most fights gives you. I really think he was ready to beat the hell out of that car. They were bullies, sure, to be old enough to drive and chasing down eleven-year-olds, but he was a grown man, and angry, and they drove away quickly.

Then what? Cobwebs. We went back and got Tracy's books, me still clutching my heavy bag and realizing I could have run faster if I'd had the sense to do what she did. Then I guess her father took us home, and I think police were called, as they would be in a small town. I don't know what I had thought would happen: Did I think they were going to run us down with the car? Get out of the car and beat us up? In my memory they are giants but they must have been 18 at the most, because the next day in high school one of them apologized to Tracy's popular sister, which was politically savvy. Denise said it shouldn't have mattered whose kid sister it was: chasing little kids in a car is uncool. Denise was wise. She once told me that sooner or later I would have to figure out my own merits and stand on my own apart from Tracy, which at the time hurt about as much as you expect it would. No dork likes to be noticed while standing in a pretty girl's shadow.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to me if we'd stayed there; how long Tracy would have stood for me; whether we would have fallen into a cliche or an awkward next-door silence as soon as puberty really hit. I had a host of general hurts when I was a teenager, and losing my first best friend to distance was one of them, but it's nothing compared to if I'd suddenly been too much baggage to carry, if I'd been thrown to the side of the road. Not least because I would have understood that it was the right choice.

it ends as it began

I wake up abruptly having dreamt my hands are asleep and itchy with needles, but when I open my eyes into the darkness my hands are no more asleep than the rest of me, and we all get out of bed.

In the morning I make coffee out of habit and then decide to drink it when I feel like I really need, rather than want it, and by the afternoon there are three cups of cold coffee in a soldierly row on my desk. I want everything to be what I want and balk at need and there is no faster way to make me give something up than to tell me I can't walk away.

Lately I've been considering the degree to which my stubborn self has put its queer shoulder to the wheel in the interest of getting me somewhere I did not necessarily want to go. If someone had told me I couldn't be a scientist because I am a woman, I would be wearing a white coat right now and I would know a lot more than you do, but I'm glad nobody told me that because few things interest me less than test tubes. I did make a mess of choices because I was told I couldn't, one way or the other, and some of those choices I really, really regret now. Still, I guess I mostly did okay.

There is still a typo on the White House web site, and it's messing with my ability to be purely delighted with it. I WROTE TO THEM about it, says Crotchety McEditpants, but apparently they think they have other, more demanding things to do or something.

I can't go to sleep at night because I need to get to the end of the chapter and then I need just a little taste of the next chapter which I then need to get to the end of, and I am torn between being distressed at my lack of self-control, which feeds me more vinegar and keeps me awake until 2 a.m. and shouldn't have said that, and my spontaneous nature, which loves the quench of hunger and the next chapter and anything revealing.

Then I fall asleep with the book under my head and when I wake up the bookmark's shape is pressed into my cheek, and I make a pot of coffee.

the world was such a wholesome place until...

How did it start? Uhm we were talking about tattoos and how it seems a waste to bury or cremate a body all covered in tattoos, all that art going to waste, and I remembered how a hundred years ago reading the RE/SEARCH about body modification and wasn't there some guy who collected yakuza skins and wouldn't that be awesome art or even better if it could be of use. It would be better than prayer beads from nun knuckles to have a yakuza skin something. A jacket?

Yakuza lampshade! It's the name of Mig's next band, which is one of a dozen reasons I like Mig so much. It's just an extension of the idea that a tough guy goes through exquisite pain to get a flower put on his back, anyway: and after he shuffles off his life of shadow, he's shedding light on some living room. It's all about being absurd. And it's not like I'd be all "It puts the lotion in the basket" about it; the guy would die a natural death first. Or he could go out in some mafia shootout thingie but I mean it's not like I'd pull the trigger. And beforehand I'd take him out for karaoke and sing "You Light Up My Life" or something.

But really. It's just recycling. Repurposing. It's no less icky than burial, is it. Maybe it is. I will admit it's a little morbid (though like I say I wouldn't kill anybody so maybe it's co-morbid, ahaha so funny).

Listen, I've got entertaining company. You can't expect me to be 100% on track. And it was this or telling you how I lost the battle of who gets the armrest on the bus ride to Prague on Tuesday, and really: yawn.

In better news, I found my camera! Pictures next week! Really!

whoops

I was off baby-wrangling again and totally forgot to write anything.

HAPPY HROMNICE! Happy so I've heard the sun might come back someday, that's nice.

Uhm. It's Squire's birthday today. We're all very excited as he hasn't canceled it yet. There used to be a story around here somewhere about how he canceled his sixth birthday, but that sort of went away in the Great Blog Tragedy of 2006 (because I was writing this thing back in 2003, my friend, back when we kept blogs on typewriters) and so you'll just have to trust me that it's a really good story. But anyway he hasn't canceled this one, so apparently Friar and I are hosting a mess of boys (that's the collective noun, right?) at a bowling alley. We rented the whole bowling alley! Your 12th birthday was never so good, was it.

The funniest thing that happened in my brain this week was trying to theoretically explain Alanis Morisette's cover of "My Humps" to someone who has never heard the song or heard of Alanis Morisette; the Obvious Logical Comparison was "It's like if Sylvia Plath wrote a version of 'Hills Like White Elephants.'" It would be full of bloody clumps of hair and tissue and you would feel somewhat soiled after you read it.

I think I have time to shave my head before the party. The hair (though not in bloody clumps) is getting Really Long, like possibly even 2 inches, and it looks ridiculous when I take off my hat. Am I more likely to scare the kiddies if I'm bald, or if I have hat head? These are the times that try my soul. I won't speak for the rest of humanity.