thestain

The Good Osmond

Poor Br*d is going to have to have himself dipped in Joseph Smith juice when he gets back to Yewtah.  He's been our constant companion, through the foul language and drinking, obscene references, blasphemy....coffee coffee coffee. He laughs at everything, though. He offers to DRIVE.  I think he's the first Osmond I've ever really actually liked.  He's partially redeemed his state. An island of tolerable in a sea of pisses me off.  I still hope for a plague, but I hope it avoids the little dairy farm he calls home.  I think it would be nice to keep him and his family in a little aquarium to study.   Not by me, though. Not my aquarium.  A project for inner city school children, maybe.  Because more rodents would just seem cruel.  I have bigger plans.  A biosphere of decadence and depravity.

Having all that wholesome goodness around this week is assaulting my moral pancreas.  Whatever that means. 

I only have 3 minutes to type this brain dump post before Br*d comes back from voiding milk through his chaste unit and washing his hands twice.    Then we'll exchange sweet smiles and I'll tell him how much I love satellite data and puppies.  It's our Common Ground.  Until Happy Hour.  Then he can watch my soul ooze tarry blackness while counting the solar days until I'm a slave in his and his pure wife's Celestial Kingdom.

Yay! It's Yahweh or the Highway!

On Death and Dying

I'm inclined to say Fuck You to the beehive state.  On one hand they give long winded slide shows on NOTHING...WHITE NOISE....on the other they are apathetic, at best.  No wonder they got the Osmonds and tabernacle choirs.  Those hideous crickets.  Double underwear with triple significance.  We all get what we deserve. OR DO WE?

No, not usually.  We get what we need.

But I'm in a bad mood, perhaps.  No food. Kim is texting FU to me on a regular basis.  Someone keeps trying to read my screen...

Poor Andy looks like he got hit by a bus....

"Some people are living the Dream, I'm living the Mistake," he told me at break.  He looks like a burgler today, all dressed in black with his crazy hair and unshaven. He had a long night trying to find this place in the dark.  Now he's eating his weight in brownies and smirking. He will be a Great Help to me tonight. 

This day needs to improve.  Allison and I are talking about going to Truckee to find an (Almost) dead hooker to put in Tom's room.  Tom being the guy I called a dick last friday for ...being a dick last friday.  Now he must pay.  I'm like God only smitier.

Or Deal By Hunger

We're in Truckee, really, though everyone is trying to console themselves by calling it 'Tahoe'...North Tahoe.  Seriously, I don't care except I'm not a fan of California.  I'm a fan of Future Coastal Nevada.  Either way, this is a remote ski resort between seasons and hardly anything is open.  One restaurant each night opens.  One little store that features overpriced wine and funyons...baked chips, gum. 

I spent way too much time around people today. Even people I like wear me down. I'm just NOT a social individual.  I take solice in our proximity to Donner Pass.  That was a party that ended literally how most of mine do figuratively.  Starvation and cannibalism.  Trapped on the wrong side of a pass.

Speaking of which, my friend Allison, who wants to Trap A Man, recently took a job in Florida where, as I warned her, she is finding that her new dating demographic is Serial Killers, 

"OR my friend wants to fix me up with her vet. WHO SPECIALIZES IN CATS!"

I love the idea of this, for the second hand amusement factor.  I picture a man who knits his own sweaters out of persian floor sweepings.  Who has no shoes that tie. Who mews during sex. 

Currently she is dating a tattoo of a hammerhead shark on a hairy forearm. She passed her cell phone picture of it around. 

"He's okay.  He has a cool job: He's an underwater welder! He doesn't get my jokes, though..."

I could never (again) be attracted to someone who didn't get my jokes. Unless I was REALLY hungry and he had nice shanks. 

Anyway, I'm tired.  Goodnight Barb and Carrie and Google Searches on 'Shanks' and 'Hairy Forearm'

Correction

My post from this morning was, like my body, full of mistake(s). 

1) I don't hate all organized sports....I like Stockdog trialing and I would be a big fan if they brought back the Christian/Lion 'games'...

2) It actually only took me 6 years to pay off my lawyer, and that was in part because I only paid him $50 a month. I hated him.  He was one of those men who think women like them and have all manner of affectation built around it...such as calling me "Kathryn" instead of "Katy"...and fake laughing because clapping at his own little speeches would have been too obvious.

3) Technically I have a house that is 2 miles from Chato...but it is in Boise and I'm in GL about 1/2 the time.   Carlos won't stay in GL.  I've tried. He says that I am...."Fucking Crazy." It's not the first or only time recently that he's employed that term or a derivative as a description for me, his mother, and I'm starting to feel a little sensitive.

Friday night at Family Dinner at Carlos' grandparent's house, Carlos was telling his grandfather, his father and me that he is way more afraid of me than he is of his dad.  Chato looked appalled, naturally. He just started growing a beard and that alone should bump up the fear factor.  It's too horrible to look directly at.  He looks like his pores are oozing irregular patches of kitten furr.

"What the hell?" asked Chato, "WHY HER!?"

"Because ....she doesn't get mad very often, but when she does...she is as CRAZY AS FUCK."

Much laughter among the Madrid men. 

"I never get mad at you!" I said. I don't.  I don't really get mad much, as he said, but never at him. 

"I know! That's because I'm AFRAID to make you mad!" he laughed. This boy outweighs me by a good near hundred pounds.  He is tough. But sweet.  OR so I thought...

"That's just not accurate." I am such a pushover. I'm like a fucking HOUSE GHANDI.  Not like his Tia Chabela who, if she doesn't like her ADULT son's girlfriends, she won't let them walk on her side of the street.  She goes outside and SWEEPS MENACINGLY....Who carries around a chijuajua in a front pack that snarls and bites everyone who irritates her at her prompting.  My dogs fear her.

"No...not me." I say, "Not crazy..." 

"Yeah: Crazy. As Fuck."  nodding all around.  His grandpa just smiled.  He has his own reputation. 

Carlos is wrong, of course.  Little bastard. 

4) The hippies didn't get me my current job, just my first government job.  Over 20 years ago.

I just don't want to misrepresent myself to YOU, Barb and Carrie and Accidental Google Searchers...

Hangover

A good friend of mine is embarking on what promises to be an ugly divorce.  I've had an ugly divorce, so I'm sort of an Authority, at least in her eyes.  Her husband is out of town and so I went over to her house yesterday to counsel, work dogs, drink, and "watch the game"...

(I don't "watch" "games"...the only thing I hate more than organized sports is organized religion...or maybe even just organization.  The only things that I think should be organized are my entrails.  And today I think they are not, thanks to the drinking part of our night.)

My divorce from the man we now call Uncle Carl was very ugly.  He was a brutal nasty man and, though chronologically I was only actually physically co-located with his bad mean ass for 1 year, he drug our divorce out for 2 and a half.  His family had money, I was completely on my own at that time and had Jack Henry SHIT.  All I wanted was custody of our daughter. We hadn't had time to accumulate anything else and even if we had...when I left, I didn't even take my clothes. I just got out quick, in between beatings, while he was at work.  It took me ten years to pay off my lawyer.  Still, Happy Ending: Today Uncle Carl is on-again/off-again gay and lives with his mother in the horrible little hamlet of Buhl, Idaho.  He has a degree in chemistry, which he once claimed he pursued in order to learn the cleanest least obvious way to kill me.  He works sorting sprockets in a sprocket shop, whatever the hell that is.  He said I would never get a job because I have no formal education and would die alone in a trailer park.  (I WISH!)  

My second divorce was mutual. We filled out the Do It Yourself paperwork together over beers at a pub.  Now we live within 2 miles of one another and split our kids (he adopted my daughter and we have a son) time equally between our homes.  We are...cheesy cheesy, I know...pretty close to best friends.  Although I routinely celebrate the fact that I am no longer married to Chato, I would miss him horribly if he were not part of my life.  Happy Ending: He married a doctor and is a stay at home dad. 

D's divorce will be the Uncle Carl variety. It's actually eerie how similar her husband is to UC, but the situation is completely different after that.  They have stuff and lots of it.  And debt and a long bad relationship that should have been drowned in the bathtub right after its formal birth.  Really before, but then she wouldn't have a crockpot.

So, last night we drank and I tried to remember what I did RIGHT over 25 years ago during that long drawn out process.  Something Advice-y. I have NOTHING.  The only RIGHT thing I did was GET OUT.  

Oh, and I moved in with hippies who landed me my current job.

(Thank You, Jerry!) 

And dated a drug trafficker who kicked the shit out of UC which finally put an end to his kicking the shit out of me (RIP Dann).

But I don't recommend either of these things. They hardly ever work out.  The music sucks and the hours are weird. 

I gave her NOTHING.  But a hangover. 

I Will Call Him Snookums

Hi Barb and Carrie!  Random Google Searches!

I thought about my last post and felt guilt and something else...probably hunger. So, on my way home from The Country, I stopped and bought tamales from the Mexican market...mmmmmm....sadly, I meant to buy a dozen but couldn't remember the word 'docena' ....and I was confusing the non-english speaking woman taking my order with my obscure pantomiming of 'I desire 12 tamales'.  I think the first thing I actually suggested was obscene.  The tiny elderly woman looked in shock at the tamale she was scooping out and then at me. Everything came to a standstill for a long uncomfortable moment.

I was going to call Carlos on my cell phone and ask "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HOW DO I SAY ONE DOZEN!!!"  but there was a young couple behind me standing firmly in front of the chicharoni case looking intent and focused....the guy was smirking...so I continued to fumble,

"NO! NOT DOS!  uhhhh....TEN MORE...EQUALS 12..."

I held up 12 fingers (My mother took digit-enhancing fertility drugs) and the confused woman put my *2* tamales back and started scooping braided intestines into a bag...

Having just come from a dog training session, and feeling flustered, I issued a correction followed by a growl.  It was not a hands across the bodega moment, for sure.

Anyway, I did get it straightened out, thanks to my international communication skills....and an english speaking employee, and was once again driving home...but, still, something nagged at me like a 20 year marriage....

OH YEAH!

It was what a faithless cold whore I sound like on my blog(s).  Justify, justify, a voice said.  The voice might have meant "have another tamale. You will run tomorrow", so I did, but I also chose to think it was even more about me.  I'm like that.

Frankly I wouldn't give a shit, and didn't until I found out someone(s) was actually READING this old dusty blog. SO:

I don't mean to imply that I am anything other than scattered ass in my relationship(s). E* is a better person than I, no question about it. He's kind and without guile and hardworking and intelligent. There just isn't and never has been an emotional connection.  Our relationship was based on mtn biking and running,  until he admitted that he hated running and my mtn biking isn't up to his skill level and so he substituted Sci Fi television and I moved into stockdog training and a different house 40 miles away. 

He's not an emotional guy and since he, until just recently, was gone for at least 6 months out of the year, our relationship evolved into something more roommate-like.  Which was okay; I was burnt out on emotional when we met.   Like the soup of the day, I chose what sounded good at the time. 

Now he is around all the time and our expectations of each other and our relationship are very different.  I can't handle being told what to do all the time and he can't stand the most basic parts of who am I.  We argue about stupid shit and we don't come together on much.  I have lived most of my life either being a dependent or having one.  I like being independent.  E*'s big dreams don't jive with my lesser, east of the Cascade's ones.  He wants to move back to his home town.

"We should just buy my parents house and move to Bellevue."

"When we move to Bellevue..."

I'm going to Bellevue."

I hate Bellevue.  I don't even like to visit.

My big "dreams" mostly involve what I might do this weekend.  And it's usually happening in Greenleaf.  E* hates the idea of acreage and sheep.  He hates the desert and when its sunny and clear for too long, he calls it 'Severe Clear'... and shields himself from the horrible rays. 

He keeps trying to get me to promise I'll let natural attrition bring us down to 3 dogs again.  I have lately strongly relieved him of this illusion:

"I will probably never, or at least not while I walk mostly upright, have only 3 dogs. I already need another one..."

"NO! Well, when we get another one, I think it should be a rescue and a terrier...."

Can you see my point? No?  Yeah. I know. Faithless whore. What did Till Death Do Us Part mean to me?

I don't know....I've said it so many times....I meant it in a RELATIVE WAY, and I think the last time, rollerblading through the Elvis Chapel in Vegas...they may have run those words together...or substituted "Hucka Hucka Burnin' love...WHOO!"

Either way. Yes. I'm not good. E* is good.  I do deserve a terrier, actually.  

Asterix

 Friday night is a Family Dinner at my ex's house.  I keep forgetting to mention it to E* (I've stripped him of his other letters. Soon he'll just be *...). He might want to go because they have such great food in large quantities.  Last family dinner he went and then I had to endure a lunch's worth of cross examination on if/when I was divorcing. 

"Kris says you two don't even seem to interact." Chato said.  "She says she thinks you live completely separate lives.  I mean, I don't even tell Kris what you tell me about things...she just came up with that."

Her opinions are like herpes then. 

Still, I know he doesn't tell her what we discuss.  He'd have to admit how often we have lunch/beer together and for whatever reason, probably because it's atypical, like a cancerous mole, she would like our close friendship to be burned or frozen off. 

So, I find it irritating to have my current relationship scrutinized by my ex-husband's wife.  She should stick to what she's good at: drinking only one glass of wine, being german, and diagnosing scabies. 

Chato doesn't want my marriage to fail because then he'll feel especially trapped in his. He loves Kris in a lukewarm familiar way, he'd never leave her. He's not capable of leaving anyone.  She won't leave him either. She's By the Book Middleclass.  She doesn't know him. They have 2 small children together.  They share horrible homey phrases, like 'how was your day?" and "love you!"

It's depressing to me to consider these sorts of relationships.  My relationship with E* is not unlike my relationship with the guy at the liquor store, except he's happier to see me.  He gives me advice:

"Try Oban, its amazing. If you like smokey peat flavor."

E* just likes to berate me for hating the earth. (I do! Now...It's so needy!)

It's funny to me how alike E* and Kris are.  They should have married.  I should have built up my dog collection earlier.

"You are going to leave him, aren't you?" Chato asks, ordering us another pitcher.

"I don't know. Some days I think we'll go on as is forever...some days I could claw my way out of this box with the clothes on my back and not look back.  My goal was for this marriage to last longer than my mother. "

My mother worried about me.  She wanted me to write a children's book.

"Children's books can't have obscenities in them," I'd remind her. "Children wouldn't 'get' me."

"Are you getting a divorce?" she'd ask, randomly.

"No," I'd answer.

"Are you happy?"

"Yes, I am happy."

"Really?" she'd ask in that way that children ask if Santa REALLY is REAL when they are starting to have their doubts.

"Yup.  He sure is...I mean, I'm a happy person."

"I know you are.  E* is a good person," she'd tell me. "No one else would put up with all those dogs..."

No one else will ever have to.  

I should write a children's book on relationships. I will call it, "Fuck You * I'm Outta Here."   I think it should feature cartoon hamsters.  The parent left behind will eat its young. And everyone will live happily ever after.

Interruption

Hey!

I'm back! Who still checks this? No one, I believe, except those late night fucked up Googlers.  Perfect.  You are my people! You know I mean it when I add an EXCLAMATION POINT!! TWO! AND CAPS!

I used to go to this writing group in My Town.  It was led by this FAREAK! name R* ...He was a Graduate of the Iowa Program, which is prestigious.  He wore it like a strap-on.  In my opinion, he was an average writer, but a really good teacher.  I learned more from him in a few weeks than I've learned from anyone else combined. 

I both liked and was repelled by R*.  He was a small guy with such a tension of nervous energy that you almost vibrated standing next to it.  He was alternately negative and positve.  He was both Dick and Twat.  He would say the most outrageous things in class, right next to the most well-thought out and precise critiques of Hemingway or Carver....tell us that if we weren't depressed, really deep down can't get out of bed struggling with the will to live then we weren't capable of Art....we needed to quit our jobs and be really poor for awhile, make us better writers. More TRUE to our CRAFT. (I've done that poor thing and it SUCKS, I thanked him.  "You are rich pretending to be poor!" he sneered, "Driving your shitty little Mazda when you have a pool!" He was a little fucker, alright.

His wife was a really sweet girl, really, ten years younger and pretty with an edge.  R* and I went out for beers fairly regularly for awhile and she'd show up. R* and I talked books and when D* (her name was D*) showed up she'd try to join in. She was intelligent, educated, etc.  He hated it when she talked. It was clear. He'd scowl and accuse her of interrupting him.  She started hanging out with this really affected 'artist' who was in a polyamorous relationship.  She showed up for beers with him once and it was pretty clear to me they were fucking.  R* didn't think so.  Their gaze was constantly on one another and it was just such a physically present fact.  R* thought D* just needed more friends.  Poly boy used to work for the circus, he laughed, when he was interesting. Now he worked for a builder.  "He reads shit."

Reading anything that wasn't literary fiction was a serious crime.  D*, by the way, was a poetess. She has a Masters in it. If you can imagine. I cannot. Why not get a PhD in Pretty?  It seems too narrow a road winding through Disneyland or something.

Anyway, I noticed D* has a profile on a book site I frequent infrequently.  She is going by her maiden name.  She is single.  R* is still teaching small groups of middle class wannabes, only now in Hippieville, Oregon.  And alone.  He adored D when she wasn't interrupting him. Maybe now he'll publish.

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.