thestain

The Facilitator

I got a job in fire because I'm really only good at paying attention to things that hurt or change constantly. I am good with computers, and software, but it's nothing especially useful. I can make decent maps; I'm a passable programmer in esoteric languages that mean nothing to most people. I shine mostly when something is horribly wrong and needs to be fixed, many times after I've broken it and I'm panicked.

I express myself best through crude gestures.

Why would anyone want me to represent an agency on a national working team? It's the sort of ignorance that causes people to dress their cats in little hats and throw birthday celebrations. (Chet has pictures. Mr. Wiggims turned three this weekend).

So, I'm in a 3 day meeting. It's like the 7^th layer of hell, only with donuts and scented markers. I'm starting to alarm people with my not-so covert sniffing of the cherry cola red wide tip. Our 'facilitator' keeps trying to get it from me, sidling over to where I sit, behind a pile of inferior scents, and holding out her hand,

"I need the RED one…" she says, enunciating more each time. I need the red one. It reminds me of jolly rancher candies and happier times. Times when there wasn't some severe woman in an incongruous hearts-and-butterfly sweater looming over my joy.

She wants to underline important points. What about MY important points?

I've tossed her the Green Apple and the Black Licorice, the Grape, and the …whatever the f*ck that brown one was supposed to smell like. It was NASTY. I cannot believe that the marker company kept the Brown Scent team on after this release.

The facilitator is starting to be visibly agitated. It's funny because during her periods of glaring at me over marker choices and posturing for dominance, the meeting is running amok without someone to guide it. I'm the only one who raises my hand when I want to say something. I do it to tease the facilitator. It's my marker holding hand.

God I hate meetings. I keep suggesting breaks. At first the facilitator was on my side. We had 3 breaks in the first two hours before people started getting cranky.

It's been said before and will be said again: I gesture with my hands when I talk. The facilitator is wearing beige pants. I can almost make her dance.

Fortune

I hate it when someone asks me if I blog. I'd rather they ask me if I golf, so I can answer 'no' truthfully..

I also hate California, in general, and having awkward social encounters with snooty ghosts from my past, in particular.   I often wish I could hang out in a group of people who have spent the day dressed as lobsters or cell phones or Uncle Sam on the busiest street corners of Your Town, USA, because that's how I feel in California, in particular, and in almost any social situation in general. 

Currently I'm in Las Vegas. Returning from my nephew's wedding (Calif).  It was nice.  Chabela, my sister-in-law, knows how to throw a wedding and my nephews and brother are all funny and great, as is the rest of the family, both sides... I love weddings. Like I love Jesus and Santa riding on the same sled to Disneyland with new donor kidneys for all the sick children. 
I've been gone for a week, though, and ...it's late.

I'm only going to be home for a few days before I have to go to Reno for a work meeting.  Nevada makes me negative.   All the cigarette smoke and people like evolution failed parasites clutching these machines that never shut up.
Some sad old man in duct-taped shoes sits down and puts what looks like the last ten dollars in his world into a megawatt slot machine that screams WHEEL OF FORTUNE in 3 minute intervals.   Gone before the next interval.  Wheel of Fortune.  Shit. Do they have a green casino around here? Could the hopeless lose their money quietly in dimmer light?

Hi Mark. Dave?  Tata?
More later, I promise... I'll be happier once I can breathe.  Once I find my inner foam lobster.

Memories from My Lost Childhood

Years ago one summer I live with my oldest brother, Matt (who now goes by the name 'Mateo' and has fully embraced his imaginary Mexican heritage. This in the wake of his previous Tijuana wrestling moniker ---El Raton Gordo---. is actually easier to say with a straight face in conversation to a 6' 5" hillbilly white boy who didn't know a taco from his culo as a child.) 

I lived with Matt in San Diego. I was just 18, he was 26 and in the navy. Also living with us at the time were his 40 year old girlfriend, Peggy, and my other brother Chris, who had just finished navy bootcamp, and one of Chris's friends, Butch, also just out of bootcamp.  We lived in an upscale condo in Chula Vista.  Chris and Butch and I lived on the floor in the living room, much to Peggy's infinite stony silence.

As near as I could tell the only girlfriend duties Peggy performed were paying the rent and making sandwiches for my enormous brothers.  She preferred that I make my own, as did I.  Peggy wasn't in the picture much, except to frown and vacuum.  She vacuumed a lot. It was a small condo and I have always loved crunchy foods. 

My brothers and I, plus Butch, but not Peggy, went to a lot of parties that summer.  Matt is a very social individual. Chris, too, actually. Only I am not so gregarious.  I have always preferred the look of horror and/or confusion on someone's face in your standard social setting to the smile of acceptance. 

My role, in those party situations, was to walk in slightly behind the men and, to the first innocent kind stranger who talked to me to ask,
"Hi, do you want a beer?" or
"Hey, so you are Matt's kid sister", proclaim in a dark and disturbed tone,

"I just wish I were dead."

I'd say it looking at the floor, and hunching deep in my shoulders.  It went over well every time.  My brothers loved it.  I would sit on a couch or chair in whatever room I wanted to empty and look like the specter of despair.  I'd sigh audibly.  Sometimes I'd moan.  To cap it off, I tried to dress in some sort of incongruous outfit we'd buy from a thrift store.  Disney character adorned sweatershirts,  whimsical skirts in party colors,  butterfly barrettes....  a bow.  Shiny round toed mary jane shoes, with taps on them.  I looked like someones 6 year old daughter thrown into the Aged and Embittered time capsule, hastily retrieved and asked to look cute or die.

When we returned home, usually very late and drunk, Peggy was usually still up, dusting her weird elephant figurines, or vacuuming my sleeping area.  She was all enormous country western singer hair and disapproval.  Somehow her hair held up under all sorts of stress, physical and emotional.  I never saw it flat or wet.  I never saw her comb it.  It just was. 

When I moved back to Idaho, because I couldn't stand living in California longer than the summer, I left my butterfly barrettes for Peggy.  I also left my frolicking kittens sweater with the bow-buttons, but I knew my brother was more likely to wear that.

I wish I still had those shoes. 

 

All I Need: 100 acres and some car seats

Eric doesn't believe that I truly want to live in the middle of no where with sheep.
"You don't even like sheep," he dithers, oblivious to the obvious.

No one likes sheep. They aren't put here for us to like. They didn't evolve a personality.  They evolved car seat fabrics and roast meat.   I'm a vegetarian, of course, except for sausage and bacon and an occasional steak.  And when someone gives me elk meat...  I love chicken! Still, I'm pretty strict about not eating hamburger or anything coyly described as 'fingers' or 'wings' when it was not anatomically possible for that species/menu item.

Did you know that cows don't breed naturally anymore? Farmer Brown (not his real name) sticks a long metal rod full of hastily thawed bull (hopefully) giz up ole Bessie's hoo haw.  70% of the time he misses and it dribbles wastefully into another orifice or pocket. (most times not his own). I just read and paraphrased this from the Internets.  It totally could ruin the Catholic church if this gets out.

Anyway, yeah. I'm looking up property in the hinterlands that includes acreage for my nonexistant sheep.
My dogs will love it.  I think I will love it. No neighbors. Solitude. I miss living where no one can hear you scream.  I will breed soft blankets and scratchy socks.  Better still, I will let them breed themselves!

I'm trying to write more.  I promise.  I've been busy running/biking/trying to eat less cheese and taking my dogs miles away to train on sheep. Plus, Cienna is home.   The worst though is that I don't have a laptop at home anymore. Eric took it with him this summer.  I feel like I'm living in the 1980's.  I miss my laptop so much sometimes it hurts like a metal rod in the wrong pocket.

Aunty Anxiety

Today is Tomorrow's Yesterday.
That is what is written on the poster hanging above our new staff assistant- LIsle's- filing cabinets.  There are six tall drawers which contain nothing but forms, endless forms, and kleenex.  And scissors.  A dangerous number of sharp jabbing tools.  I imagine.  I can see into not just a person's soul, but their desk drawers.

Lisle's job is to fill out forms for almost everything anyone around here does.  Budget, overtime, travel, purchasing....reserving the conference room for staff meetings. 

The poster shows a clown riding away on a tricycle, midway across a landscape of sawdust and half lit empty circus tent. 
It puts me on edge.  I've started coming in the other door each morning. I can't take it.  She's going to kill us all one of these days, despite the basket of Albertson's cookies she puts out for everyone each wednesday, and the candies that occupy her counterspace the rest of the week. Hard candies. She has to be seething with murderous rage to hang something so sinister.  A full grown clown on a tricycle.  What do his parent's think? 
Lisle seems happy enough. I think she must be dosed to the gills on Paxil or something. 

I know a woman whose dog is on Paxil for separation anxiety.  The dog doesn't like it when she leaves for work each day.  He pants and drools all over the window and back of the couch.  Zeke doesn't like it when I leave for work either, he sits in the kitchen window and watches. It would never occur to me to put him on anti-anxiety meds any more than I'd get my spayed border collie a boob job to cure her insecurities.  Can you imagine what that would cost? Eight new perky yet elongated teats? No way.  She can suck it up like I've always had to and be thankful that she doesn't have back problems.  Be glad that she can run unencumbered.  I tell her this and she barks and wags her half tail. 
Try telling Lisle this, however, about her own good fortune and she stares and blinks. Hard. 
It's like there is nothing behind those eyes but a blank form and tomorrow's yesterday riding away on a trike.

DO NOT PAY $20 FOR UNKNOWN HAIRLESS RATS!

That's what the Craigslist ad admonishes.  And I love it.  I want to post my own series of ads:

Tired of excess rat hair? Try my patented Brazilian Rat Body Wax.   $19.95

Want a sexier rat line? I will shave your rats hair so close you will think it's a mouse.  See you at the Salt lick! $20

Be as bald as an (uneaten) baby hamster.  $20

You can see what my day amounts to. I hate my job. I could be someone in the rodent grooming world. I can feel it.

Love is Not Pretty For Everyone, Allison

My friend Allison is having a hard time trapping a man.  Or, as she likes to say, "finding someone to have a relationship with"... which is exactly what I tell wasps when they approach that screaming yellow hanging thing on my deck, full of rotted meat and pepsi.

"I'm just looking for the right swarm to settle down with! Go on in and have some cola!"

I used to do the same with rodents, livetrap them and set them free in other people's houses, like I do with my husbands, but I was wrong. Now I have mice, and men, as pets.  Which wouldn't be a bad alternative, but Allison won't hear of it.

"What the fuck, are you mentally ill?" she asks. One of us is. One of us is happy and healthy and never has to worry what to do with our old cracker crumbs. One of us is adored.

Allison can lure her prey in, but they just nibble the cheese and leave behind an empty unsprung expectation. 

"You need to get pregnant," I told her.  "Not just 'with child', either. Children.  Many.  Fertility pills by the fistfull and canned tuna fish heated in number 7 plastics will help you build your litter of freaks.  Damaged babies. Get X-rayed on a weekly basis and huff paint thinner. Clean cat boxes.  You need a squeaky pram full of malformed infants."

"...?...what will this accomplish?" she asks, "Are you drinking?"

Of course I am. It helps me see things that aren't there. Things Others can't see.

"You're welcome," I say.

It's easy to leave behind a woman, or even a woman with a baby. Especially a woman with a baby.  But an angry woman with a van load full of handicapped babies, each one more horrible than the last...Who wants that thing following them around? Parking out front of where-ever they happen to land? Its better to secure a home and stash them away out of sight.

"No one can afford that sort of child support. Not emotionally, not financially. Together, however, you are sitting on a gold mine.  Great parking, extra organs, people pay to see things that may be bad enough to portend evil...like a 2 headed snake baby. Times are ripe for a 2 headed snake baby."

I want it so badly for her.

"Think of how the babies will love you," I tell her, picturing crooked smiles on half formed faces, attached to torsos or arms. Shoes bought singley. 

"If nothing else. Damaged babies will never leave you."

I think its not just great thinking, excellent desperate family planning, but its also a great bumper sticker. Totally trumps those fucking Honor Roll issues.

Plus the parking. Did I mention the parking? Sometimes its the little things.

The Choice

Patricia's fat little hands ball into fists which she flails constantly in the air.

Filthy little things, covered in spit and food and Lord knows what all. The horrible little beast eats constantly. I cannot throw enough cheerios and rice cereal onto her plastic tray. Yet, it's the only way to shut her up, the babbling, the screaming. She is fat and lazy and incoherent. She smells horrible. That it's all contained in a smiling duck embossed leotard just seems all the more hideous. My friend Barbara suggested that I find something that 'snaps at the crotch'…but is that legal? I mean would I need a special license?

"CHANGE HER DIAPER!" my husband says.

As if it was that simple. There is no diaper. That's why booster seats are made of (recycled) plastic, why I regularly let the neighbors dog into the house; and why I've had a drain installed in the cement floor of the nursery/garage. If she doesn't like wallowing in shit, she'll do something about it. We have 4 bathrooms in this house, for fuck's sake. She has 3 litter boxes to choose from.

Matthew blames me that the child is stupid. Although he claims that she isn't stupid, that she is "neglected"…that I'm "unfair" and "harsh…" "Insane," even!

This from the man who won't sleep with me until I've lost 80 pounds and stopped drinking rubbing alcohol (with a splash of vermouth and 2 sticks of gum – a Dentini, if you will. To lose weight it's an unparalleled buzz/diuretic. Plus, four out of 5 Dentists recommend it.)

"You wanted a child, Hillary!" Mathew says.

No, I wanted a choice. Somehow it's my fault that she isn't clean and cute! That she is NOT unconditionally lovable. He acts as if there is something wrong with me! I think I could love a blonde baby with ringlet curls and huge blue eyes. Something photogenic. This one has a huge bald head at the center of which sits two beady sea-green holes. She already needs her chin worked on.

I saw an Asian baby on tv that I wouldn't mind having.

"You could do something with her," Mathew whines, and for a moment I am encouraged. I may even have clapped. I know I looked at the wood chipper.

"Give her a bath! Put some of your little outfits on her!" he gestures at Mr. Pats carpet-covered bureau, overflowing with kitty coutier. Scarves, furr hoodies, sweaters… mostly last season's stuff.  Still, I'm sure I gasped.

As if the cat's cashmere sweater and matching tail cozy would fit that round little shit roast. I couldn't squeeze Patricia into two of Mr. Pats stretchiest funsies (like onesies, only with a hole for the tail!) sewn together!

Mr. Pats is just a baby, too, really, and yet he is adorable and fun and self-sufficient. At least he doesn't shit himself and expect someone else to clean it up. He buries his messes in scented sand. He licks his own ass clean. I have a purse that matches his collar.

Patricia eats kitty litter.  Jabbers at the turds.

She screams when I turn the hose on her.

If my television volume didn't go all the way to 65 I think I'd go insane…

God, it is so much work. I'm sure we wouldn't be having this problem if Mathew had ethics about screwing something tits up and minty-fresh 2 years ago. I'd have a Prius or a Labradoodle. Something I could put on Craig's list.

Tex Ass

I get to go to Texas next week.  Austin.  I've never been to Texas.  Although I've heard that as far as Texas goes, Austin is not a good representative sample.  I've heard that Austin is very fun and 'hip'...like the shoes CIenna made me buy last year.  The ones that my puppy has made into chews. I still wear them.  They look dangerous. Like my feet are crazed; angry toenail-wielding digits of doom.

I'll be there for a meeting, of course.  A Working Team meeting.  Our team is comprised of 13 people, luckily.  Half of whom I really enjoy, half of whom I either don't really know or that I like to mock so much that it's almost a condition.  There is one person about whom I am completely neutral.  He will be our notetaker.  Occassionally I will ask that he hold a marker up to my twitching nostril. Just to see if he can step over that line.

I've manuevered it so that the RIght People are Dependant upon ME.  I'm renting a car and I will drive my group around to where *I* want to go.  I've made the motel arrangements so that the people I like are staying where I am staying and the others are staying far away at a La Quinta.  Under an overpass. Or so I imagine.  Me and My Group will bond and form alliances while the other group eats at Denny's and has a daily continental breakfast together.  The only thing more blan than their steamed eggs will be their conversation.

I've only been a member of this group for a few months, really.  I've sat in on it unofficially for years.  I have never volunteered for anything.  For meetings, I usually stay way off in the hinterlands by myself.

This is Texas and I will be big.

If My Dogs Could Vote

Left to Right, Hank (Australian Cattle Dog) - Prior to rescue, Hank lived in a small squirrel-infested yard. Forced to sleep outside in the cold, damp elements, without pillows or the ocassional snausage, she endured hardship and cheap kibble.  A recovering obsessive compulsive, Hank is predisposed to rolling in shit and rotting animal carcuses, biting at sprinklers and is injury prone. Hank's pick for 2008 is John McCain. 

Jasper (Red Border Collie)- barks incessantly at neighbors, has a history of sneaking things that belong to others and hiding them under the bed or in a bush next to the fence. Vacuum cleaner attachments, car keys, underwear...Turn-offs include male lawyers and the other dogs having fun.  Loves water and carrying shoes.   Jasper likes Hillary.

Zeke (Australian Shepherd) - Standoffish with people, Zeke will tolerate strangers who don't make eye contact and who come into the house only under the embrace and constant praise of his family, which makes having casual friends and acquaintances over a little awkward. Zeke loves sheep shit and any of the verbs in the 'to go' family.  Sleeps on the bed.  Has bad gas.  I'm afraid he's likely to lean toward Ron Paul.

Scout (Black/White Border Collie) - Enjoys chasing and biting.  Not old enough to vote.  Obama is her clear pick.