The Dancing Sausage Web Journal

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September 24, 2002

George Wendt

Posted by me at 11:26 PM

Biffids?

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What NOT To Do With Photoshop

Don't ask how I found this... had something to do with a search for pictures of fat women in bikinis -- yes, I checked the porn sites already -- don't ask why... ok, I'll tell you, it has something to do with a certain ad campaign I hate. just you wait, mr. madden, just you wait...

Oh, how lucky am I to have just found a GIANT picture of the Venus of Willendorf? How lucky was I that I even had a teacher in high school who wouldn't let us forget about the V.o.W.? For sooo many reasons, too -- I credit Dr. Feldmeth's insistence that we go view Greek statuary for my awareness that current American physical ideals for women are 1) stupid and 2) transitory. Thanks, Dr. F.

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September 23, 2002

Emotion Watch

Oh -- my mistake, he just mentioned her in passing. He was telling a funny anecdote about her brother and Jiffy Lube. No mention of how his leaving town roughly coincides with hers; nothin'.

Am I really the only one out of my group of friends who says anything about their affective life in blogero?

In other blog-watch news, Full Waffle Jacket: [cue tumbleweed]

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...

Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Sorry. It just occurred to me.

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Windswept

So in honor of Mr. Stelter (Poly people, don't miss that link, I think some of those chapters must be written by him!), I named a shade of purply-pink Windswept at 216 Nameless Colors (and how you can help). It's a damned shame that every single web-safe color is, without exception, hideous. Mr. Stelter would not approve.

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September 22, 2002

Collective Creation of a Font

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Accordion Guy

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September 20, 2002

New Features

Also, you will notice I now have a feedback form in the right-hand column, in case you need to get in touch with me and forget how and/or have something to say you don't want to put in comments. If it's about a post I'd rather you put it in comments, of course.

And there's a link to selected published clips and a "best of" section. It's mostly there for potential employers (those I feel safe showing the site to). If you liked a particular article and think I should add it to the "best of" section, post a comment and let me know.

Planned for the near future: my resumé (ope! there it is; finished it the next day), hit counts (I need someone to set me up the good old Apache scripts that do that, any takers?), and a section in which I digest and critique the advertising industry's fatuous trade mags.

It's nice to finally have all this taken care of. I feel like the site is whole for the first time since the last round of server problems. Having hit counts again will really cap it off; knowing my readership was actually growing was a huge motivation to write back when I actually had statistics on it.

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From The Vaults: Ley Fuck You

The following was one of two audition essays I wrote for Michael Lesy's class at the beginning of my second year at Hampshire. (The other one was better, though what he saw in either I don't know.) All names have been changed except mine. This one's dedicated to everyone's favorite bitter older student. See first comment for additional notes.

"Ley fuck you, frog!"

Wayne Durchkopf is not someone you want to take to Quebec with you, if you have any desire to speak French with francophone Canadians. As we sped past the wrinkled Sunday driver, who frowned angrily through the open window of his Buick, I thanked all listening powers that be that Wayne at least had enough sense to be civil to customs agents.

"Damned Canadian drivers." Wayne aimed an abstractly sadistic half-smile at the yellow line rolling up the hill ahead of us. About an hour from Magog, Wayne had decided he was hungry, and thus justified in flinging any epithet he felt proper at cars in his way.

"How do you say fuck you?" Wayne did not, and does not, speak French, though he claims to want to learn. He was directing the question at the designated navigator, me.

Throwing the plastic-covered road atlas on the floor and pulling my knees to my chest to shift weight off my sore butt, I regarded Wayne for a moment before responding. He didn't even glance at me to ask. I was a translator, no more; not good to look at, with my uncombed hair blowing out the window. Wayne's sharp nose was still pointed ahead. The low afternoon sun poured through his slightly open mouth, which appeared ready to catch its next insult, grinning dog-like.

"I dunno. We didn't learn stuff like that."

"What good is French class if they don't teach you how to swear?"

"I had a good French class. I went to a good school."

"Oh, I'm sorry, Miss I-Never-Saw-A-Black-Person-Until-I-Went-To-College. Miss Prep School."

"Shut up. That's what you think. OK, I dunno... nique-toi?"

A Jaguar passed us, entering the wrong lane of the two-lane road, its occupants apparently in a hurry to get to Lac Orford. "Hey, neek twa, frogs!" shouted Wayne to the rushing wind. "Look, Emmett, I talk French like them frogs!"

In the back seat of the Nova, Emmett raised his head from Tina's lap. "Be bo bo," he remarked, apropos of little. Tina blankly stroked his fine brown hair until he lay down again. Neither of them spoke French, either. When we crossed the border, all three of them became utterly dependent on me for food and lodging. Well, mostly dependent. Wayne claimed he could figure out what most road signs said. As we slipped into the outskirts of Magog, he read them aloud.

"It's not hard to figure out what they mean. Terrain a camping-- means a campground. We'll keep that in mind for tonight, but we gotta get food first. Damn, I'm hungry. Ooh, there's a place called New York Meat. Sound good to you kids?"

"Mmmm... meat," echoed Emmett, dreamily.

"Wait, did we just pass through Magog entirely? Damn. How do we get back? OK, there's a sign that says 'Nord'-- look on the map and see where Nord is, Gus. Gus, hurry up, get the map!"

"'Nord' means 'north,' Wayne."

His mouth tightened in irritation. "Wise-ass. I knew that." I sighed, and squinted through the dust-dazzling windshield. A sign swam up towards my vision like a message in a magic eight-ball. Magog-- 14 Sud.

"Make a left, Wayne."

"Are you sure? You haven't shown me you're any good with maps."

"Just shut up. Go left."

We found ourselves in Magog. New York Meats was our destination, despite my protests that I was trying to go vegetarian. By the restaurant's knotty wood porch, they shoved me towards the bar. A brunette waitress, with bright eyes in a work-worn face and long, Formica-shiny fingernails, appeared at the portal with a tray of beers, chatting rapidly to a co-worker in the stretched, nasal vowel sounds Canadians apply to the French language.

"Bye, Gus." Emmett had no qualms about abandoning me. "Go talk to that waitress-- ask her what meats she recommends."

"Oh, I'll have the veal." Wayne and Emmett laughed. Sidewalk diners in dark polo shirts looked at them askance. "Ask if we should seat ourselves." I scuffed my shoes across the rough boards, heading for the dark mouth of the bar. My toe hit a knot-hole. I kept myself from falling; however, it seemed the verb "to sit" was jarred off some unused cusp of my brain at the same time. I froze on the lowest step of the stairs to the bar. The disheveled waitress towered over me, looking down over her meager breasts and a heavily laden tray.

"Allo," she said, surprised.

"Salut," I stuttered. "Est-ce qu'on peut--" I snapped my fingers as I searched for words-- "se trouver un table ici?" There. At least it was all out: "Can we find ourselves a table here?" My mind instantly reviewed how many ways I could have unknowingly trod on the toes of idiom, and how many ways my tongue had slipped on the alien vowels, making a mockery of meaning. "Does one find oneself to be a table, here?" "Can we find ourselves at tables here?"

I quickly looked back to my companions, hoping they'd already seated themselves and pulled me from the wreck my tongue had made. They were, unfortunately, still standing. Wayne and Emmett appeared to be looking directly at the humidity; Tina was contemplating her sandal, shimmying absentmindedly.

The waitress looked at me, bemused, as if I'd stated the obvious. "Ouaaais... asseyez-vous!" ("Suuure! Sit down!") She breezed down the hall, calling to a friend. I returned to my mute caravan.

"I messed that up bad, but she said get a table."

Wayne had one of his rare compassionate moments. "I'm sure you did fine." In the same breath, with the same unfazed expression: "All right, kids, let's eat. I'm starved."

We chose a table outside, and I nervously flipped open the slick, laminated menu, hoping to catch more holes in my vocabulary before I fell into them. Did I remember how to say spoon? Emmett was missing his... What was an "aubergine," again?

"Gus, calm down." Easygoing Emmett was clearly worried about my state of agitation. His usually smiling mouth was flat, set. "I'm sure you did fine."

"No, you don't understand-- I had seven years of French; I should know how to ask to be seated by now! Where'd she go, anyway? I thought she told us to choose a table..."

It took her fifteen minutes to get to us, perhaps due to other business, but I couldn't help but think that she was really snubbing us for being anglophones; I have no feeling yet for how the politics of language and culture work up there. Still, I mustered the courage to order for Emmett and Wayne.

"Numero quatre, s'il vous plait, avec bacon, et le special de jour." (Number four, please, with bacon; also the special of the day.) Again, she looked at me as if I was asking something too ridiculously simple to be possible.

"Le numero quatre avec bacon, et le special?"

"Oui."

A bunch of laughing teenage girls passed with a rumble of rollerblades on the broken pavement, sending Wayne into a spasm of rubbernecking. "Oo, Emmett, check it-- they were hot!" I missed the waitress' response.

"Pardon?"

"Deux numeros quatre?" (Two number fours?)

"Non! Non, non, non, attends..."

It seemed the two plates I had requested were identical. She rolled her eyes, then retook the whole order, this time in English. "Anything else?"

"Redemption!" The word popped up in my mind, and flung itself at the gate to my voice box, taking friends with it. "Bring redemption! Recognize that I'm almost fluent! Acknowledge that I make sense! Tell me I speak like a little Parisian, the way Madame Terzi used to! For God's sake, just speak to me for one second more! Take me from the company of these illiterate goons! Keep my brain limber! Save me!"

But trying to voice all that was like trying to funnel the contents of a firehose through the eye of a needle. What came out instead was just wrong. "Un thé glacé, s'il te plait. Je m'excuse-- je suis americain; je suivis un course de français depuis sept ans."

And what she understood, I realized a second later as she raised her plucked eyebrows in surprise, was even farther from the plea I wanted to make. "An iced tea, please, my friend. I excuse myself-- I am a (male) American; I followed a journey of French for seven years."

"Oh, very good!" she exclaimed, a bit sarcastically; tucked our order into her apron, whisked the menus off the table, and strode into the depths of the kitchen again, reappearing only to bring our meals. I buried my head in my arms. I am sure the only words she left with were these: les americains laids. Ugly Americans.

We paid our bill and left. Coming out of Magog, Wayne ignored me and took a wrong turn again. He was forced to hang a U, much to the annoyance of three cars behind us, whose drivers had apparently been waiting to pass this slow Yank, this blithering Mass-hole. A man in a blue Honda yelled something unkind, his words leaving a searing streak in the air behind his car. Wayne, forgetting my uncouth suggestion, returned to his original slur, flinging it into the oncoming Canadian night.

"Ley fuck you!"

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September 18, 2002

titillate an ocelot

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September 16, 2002

The Public-Screaming Clause in the No-Meddling Agreement

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September 12, 2002

Deeply #2

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Antidisestablishmentarianism? Fuhgeddaboudit!

postscript: it doesn't like "chiffarobe ascendancy," either! damn your eyes, Googlewhack! I give you the best hours of my evening and you spurn me like... like... saluki arpeggios!

Posted by me at 10:07 PM | Comments (5)

September 11, 2002

Earthquakes and Protests

Shoes. Closed-toe. Soles with suitable traction for running over possibly hot debris.

Pants, even though it's too hot for them. You don't know how long or in what conditions you will be wearing them. Rubble could cut you. It could get cold; the smoke might block out the sun.

A shirt and bra comfortable enough to sleep in, if need be. Who knows when it will be safe to go home.

Bandanna or dust mask to breathe through.

Flashlight. Bicycle. Portable food. Is there a supply of bottled water in the house? Should I run some into the tub? What exactly do you do to prepare for anthrax attacks and planes falling from the sky?

Once I was actually awake and aware; once the first tower had fallen on TV, breaking the flaming buildings' awful spell and propelling me out of the house to find friends, these were the thoughts on my mind. Earthquake thoughts and protest thoughts.

* * *

For days after the World Trade Center disaster, I struggled to write about it. Blogging wasn't foremost on my mind. At that point I was unemployed and in a more for-profit mode with my writing, so I tried to come up with a pitch. Making a buck on the disaster would have been callous at best; fortunately, that was not my (first) motive, but the feeling I was acting on wasn't appreciably more honorable. I felt the need to have an impact on a large scale more strongly than usual; a bigger forum would be better. (I also felt like a real dupe for sitting petrified in my desk chair in Queens while other writers and photographers rushed south of 14th street for interviews.) I felt small, and helpless, and useless. The call for blood donations was eventually rescinded, and the area was sealed off to everyone but emergency personnel.

Writing draft upon draft, I found myself completely unable to struggle out of the timing and particulars of my experience of the event. One of my files is labeled "awful first page about soy milk": convinced I was lactose intolerant, I had grimly told myself that I would start drinking soy milk that Tuesday. There was a carton of the foul brown stuff waiting for me in the fridge. I was thunderstruck by how trivial my thoughts had been up to that point, and couldn't bring myself to take the soy milk anecdote out of the blow-by-blow account of my feelings and all the conversations I had on September 11th and on subsequent days. Even now I feel compelled to highlight pieces which I can't fit into a narrative: how a number of friends of James's, who I didn't know at the time but have since become friendly with, were unaccounted for and supposed to be in that area, and what I would have missed if we had lost them. How passionately angry my sister Sylvie got, calling for the as-yet unknown murderers to face their own mothers, and the mothers of those they killed. How another, more curmudgeonly relative surprising me by saying the mass deaths caused by the buildings falling were a result of people going to "unnatural, illogical extremes" for commerce... "no good reason for concentrating that many people in that small a space... too many rats in the cage."

In retrospect I am able to arrange a few coherent lines through my tiny fragment of this story; they are about earthquakes and protests.

The horrible slowness of the way the events of September 11th unfolded frightened me particularly, and I wonder if it also did to other transplanted Californians who went through this. California disasters have an identifiable trajectory. Earthquakes and aftershocks generally last a few minutes at most; fires are contained; the OJ Simpson trial can only go on so long before Ito hands down a verdict. The first time I watched the concrete of the driveway flap like a shaken rag while the neighbor's dog tried to chew through the fence in terror, I was completely unhinged, but I've gotten used to the routine enough to quietly jump into the doorway when the ground starts to move. (Minor setback in my progress -- the very mild 4.7 centered in Yorba Linda last week had me shrieking as I rolled out of bed. I'm too tense. I blame Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and that goddamned safety alert system.)

The media coverage of disasters also has its trajectory. When the shaking stops, the anchors climb out from under the reporting booth; stations drop their ads and truck down to Caltech for interviews with Lucy or Kerry. Within 24 hours the magnitude of the quake has been revised, damages are assessed, and the dead and injured are tallied. The reporters wrap the late-night news with a promise they'll drop whatever else they're doing if there's new developments.

When, by midday, reporters were still unable to deliver any figures on casualties, and there were still no commercials being run, I knew this was going to be substantially larger than any disaster I'd ever lived through. Panic set in.

Hanging around with seismologists enough has gotten me seeing mountains and hills as the records of earthquakes. Knowing that brush fires happen even when people aren't there to be careless with their campfires makes hillsides of scorched stumps a somewhat less frightening landscape. I trust the earth. It does what it has to do, and like the wood-frame house, I bend with it. The troubling thing is trying to stay sane without the belief that strategic deterrence is as absolute a mandate as seismic pressure.

Many Americans doubtless looked at the burning towers without any comprehension of why someone would attack them. For me, the meaning was instantly clear. The tallest symbols of capitalism were being brought low. Symbolic play is familiar to me. I have seen Michael Moore take a gay men's chorus to Pat Buchanan's house. I have seen a Vieques activist dangling from the crown of the Statue of Liberty, hanging a Puerto Rican flag. I have seen an American flag, its stars replaced with corporate logos, hung over Times Square. If I had wanted to make a statement about injustices perpetrated by corporations for the sake of profit with the help of the government, I might also have chosen to play off the World Trade Center. I just would not have killed or hurt anyone.

It is the shudder of recognition I felt on the day of Septemeber 11th that I have had the hardest time explaining. It is even harder coming back to it a year later, knowing that activists I walked alongside last January are now being held as terrorists.

The tactics of the terrorists looked more like those of my protesting friends than those of the government they sought to attack. They did not mobilize troops publically; rather, they organized cells much like our affinity groups (though more impermeable to infiltration). They did not attack with fighter planes. Instead, they misused what came to hand. They grabbed a passenger plane; the black bloc grabbed fire extinguishers, pieces of fencing. And, like the black bloc's smashing of windows, their attack can be seen as defensive if put in context. I don't mean to portray Al Qaeda as rational representatives of Islam or the Arab world. However, knowing that Iraqi children are dying of malnutrition as a result of sanctions and fallout from the use of depleted uranium by the U.S.; knowing that Palestinians are being beaten and denied medical treatment and killed by Israeli soldiers armed and supported by the U.S.; and knowing that the U.S. actively squashed a burgeoning democracy in Iran in the 1950s for the sake of keeping the region "stable," not to mention U.S. arming of the Taliban back in the day -- knowing all that, it's not surprising that the terrorists were mad enough to do it.

This is what I wrote a few weeks later:

ultimately, we wanted to stop the killing in their country, too.The difference is that none among their number are pacifists, while almost all of us are.

...My immediate thought was this: My friends in the anti-globalization movement have been working for years to cause a ruckus this big. Would this be what it took to bring commerce and government to its knees?

If that was what it was going to take, I didn't want any part of it.

I wrote that last line in horror at myself, trying to pull back from some precipice. Now?... I am even more aghast than ever at the U.S. government and the horrible things a small handful of people have been able to wreak using its powers.

I read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and found it the only thing that could soothe me, the only context in which the Bush presidency and the current militancy make sense. (Now I'm thinking it's time to break out the really strong stuff, the Twain.) Americans voted for Nixon even though they knew about Watergate, strung along by the man's promises that the end of the Vietnam War was near. Now people are supporting the war in Iraq, giving in to the Department of Homeland Security, turning in neighbors and friends and strangers.

There is no hope. America is huge and torpid. No amount of prodding or screaming or fiery revelations will do anything to rouse it.

I spent a few months trying to work with a group of educators teaching about the war in schools and eventually... just gave up. Dropped out of the movement entirely. Told myself, I guess, that I was doing plenty at work. I Gave At The Office. And I was doing some, but nothing challenging to me or to anything or anyone else. I did join up with I-Witness Video, shot some video of the WTO and ALF-ELF marches. Happily, some of my footage of an arrest is apparently being used in an ALF-ELF marcher's trial. But this is passive stuff, shooting for I-Witness; much self-effacement, not the active involvement in information dissemination and planning I'm used to.

By now I've completely lost my compass. I feel a mild compulsion to help people, which is manifesting in a feint towards an advanced degree in education, but I'm ambivalent about activism. We will never make the kind of news the terrorists did. If we do, the politicians and media will lie about our motives as much as they do about anyone's.

One thing did become completely clear that day. I had always said I'd never have kids, that there's too many of them out there already, I had too much else I wanted to do and I didn't think I'd make a good mother. September 11th, walking back through the smoky alleys from Kim's, I knew I wanted to have kids. Not right away, of course, but someday. This was not because of values; it just struck me as the saddest thing in the world not to have someone worrying whether you were OK that day, and also not to have someone to worry about. Maybe it makes it easier, but who wants that kind of easy?

* * *

This September 11th I begged off work and gave into an instinct I have been fretting with all year: I ran away, out Long Island. No sense to it, aside from the fact that Long Island is the only place you can run miles away to without going through a major transit hub first. I was actually afraid the terrorists would strike again. I go through periods like this. I'm a fool enough to believe the fscking terror alerts.

So I got up long before I normally would -- before rush hour -- and boarded the Long Island Railroad away from the city, blinking my malfunctioning eyes against the early sun. I thought I'd go all the way out to the end of the island, but I was remembering a song on a Tito Puente album I have and so I got off at a ferry stop for Fire Island.

There was nobody waiting for the ferry yet. The pier stank of bathroom cleaner. A voice was droning names.

Two TV sets were on. Hillary Clinton was calling out the names of the dead. She was on C.

I walked out to the parking lot and started crying. Running away did nothing. It was all still there. I walked around and around listening to the birds and the wind, kicking at the gravel.

When I got back, there were more people on the pier. The TV was calling out the Gs. In a moment of frustrated snobbery I hated them for not doing it right. They weren't calling out "Presente" after every name the way they do when they recite the names of the Disappeared at the School of the Americas protest. It was like they didn't care none of those people were there.

When I got to a store on Fire Island and bought lunch, they were calling out Sanchez, Sanchez. I wished people would just turn the damn TV off. Some of us were out there to get away from the coverage. If they cared so damn much why weren't they in the city visiting that giant smoking crater?

Wind was strong from the northwest that day. On the windward side, the waves spat foam into the air and slopped great hanks of weed onto the docks. I walked among the empty summer cottages out to the leeward beach. The wind was so mighty the waves were atomized at their tips. The sand dunes blew into my hair as I tucked up against their slopes. Down the shore, a group of people threw long-stemmed roses into the tide one by one. I didn't want to know why. Maybe it was a wedding. I found sodden petals on the beach later; also my first starfish, which I gave away, thinking about how the whole of it was a skeleton.

I spent most of the afternoon nursing a single iced tea in a cafe that boomed with wind, trying to make fiction out of stories from my family. Once or twice I managed to forget what day it was.

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September 10, 2002

Lebensraum

I got to drive my sister up to Santa Cruz and move her into her new apartment. She now lives in a 10x10’ room which is almost a shed, and she has to walk to a separate house to use a kitchen or bathroom. Well, it’s light, at least, with big windows under the rafters; we do wonder if it’s up to code. It is the first place she’s rented after college, and she doesn’t have a job yet.

I didn’t have a job when I got out of college. I convinced myself I’d live on freelancing, and babysat for a Doberman whose owner was going to lose him if he barked all day and bothered the neighbors. The owner paid $4 an hour for three hours a day. The dog was a big wimp. I wrote three articles for the local birdcage-liner at $75 an article, one travel piece for Sunset and an essay for Salon for a few hundred each. There was nothing left of my graduation money by the end of the summer.

I stood in the door of my sister’s room and watched her damping down the frustration of the drive (we went two hours out of our way on a highway so bumblefuck there wasn’t even a McDonald’s on it) by settling her stuff into her room. She’s a smart kid, but we’re all smart kids; Kellan lives in Santa Cruz too, and he’s unemployed. I might as well be unemployed. We’ve been packed full of all these good skills nobody needs. It makes me mad to think that they won't use us, when we could be doing so much good stuff.

Sylvie: how about substitute teaching?

On the way back down I stopped in Salinas because of the Steinbeck Center. (Damned if I can find a copy of Of Mice and Men at the Strand.) I had never been to Salinas. The Steinbeck Center was at the end of a strip which looks like it’s getting the Old Town Pasadena treatment, only Salinas is in the middle of fscking nowhere so there’s prosthetic limb stores and bargain discount whatnot all interspersed with dead dusty storefronts. The seeds of the yuppie device stores have fallen on fallow earth. But it was overcast for a change, and quiet. A man was painting the marquee of a tourist trap bar a hopeful magenta and yellow. I could smell the turpentine. The fields were green and right behind the buildings downtown, like a movie lot with nothing more than facades.

Then I got back into the fields of artichokes and brussels sprouts and about six Spanish-language FM stations zoomed at me out of the car radio static. Salinas. What is behind your storefronts?

Need more Salinas. Empty and unscheduled. I’ve broken all my usual behavior patterns and am cleaning the house, trying to purge the remnants of my fouled social connections from it. Trying to save up a little extra Zen for work. I cast about me and find...

... cans of chicken broth. Three, in the kitchen cabinet here in Sunnyside. The labels are yellowed and the graphic design looks a little bit old, but is there any way of telling how old canned food is? It occurs to me that the canned food cartel may be invested in the idea that canned food never spoils. There may be a conspiracy to keep expiration dates off the cans.

... a novel titled Fat Chance, on my bookshelf. Jacket patter says something about fat becoming deadly. How did it get there? I’ve never seen it before. Did the movie crew that recently turned the house upside down plant it as part of their set? Unlikely that it belongs to the landlady; nothing likely to disturb her denial of her deteriorating condition (she is a diabetic and polishes off box after box of Nilla Wafers when she visits) lasts around here. More likely it came from a former roommate, who also left me an Audiobooks version of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.

... iridescent marbles, under the couch. Their plastic pouch has split. I search among them for a seafoam-green and gold bead that broke out of a piece of Chinese-style knotwork given to me by a friend. It isn’t there.

... two coffeemakers. Neither is mine. Time for a trivia contest; I call Kim, my co-caretaker. Which is yours? I ask. She sighs as if harassed. It’s the frst week of school, but she will be making excuses about exhaustion and correcting papers for the rest of the semester, and the next one. I do not think the promised repairs to the decaying kitchen wall will happen this year.

... a Gypsy Kings tape salvaged from the laundry-room giveaway in the Manhattan apartment. Sing along! It isn’t hard. Lai lo lai, lo lai lo lai lo lai lo lai... and then at the end everyone shouts “Ho-ehyyyy!” and says in Spanish I don’t understand, Let’s sing another one, we’re the Gypsy Kings and we’re the only goddamn bastards out there who actually have a pulse left.

... at home in California... a hundred tiny clay pots, shaped with thumbprints, glazed in brilliant colors, made in art class eighteen years ago. Eighteen years, my stepmother says, and jumps a little. I realize I still don’t think of myself as having been alive that long.

So many pots. These spilled out of a mildew-eaten box in the basement. I took them out of the rotting tissue and basement froon like an archaeo-anthropologist, rubbed at the tenacious black spores with toothbrushes. Would I have made fewer of them if I had known I would spend futile hours trying to clean them as a 25-year-old? I ask Dad if he’d be ok with me throwing some away. He gives me a hurt look, but he is the one who has put them in the basement. Mom keeps hers on the desk to put paper clips in.

One of them is lopsided, a whole side of the pot circle flattened. I remember it was not a pot. It was a couch. I used to make ceramic couches. They did not have patterns on their upholstery. I neglected that in my frenzy of mass-production. I made so many pots. I must have taken the other kids’ extra clay to do it. I made so many damn pots, and more than my share of uncomfortable-looking, flat-bottomed couches.

... no screens on my window, still; no brackets to put them in with. Every day more cases of West Nile virus are reported across the country.

... week-old snow peas in the fridge. Snow peas are inedible these days. About half of them have this tough, unchewable membrane on their inner wall, probably bred that way so they’d ship better. One of these days I’ll complain to the growers. Really. Salinas!

... the Shuggie Otis disc an ex-boyfriend gave me. Everything is OK because Shuggie moans he is Out Of His Head and the beats are deeply #1. But it is the totally nutso K-pop Janice gave me that really makes me segie segie na baby, with my arms bent like a robot and my head flopping around.

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