funistrada: September 2006

28 September 2006

Furniture on a flea-infested, child-beating, gambling-addiction budget

My mother was bitching incessantly about the fleas, to whomever would field her complaints: me, my sister, my dad, Polyester Suit, her parents, strangers at the grocery store, the pediatrician, the neighbors...having had flea infestations as an adult pet owner, I know the neurosis that comes with actually living with them; being a parent, I know the neurosis that comes from harm to that child, regardless of one's personal definition of harm. The fleas were terrible; I believe that they personally instigated my crawly-thing neurosis that still plagues me today, and I know now that my mother was bearing things much more aggravating than even calamine lotion could soothe.

For one thing, my father wasn't paying his child support and she and Polyester Suit were not only supporting the four of us but PS's two daughters from his first marriage, as well; they, until a few paragraphs from now, lived in Arbutus with their mother and he (or so I'm told -- nobility and integrity not being his strongest suits, it seems dubious that he fulfilled this particular obligation but who knows?) was paying his court-ordered support so they were stretched -- tight. We ate a lot of ground beef, a lot of government cheese, a lot of WIC foods like peanut butter, Kix cereal, tuna fish, tomatoes with mayonnaise on white toast, and per usual, we drank a shit ton of Kool Aid. My younger sister was so small, barely out of toddlerhood when the drama really took off, and she was busy enjoying a state-sponsored Montessori education (there was no way my mother could have afforded it without assistance) where they did art projects, spent prodigious amounts of time out of doors, kept guinea pigs and other small rodents as classroom pets, took scheduled naps and made close friends. I, on the other hand, was wearing Sears-brand jeans -- Tuffskins, if I recall correctly -- when my classmates were sporting Jordache, was wearing thick glasses and pleather shoes from Thom McCann and got haircuts in my kitchen while my peers were proudly showing off new Nikes, had long flowing hair and I cannot recall anyone on this side of the short bus peering through Coke bottles at the blackboard on a daily basis. From whence I came, contact lenses were probably standard issue for elementary schoolers; needless to say, I was well-aquainted with social alienation by the third grade.

None of this is to say that my father's contribution would have elevated my aesthetic status to that of my peers -- after all, ours was a town of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers and hippie college professors with trust funds and my parents, who'd moved there for the schools alone, were keeping us in Section 8 housing by virtue of their teenage pregnancies, questionable sexual habits and lack of college educations necessary to elevate them to "professional" status and so there we stayed, unfading jeans and shaggy hair and all.

My dad and the girlfriend bombed the trailer several times, dipped the cats and the fleas abated, a bit, but they never quite went away. Still, there was something kind of rugged and resourceful about their existence that I managed to admire a bit through my scratching and I learned some valuable stuff in that short time:

1. Four-by-fours and cinder blocks make fine, cheap bookshelves. I will always prefer them over cheap Swedish prefab (but, in deference to my husband, will not push the subject because he is a skilled arguer and will wear me down with his boring-but-well-intended objection toward them).
2. A piece of foam, covered with a pretty bedsheet, wrapped around a six-by-twelve sheet of particle board and propped on cinder blocks makes a useful-yet-uncomfable sofa; one must use a good number of stolen milk crates and pillows to really recline on this thing properly if one wants to comfortably enjoy a pirated showing of Nine to Five for the umpteenth time in peace. This can only happen if one is the only person home at the time or if all the other inhabitants are otherwise occupied. Otherwise, it is necessary to sit upright and adjust the foam half-hourly to keep from sliding onto the floor.
3. Protein -- specifically, meat and seafood -- is the best option for sustaining oneself on one meal a day; it doesn't hurt to have an extra freezer in the shed stocked with the stuff pilfered from Dad's days as a meat salesman and supplemented, presumably, by weekly meat sales at the local A&P. Eggs are a close second; getting a microwave for your latchkey kid and some gadget known, cleverly, as the Microwave Egg Magician, is second to nothing in terms of teaching the very basics of healthful-yet-thrifty sustanance. Even when those children very specifically preferred the Budget Gourmet's version of linguine with clam sauce, you stood your ground for economic purposes and taught a lesson that would be valuable, even if it was 30 years down the line. Another lesson learned: One cannot microwave a New York Strip and expect a tasty result. Ever.

So, yeah, we were poor, both at home with Mom and PS and at the beach with Dad and the girlfriend, for whom I have yet to assign a clever name -- I always liked her and it seems flip to call her by anything but her name, which is Wendy. And knowing what I now do about my father and his, [cough] habits, I think Wendy must have been some kind of saint or entirely off her can. A modern-day Joan of Arc, really, because there is proof that one can be both. The same might be said about my mother, as her home life with PS was entirely excruciating (which was only partially evident to my sister and me, although in truth I never trusted or liked the guy wholly, which makes my future with him even more confusing but for cripes sake! Hang in there because I'm getting to it, I swear) but my mother, coming from a long line of mental illness, social ignorance and poverty-induced rage, was shamed into channelling her frustrations into one of the last bastions of pre-litigious, pre-child-abuse-awareness indulgences, which is to say that she beat the absolute crap out of me on a regular basis.

27 September 2006

Weekly Fluff! With no capitalist propaganda, I swear it.

This is a fun entry -- do it! Go to Wikipedia, enter your birthdate -- no year -- and list the following: four events, four births, four deaths, and two bonuses of your choice.

On 5 February, throughout history:

1885 King Leopold II of Belgium claims the Congo as his personal possession.
1919 Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and DW Griffit launch United Artists.
1968 Vietnam War: Battle of Khe Sanh begins.
1991 A Michigan court bars Jack Kevorkian from assisting in suicides.

Born 1848 Belle Starr, American Outlaw
Born 1910 Francisco Varallo, Argentine Footballer
Born 1941 Jane Bryant Quinn, American Journalist
Born 1949 Nigel Olsson, Drummer

Died 1775 Eusebius Amort, German Catholic Theologian
Died 1917 Jaber Il Al-Sebah, Emir of Kuwait
Died 1981 Ella Grasso, Governor of Connecticut
Died 2005 Gmassingbe Ebadema, President of Togo

BONUSES!
+Kashmir Day is celebrated as a public holiday in Pakistan.
+the Feast of St. Agatha, Patron Saint of Firework Makers and Glassblowers -- a liturgical feast worth consuming, I'd say.

21 September 2006

it burns, it burns

Yesterday my therapist, who's relatively new to me -- 6 months, approximately -- tells me that what I'm describing to her, my moods and anger and whatnot sound manic, to which I did not respond very, um, maturely. In fact, I almost had a tantrum which might have driven her to tackle me and shove a Depakot(e?) under my tongue.

I don't want to be bipolar. By this statement I mean, of course, no offense to my friends who are bipolar, minorly or majorly, and who choose a medicated route to keep themselves sane -- whatever you need to stay above ground, do it, unless you don't really wanna be above ground but that's a whole other entry -- but I really don't want to take medication. My sister, who has some experience in the epilepsy department (and by that I mean that she experienced some seizures a while back and was diagnosed with epilepsy/seizure disorder, only to go ten whole years without ever seeing another one, imagine that...), said, "no way am I letting them give you Depakot(e?)," for various reasons that I'd rather not touch on here, not the least of which is that I cannot bear the prospect of gaining a bunch of weight, which is the number one side effect of said drug.

I know that a bunch of you will say, "but there are so many drugs out there besides Depakot(e?) that they can give you!" and "Depakot(e?) doesn't always cause weight gain!" but it was the one Therapist Lady mentioned and I can't get it out of my head. And I'm not taking it. And not because I'm so shallow that I can't bear to be fat (although I'd rather not be, sorry to say) but because I think those drugs will take away any drive I have to Live at all and will push me merely into Existence, which is something I'm actively avoiding. Nor am I taking Lithium or Tegratol or any of the gazillion SSRI's out there or anything else that might "steal my thunder," if you will, although if you want to know what started this rant it was a metaphor about a tornado.

You know, the one that I live in.

See, it starts in my brain, where I get extremely agitated -- moreso than I normally am, which is pretty agitated, which is why I take another medication that no, I can't spare any of -- to the point of compromised vision and dry mouth; if provoked, I can speak in tongues, yell obscenities and throw objects but I've gotten pretty good at controlling all those things in the past year, despite how ashamed I still feel recalling it all. It moves pretty rapidly into my body, where I have a very loud hum (that I'm convinced is audible to passersby) centralized right between my esophagus and stomach -- a tight spot, considering that the two are connected. This hum tends to be so disturbing to the rest of my body that I am rendered motionless for approximately one hour and I fight the call of a Jungian "death mother," who is luring me to her side with tobacco and alcohol but I just sit on the step and wait for it to pass. I give it a good hour to pass entirely -- not bad, really, for such an extreme episode -- and when it's over I feel deeply ashamed and afraid that this is my life.

Then I dig out my menstrual chart and go, "oh, that's right..." and I feel more ashamed for not being better attuned but relieved that I'm not going insane. So when I bring this up to Therapist Lady she says, "well, yes, it could be PMDD [Pre Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder], but I'm just going to put BiPolar 2 with a question mark (?) next to it; I'd like to revisit this."

Aargh!

it burns, it burns

You know, the one that I live in.

Aargh!

19 September 2006

I was practically forbidden from living with my Dad, although it took a goodly amount of time for me to eke a reasonable objection out of my mother at which point she said, "your father's in jail -- I put him there."

Huh.

Since my parents' divorce, my father had worked a variety of "odd" jobs, mostly sales positions that necessitated the purchase of a 1960-something panel truck that we called Blotch; it was, originally, painted black and was probably used as a dairy or a linen-delivery vehicle at some point but my dad got a hold of this thing and made it his primary source of transport. Now patched here and there with filler and half-primed with, well, primer, it was no longer the beautiful thing that one might have considered it; it had a driver's and a passenger's seat but only a large, windowless enclosed bed that had no seats but did contain a long freezer that my dad kept filled with dry ice and -- get ready -- meat. He worked as a meat salesman, going door-to-door and business-to-business hocking tenderloins, standing rib roasts, lobster tails and pre-breaded, pre-stuffed chicken cordon bleus and Kievs. In retrospect, I cannot imagine that he did well enough to make a living because we ate a lot of the aforementioned meats and sea creatures during our weekend stays with him; these meals were supplemented by avocados, Klaussen pickles and sugared cereals that our mother would not buy for us. I also recall drinking a good deal of Tab in those days; this now stands with Red Bull as the only soda that I ever let cross my lips in pure form. Not that I really drink Tab anymore.

He jumped around from apartment to apartment; at one point, he lived with a guy that owned a pair of those long-haired Yeti boots that almost picked up steam again last winter but were finally remembered to be impossible to clean and care for; he eventually moved back to Columbia and settled in an apartment complex within a couple of miles from our house, across from the Gulf station and a Hardees. During one of his sales calls, he met a woman around his age that shared his fondness for perms (he got them religiously, every six months) who worked at the local raquetball club and they soon got a slightly bigger apartment together in the same complex. Very quickly it was decided that they were moving to the Eastern Shore -- Ocean City, specifically -- where they would live in a rented bungalow together in a community called Ocean Pines. The house smelled like cedar, it was on the bay and it had an A-framed roof that gave it a really modern, beachy sort of appeal. I really loved that house and I know my dad did, too; his girlfriend was much more domestic and rugged than my mother (this made my mother insanely jealous and never was a kind word said about this woman, although I rarely recall the girlfriend saying negative things about my mother); she was from Oregon, originally, and she baked and cooked and sewed and knitted and quilted and did all kinds of things that I do or aspire to do now but were considered, I dunno, unnecessary to the women in my family whom I assumed felt that they could buy all those things -- why bother making them anymore? So when she made us all matching flannel nightgowns, sewn to size, for Christmas one year and put hand-sewn down quilts on our beds, it really set my mother's hair on fire and she started wearing her resentment of my father's life [without her] like a favorite sweater.

At this point, he was selling cars for a living at a now-defunct dealership in Frankford, Delaware, about a half-hour's drive outside of Ocean Pines. The girlfriend drove a 1972 Chevy Caprice, forest green, and my dad always drove what were known then as demos; salesmen drove them so that they could know how to sell them and it was a big perk of working as a car salesman -- you rarely had to own your own car. One of my favorite cars was a Camaro that had a digital dashboard -- no more of those old-fashioned needles, no sir! All digital in the future...notice that you rarely see that now; I was also quite fond of a Nissan Maxima with calf-leather seats that got warm in the winter. My dad had a stellar collection of brightly-colored chinos -- golf pants, really, although to my knowledge he didn't play golf but was just fond of the pants -- that he alternated daily (there must have been at least seven pair of them) and life seemed to be going pretty well for my father, who had started off his separation from my mother by living temporarily with her father...indeed, things were looking up. It never occurred to me to ask why the house was so cold and why he and his girlfriend were sleeping on the fold-out couch in front of the fireplace [instead of in their bed, in their bedroom] or why I was sleeping in not only the flannel nightshirt but in thermal underwear and wool socks under the down comforter, as well. I now know that although there was electricity, there was no heat because gas and electricity were paid separately and they, for whatever reason, could not afford to pay both; this is how we had waffles from an electric iron in the mornings -- with real butter, which I had never had and initially had tasted disgusting to me -- and were still able to watch cable TV (reportedly pirated from a neighbor's line) but were wearing ski apparel indoors in November. There may or may not have been eggs but my memory fails me in the did-we-or-did-we-not-have-a-gas-stove department; come to think of it, I don't recall ever using a phone there, either.

Perhaps my dad and the girlfriend realized that they were well without their means when they made the decision to move into Ocean City proper, into a trailer park, into a trailer, that was, appopriately enough for a family that accepted their true worth, infested with fleas. Old, small, rusty and musty, this trailer was nothing compared to our palatial former digs and my sister started coming home -- to our mom's on Sunday nights -- with flea bites on her legs, much to my mother's dismay. Also appropriately enough for a woman trying so hard to deny her true worth and roots, she started calling my father and his girlfriend "trashy," and "poor" and began a long-term sabotage of our relationship at which she was ultimately successful.

17 September 2006

I guess I oughta talk about my father...

This I almost actively avoid because it seems lenghty and boring until you get to the end when there's a real live cliffhanger that is awesome if you're watching a movie starring Julianne Moore or some shit but sucks if you're a real live person trying to get on with it, which is difficult to do when you live with a cliffhanger.

My father was born in January of 1946 in Denver; he had two parents and an older brother who was reportedly born as a twin but the twin died, as was supposedly common back in "the day," which is to say the late '30s/early '40s. Oddly enough, it's almost as common now, what with the US having some of the highest infant mortality rates per capita in the world, which never fails to blow my mind...anyway, I know very little about his early life. I don't even know the age difference between him and his brother but I do know that his brother's birthday was 21 July and my father's was 21 January, separating their anniversaries by exactly 6 months, thus the enjoyment of a small tradition known as the Half Birthday, wherein the one not celebrating the birthday would get his own small cake and one small present on the birthday of the other. Knowing only those details, I must admit that I've always found that story to be sweet and I always wished for someone with whom to celebrate my half birthday; for now, though, I have to be happy to celebrate my actual birth date with Brian Dubin, which is practically good enough.

At some point my grandfather died from lymphatic cancer (I don't think Hodgkin's disease was a thing then, so I couldn't tell you what kind it was) and I know that my father was young and my uncle only slightly older, leaving my grandmother a widow with two small boys to care for on her own. I don't even know if they came to Baltimore before or after his death; what I do know is that my father and uncle were shuffled around from neighbor to neighbor and later to the local PAL centers in Arbutus and Catonsville while my grandmother struggled to keep the lights on working for Mrs. Filbert's, a margarine plant located in Lansdowne. Factory work for a widowed young mother in the '50s must have been excruciating; all photos I've seen of her show her with a sour face until you get to the ones where she's marrying off her sons in which her face shows visible relief and a hint of a smile.

I don't remember my grandmother at all, for she died when I was a mere infant. It would be my mother's first time on a plane, flying with my father and uncle and aunt to Colorado to bury the legless old woman -- she'd died from diabetic complications, but not before succumbing to painful gangrene resulting in a double amputation of her legs -- alongside her husband whom she'd buried decades before; the year was 1972. The comic relief started when the casket was misplaced in the Denver airport where there was reportedly a good deal of humor enjoyed at this expense by my father and uncle; it continued when they finally went to the funeral home to pick out the actual casket in which she would be buried and my mother recalls them cracking jokes to the funeral director -- then called, "the mortician" -- about people who were "dying to get in here." Pretty typical Smothers Brothers material but indicative of my dad's dry humor, his ability to lighten up any and all tense situations and his complete inability to express real emotion. Not the most stable package, really.

He graduated from Catonsville High School along with my stepfather's brother, Jon, who would soon die from a heart attack related to Marfan's Syndrome; he remained close to Jon's family and struck up a friendship with Jon's slightly older brother, Polyester Suit. You can go ahead and do the math on that one yourself. He attended two years at Essex Community College and studied musical theory; whether or not he obtained a degree is unknown to me. He sang and played guitar in a folk duo, he worked in the camera department at Walgreen's, he spent some time enlisted in the Air Force during the Vietnam War but due to severe myopia, he never left New Mexico and it was there that he reportedly learned to fry an egg on the sidewalk. It is said that he met my mother at the 7-11 in Paradise (a neighborhood in Catonsville) while standing in line to buy cigarettes, which makes sense because that's where he would have lived and that's where my great-grandparents lived and my mother spent a good deal of time there; it also makes sense because my father was always a heavy smoker -- "he would light one before his feet touched the floor every morning, as soon as he opened his eyes," says my mother -- and when he would try and quit, he would become clinically depressed, stop eating, lose upwards of 15 pounds in a matter of weeks and become chronically ill. During these times of abstinance and consequent illness, the doctor (said my father) would always tell him to start smoking again, that not smoking might drive him to suicide. I would later learn that smoking as it relates to suicide might have been the least of his problems.

For the record, I don't believe that my father committed suicide, nor do I know him to be dead. For the record, I have no idea where he is -- I haven't seen him for 15 years

I've already told all the stories about the swinging and his relatively brief -- five, six years, tops -- marriage to my mother, about how he defaulted on the mortgage, how she bailed him out with her paltry savings but kicked him out at the same time...what I haven't told are more things I can't remember but that my mother tells me: stories about living without a phone, without electricity, about the car being repossessed due to non-payment, about how much she loved him but how he never paid the bills, how his paycheck would disappear and how we lived, more often than not, in abject poverty. All I remember about being little in that duplex in Arbutus was the big yard, the cicadas (they were around one year that we lived there; their exoskeletons would gather in the hollow under the tree swing, the one that comes from dragging one's feet to stop the swing), the big porch, the tall tree, the short brick wall separating our yard from the neighbors, our mean cat called Shakespeare that I once saw get whacked with a broom by my mother because he bit her, Shakespeare's dead body buried by my dad by the short brick wall after the woman on the other side of it supposedly fed him poisoned tuna because he was such a mean little fucker, our German Shepherd called Caesar who came to live with us after my dad found him at a gas station (or something like that), my mother's Cairn terrier called Oliver who died while in a play-chase with Caesar around the big tree while they were both chained to it, countless other pets and strays that my father would bring home, Dr. Doolittle-style, on a weekly basis...there are other things, like short little bottles of Budweiser, overflowing ashtrays, the coffee table made from an old Singer stand, my dad's friend, Dick, who stood over six feet tall and whom I was convinced was a giant, my own playroom, and an ERA sticker on our refrigerator. I remember singing along, word for word, with Jim Croce and Carole King and trying to imitate their voices and my dad encouraging me to try singing in my own voice -- it was good enough, I didn't have to try and sound like anyone else. I was admonished when trying to imitate John Lennon, which I'm sure sounded terrible; I did, however, do an excellent impression of George Carlin, from whose records I learned to shun my breakfast with the declaration that, "this tastes like shit, Mommy." I was no more than two years old.

16 September 2006

Another thing of public record...

I do not have the same name that I was born with; I was born as Kristen Meyers and was called that until I was 21 years old when my name was changed, legally, to King. I keep King not out of loyalty but out of the catchiness it exudes and the fact that it is a huge pain in the ass to change one's name and it's just too exhausting to consider changing it back or to my husband's name.

So, for my dad, I only keep it because I like alliteration. It seems reasonable to me. There's nothing wrong with Meyers, I can assure you.

14 September 2006

Crazy Family, Ongoing

Where was I? Oh, yes, Polyester Suit.

So Polyester Suit moves in and I honestly don't remember a whole lot about the beginning, not much more than the suit and the beard and the car and the Steely Dan (which was sometimes Bob Seger or the Eagles, it's almost all the same to me at this point) and the smoking, he and my mother both smoked like chimneys. He had two daughters that would spend weekends with us and they were strange, different from my sister and me; we were docile and compliant and ate all foods, no matter how odd or gross-seeming -- my sister's favorite food was liver and onions; I could have lived on mushrooms and crepes alone -- and they were both mouthy, defiant and excruciatingly picky eaters. After a typical dinner of, say, beefaroni (homemade, naturally -- we were fortunate enough to come from a home where processed or canned foods were forbidden; we also ate very little sugar and to this day I have no sweet tooth and I cannot stand soda unless it's mixed with alcohol), my mother would stay at the table with the younger daughter and berate her while chain-smoking, "you'll finish that dinner if you have to sit here until breakfast," while the girl pushed the onions, mushrooms and tomatoes around on her plate, whimpering (but not really crying -- these girls were tough and oddly emotionless).

My mother and Polyester Suit drank gallons of iced tea; my sister and I were allowed only Kool-Aid, which my mother bought in the 5-cent unsweetened packages (20 a week! A dollar got one a lot of Kool-Aid in the day, I'll tell you) and sweetened to taste, which is to say barely at all. I also think it was really watered down, and we drank out of old margarine cups -- to be fair, they were these novelty packages of Land-o-Lakes or whatever brand of margarine we were using at the time and they were intended to be reused as drinking cups, for I vaguely recall them having handles on them -- and griped the whole time about not being allowed to have iced tea.

My mother worked at the corporate headquarters of a national chain of bowling alleys as a secretary; Polyester Suit, I believe, worked as a liquor distributor and possibly sold insurance, although I didn't really start paying attention until he began working as a driving instructor for EZ Method Driving school and his cherry-red Chevy Nova was replaced by a Chevette with two steering wheels and a brake pedal on the passenger's side, which we were forbidden to touch if we were lucky enough to ride in this car. The Chevette was emblazoned with the EZ Method logo on both doors but was soon replaced by some model of Chrysler decorated with a snow-capped mountain over the word SUMMIT, which was a competing area driving school. Polyester Suit had a lot of jobs and in my adult life, after my mother had married and divorced him, she finally revealed why he'd changed jobs so frequently.

Not surprisingly, PS was somewhat of a sexual deviant and for every job there was at least one unwitting female coworker willing to engage in some risky business in a not-so-private setting where they were sure to be caught. My mother claims that he lost several jobs after engaging in "consensual sexual acts" with female coworkers; he also lost several jobs over harrassment before harrassment was even a thing, which is pretty impressive for the '70s and the '80s. The best one -- actually, it's the worst one -- involved an affair he was having, well into his 30s, with a 15-year-old driving student; her father caught wind of the affair (because you know, insecure female reader, that you had at least one crush on an older instructor of some kind, male or female, but most of us didn't act on it) and fortunately didn't press charges against PS but did get him fired from his job. Also fortunately, for my mother and for PS, molestation had yet to become a buzzword and folks weren't particularly litigious in those days so he got off with little more than a threat of physical violence from the girl's father, which at the time was apparently a pretty big deal.

Bear in mind that my mother had full knowledge of all this bad behavior at the time, yet continued to let him live with us; she insists, now, that she was a victim of what is popularly referred to as Battered Women's Syndrome, but without the battering -- in other words, he was manipulating her into not kicking him out by blaming her for the infidelity: If she were more of a woman, he told her, he wouldn't have to resort to all these affairs. So, she did the only thing she knew how to do at the time to remedy the situation: She married him.

In our living room, on a rainy night in autumn in a year I can't recall (1982? No, '84 -- I was 13, I think), my mother, sick with an ear infection and running a dangerously high temperature, married PS (who was, not surprisingly, wearing the polyester suit) in front of a couple of witnesses and various family members. My grandfather and his second wife (my grandmother, too, because we love her) had since retired to a mountaintop in West Virginia and although I was crying hysterically by the end of the ceremony -- I did not want her to marry him -- I was driven away in the night for a weekend of chopping wood and damp woodsiness. Now we had a stepfather and although my sister didn't remember our parents marriage -- she was merely an infant when they separated and had no memory whatsoever of them ever being together -- I did, I still had a growing relationship with my father and I didn't need another one.

Life in our house was violent and difficult. Mom and PS fought constantly, my mother was very unhappy (emotionally battered, I now understand) and took it out on me (which, through therapy, I have learned is very common for someone in her position), beating me badly on a somewhat regular basis for small infractions: I got a deficiency in gym, I couldn't find the TV Guide, I didn't want to eat my breakfast so I hid it in my shirt and carted it off to the bathroom and attempted to flush it down the toilet. English muffins, for the record, do not flush. I mouthed off, I was well into being hormonal so I was moody (and angry, I can't stress that enough -- it started early on, this anger of mine), I began to do very poorly in school and I was closely monitored by Dr. Geuder, the school guidance counselor who didn't seem to notice that I would go into trembling hysterics whenever the mention of "calling your mother" occurred. I swear, the '70s and '80s must have been the worst time to come from an abusive home because if you were a person of any kind of intuition, as I considered myself to be and still do, you knew that someday you'd be heard and redeemed but you didn't know when, which was frightening and disheartening and helpless-making. It was around this time that I started making a lot of regular noise about living with my father.

13 September 2006

Later Day, 13 September 2006

Unsolicited advice about crap.

I've been dying to post something like this for years; I considered, after indulging in LiveJournal for so long and being constantly exhausted from the drama (so I had a kid, because apparently I didn't know real exhaustion) that I would have a blog where I just talked about products that I really dig, material goods that make me happy. I can't commit to something so frivolous, plus we're poor again and I can't buy all the stuff that I really want (I have consumerist, capitalist, dirty dark secrets that I will reveal to you in small bits -- try and keep liking me, I dare you), so I'm just doing this to keep the writing flowing.

+C.O. Bigelow Apothecary Skin Care products, recently acquired by Bath & Body Works (sorry, a trip to the mall is involved in a bunch of these suggestions). Mostly natural, fragrance-free, lots and lots of fruit acids for those of us that spend too much time in bars, whether we work or play in them. Mid-range, pricewise; get some of that Lemon Body Cream and smear it all over your damp skin after your shower, follow it up with Rose Water Skin Tonic and Extra-Light Face Lotion. The last product contains white clay, which keeps oily skin not-so all day. I love these products; don't ask what I'm doing at the mall, poseurs.

+Mr. Clean(tm) Magic Erasers, also available in generic form at the marvelous mega-mart called Target (and don't say Tarzhay, bourgie, it's not clever). These things take everything off of everything, but don't use them on any painted surface or it will lose its shine. Shower scum is outta here, along with caked-on microwave ick -- magic, indeed.

+Frye Harness boots, available online or at the mall. These make you look like a rockstar -- just ask me.

+Did you know that Whole Foods Market makes their own sausages? If you're in the business of eating meat, I highly recommend picking up the turkey italian ones and frying them up with some small tomatoes and fresh basil; we're having ours with a green salad and some steamed baby sweet potatoes. This is the least greasy, least mysterious encased meat I've ever eaten.

+If you suffer from any of the frontal lobe maladies -- depression, anxiety, debilitating PMS -- I highly recommend the following dietary supplements (as well as a good diet, which probably shouldn't include meat -- especially sausages! I actually know nothing...) for a variety of ailments:

1. Evening Primrose Oil: A plant-based Omega 3 fatty acid that will improve your concentration and keep your mood swings and hot flashes to a minimum. Guys can take this, too, but it's good for the female troubles. Keeps you moving, too, if you get my drift.
2. B-50 or B-100 complex, whatever your stomach will tolerate. The B vitamins help stimulate seratonin production (B6), keep histamine blockers working (B5), and keep energy levels moderately high (B12). This is the quintessential winter supplement; your immune system will thank you.
3. Zinc, dehydrator of all things infectious. Available in lozenges (ew), pills or nasal gel; I used the nasal gel last winter in the bar and it seemed to create a barrier against germs for I was ill much less frequently than most cold and flu seasons. When I was ill, it significantly shortened my illness.
4. Goldenseal, which really does purge your system of all toxins if taken regularly; if you're on some kind of probation where they test your urine, they test for this, too, so don't go getting yourself in trouble.
5. Drink water, dummy, lots of water. You really do need it.

+Stop smoking, or smoke less commercial tobacco products. I've switched this week from a commercial brand to American Spirits; not only are they chemical-free, but they burn so much more slowly than my regular brand that I'm smoking less -- much less. Try ten cigarettes in four days. Huzza! Their parent company, Santa Fe Tobacco, has recently been acquired by RJ Reynolds, which is bad, but the product continues to be regulated by the parent, which is good. We really should stop smoking, though, seriously. It's bad on so many levels.

+FINALLY: the Minute Clinic, to return to area Target locations next month [They've temporarily moved to CVS whose pharmacy is much more expensive than Target -- the least expensive Rx in the area besides WalMart and I don't want to know if you go there for any reason at all]. $49 gets you an exam and a diagnosis without insurance; if you're lucky enough to have insurance, you just pay your company's co-pay. I used these guys last winter for a pesky ear-turned-sinus infection and they were great; they also send you a get-well card a few days later (aww!). They're located right outside the Target pharmacies in most locations, so you can walk out of the exam room and over to the pharmacy, read People magazine and get your generic Z-pack (make sure you ask for the generic of anything, folks) and start healing. Thyself.

13 September 2006

Go here and get some of this.

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/

If you don't already read this publication (Heather, Francesco, Brian D, all my other adoring fans [cough]) well, you're all fools.* Go to the website, get your free sample subscription, get hooked, look forward to postal candy every month. Good candy, like made-from-carob-but-tastes-like- chocolate-candy. And quit your nay-saying, because that kind of candy does exist.

*Last night I asked Brian to install hook-n-eye locks on some closet doors because a certain 3.5-year-old won't stay out of them and is making confetti out of my collection of wrapping paper and threatens to impale himself on a real sword pretty much hourly. Like the good husband that he is, he installs the locks but the child is clever and sees a hole in his father's handywork: a lidded wicker laundry basket is left next to one of the closet doors and the swords and the child's internal organs are once again vulnerable. As I lift him from the basket and put him on the floor, I mutter, "Daddy! He's a fool!" to which Fergus responds, "Daddy is not a fool -- he's a person!"

11 September 2006

Where I was.

I trust that I know enough people who are all, "pffft, September 11, whatever," because I know a lot of narcissists(1), and (2)I know a lot of folks who think they might be too cool to admit that that was one scary and sad day. I, for one, was really frightened.

I had the "luxury," if you will, of working in an office at the Port of Baltimore; I worked as an administrative assistant at the Pilot office and it's set up like a firehouse, with a big living room and kitchen and lots of beds, because guys on two week shifts tend to stay there for the duration. My sister called me and said, "someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center -- I shit you not! Turn on the TV!" And of course at any other job this would be impossible but here it was right convenient so I put her on hold and ran to the kitchen phone where I switched on the TV and saw smoke and heard Katie Couric deviating from her usual cutesie voice and I was confused, because I thought my sister meant the Baltimore World Trade Center. But the fixed camera on the "twin towers" quickly clued me in and I understood that it was New York and at that point I was just fascinated, thinking, "how could a pilot make such a mistake?" and then I saw the second plane hit, before Katie did but at the same time as my sister and we both said, "oh, shhhhhiiiiiitttt..." and that was the scary part. Anchor confusion, crowd hysteria, and immediate buzz in the office of other secretaries and dispatchers and grouchy pilots initially woken by our chatter but quickly attuned to the pending disaster, because I don't think that anyone in that office, except for me, really thought this was a big deal.

Jim Miklascewski was at the Pentagon, keeping a pulse and tabs on the gov't's response, when the plane hit there and Katie kept yelling, yelling, "Mick! Mick! Are you okay? What's going on?" and of course he was momentarily silenced and that was nuts, thinking that you just heard a death but he came back in a few minutes, explaining that another plane had hit there and that the impact/explosion had temporarily disabled their communications but that they were back and that he was okay. But just him, see, because a whole lot of other regular folks weren't and that was the continuation of that fear and the beginning of, "I wanna go home right now."

My sister was going home and we lived together at the time and all I could think was that I needed to be with her and that I wanted to drink, even though it was still early in the morning. I first asked if I could leave, thinking that it would be fine, and my boss asked me, "who do you think is going to answer these phones if you leave?" It's important to note that my job consisted of answering the phone maybe five times daily; the rest of my time was spent surfing the interweb, drinking coffee, snooping through the century-old building and eating rolled up swiss-cheese-lunchmeat snacks. I also photographed my shoes quite a bit in those days.

I felt terribly betrayed when he said I couldn't leave; it was then that I decided that not only was I leaving anyway, consequences be damned, but that if I didn't get fired that I would start looking for another job. I was well-paid, I had a killer benefits package but this was too much: The federal gov't was shutting down all ports! Some 150 men and two (that's right: 2) women pilots would get to leave their posts and return to their families but we were expected to stay and hold down the p(f)ort. Forget it; five minutes later I told him I was leaving and he said, "whatever, I think you're being melodramatic. See you tomorrow." I got my stuff and headed downstairs where I saw all the pilots, all the secretaries and the dispatchers huddled in the coffee lounge around a tiny television; as I walked in the room, the first tower was falling like a well-orchestrated, intentional demolition and I could see, then, that everyone else was starting to understand that it was, in fact, quite a big deal.

It took me over two hours to get home; I managed to get a message to my boyfriend (now my husband) who met me at my house and we all started drinking and watching what we'd come to dub "Crack TV"; that is, television news on a loop that changes only in its preview delivery: "coming up, firefighters struggle to breathe..." and we were transfixed because this was so monumental, the hugest thing we'd ever seen that we couldn't tear ourselves away for fear that we might miss a new fact*, and when we stepped outside to take a cigarette break and a breath we were terrified by a plane flying over when we thought that planes weren't supposed to be flying until further notice. I now assume that it was some kind of military plane, but copious amounts of wine and electric paranoia don't mix and I cried, for the first and only time that day; I would cry again the next day when I saw the jumpers, the people that jumped out of fear of burning alive, whom I'd somehow missed the day before.

It took me about six months to find a new job, but I was sure to mention That Day in my resignation, only to have my boss say, "well, I hope that melodrama serves you right in your next job," as he handed me my severance check; my next job was one as a human resources administrator for a grocer and damned if that "melodrama," which I also like to call, "compassion," didn't help me a whole lot in terms of understanding that a whole lot of people are devastated day after day, with or without "terrorism."

*Don't fall prey to Crack TV. The facts never change, they've just got some guy in the other room rephrasing all the stuff that you've been hearing for the past several hours -- you're only waiting on the next "press conference," where some city/county/state/federal official is bound to give you the same information, spun into another bundle of words. You might get to see the commander in chief climb onto a pile of rubble with a hard hat and a flag, you might get to see somebody covered in dust/floating down the street in a Coleman cooler, you might get to see a dog stranded on a rooftop or a firefighter's wife trembling with uncertainty, but the facts remain the same. Turn off the TV and kick the ball around the backyard; I still condone the drinking.

10 September 2006

Later Day, 10 September 2006

On my mind...

+Obviously, I think our gov't is completely corrupt and fucked; I heard a report on NPR (I know, I know, not the most radical news source by far but I don't have the attention span to read the news in any form and I haven't got cable or satellite radio, so this is my best alternative. Maybe I'll have a live feed of Air America wired into my ear, like a Cochlear implant but with sound. It might override my tinnitus, I dunno) about the tobacco industry and it seems insane to think that it was anything but true. It turns out that although the FDA bears no regulation rights when it comes to tobacco, it's allowed to send some guy out to the Royal Farms and buy countless packs of "the two most popular brands of cigarettes consumed by adolescents and people of color, Marlboro being one of them." The fact that they wouldn't even say Newport in their report is disgusting enough to me, but they then go on to admit that they've been sending this guy out pretty much every day save for power outages and bank holidays to buy these two brands and measure their nicotine content. They report a ten percent (10%) increase in the quantity of nicotine in these two brands over the past ten years. The report was brief, I've heard nothing else about this study, but for real?! The FDA reports that were tobacco regulated as a drug -- it's still controlled by the ATF, who considers none of their three things more than a fiscal commodity -- that a ten percent increase in the potency of the main ingredient in said drug would be considered significant and would be cause for investigation or even recall, but that despite its efforts (I trust the efforts of the FDA and the Bush administration that controls it to be little less than noble, so I'm not sure that this is an actual point) the FDA has failed to gain control of tobacco and re-delegate it to a drug status. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. I smoke, too, so this isn't some anti-smoking rant, if that's what anyone wants to holler at me about.

+When you (female you) are riding your bike down Old Falls Road at night and are minding your own business and being careful not to skid on the rocks and are giving a plenty wide enough berth for the SUV speeding up behind you to pass but the driver still tries to run you off the road, then yells patriarchal obscenities at you and threatens your sexual safety and your life, it's called sociopathy. Not to go on this big defense-of-men kick, because I wouldn't dream of it, but most of the patriarchal shitheads I know wouldn't have the constitution -- fuck that, it wouldn't cross their minds, that's how much credit I'll give most of the misogynists I know -- to utter some of the shit that purportedly came out of some "guy"'s mouth toward one of my dear friends very recently when she was performing the above rote activity. You know: Commuting. I know it's a hassle, people, to go around a respectful, skilled, self-protecting cyclist -- I mean, can you even believe they let people drive these things, anyway? Bicycles, for real? Get with it -- what? Do you hate America? Get a car! -- but try and keep the threats of bodily harm and sexual assault to a minimum, 'cause it's tiring for us feminists to keep getting ourselves out of bed every morning after one of these incidents without setting fire to something.

Stupid Sparks.

Morning, 10 September 2006

What not to drink

Sparks. Don't drink it. I don't even know why they make it and whose really horrible idea it was to put that poison in a can and make $5 off of it, but they should fire that guy. I actually love me a can of Red Bull from time to time -- I'm not gonna lie! -- but adding malt liquor to it is twisted.

I drank one and I'm sorry. To myself, I'm sorry. It took a lot of regular liquor to get me back on track, and then I was just drunk. Talk about crying at one's own party.

09 September 2006

9 September 2006

I don't know what I want to write about today. I'm not angry or manic or full of ideas, I'm just awake and I just drank my coffee without any kind of white stuff for the second day in a row because we're out of Silk creamer and I hate cow's milk...boring stuff.

My mother is taking the boy for a sleepover so that we might attend today's installment of Reverent Fog, featuring my good friends Beach House and Arbouretum (among other really awesome bands about whom I will surely become fanatical); I am newly committed to supporting my loved ones in their artistic endeavors so please! If I'm ignoring your genius, feel free to shove it down my throat. If your genius is something other than art, keep it to yourself, you fucking perv.

Brian: Bring me a copy of that thing I need. Today. You wonderful, wonderful person.

People I'd like to see today and hold hands with a little and laugh with, in no particular order:

+Victoria L.G.
+Corey A.
+Brian D.
+Brian R.W.
+Joel, Angela and Rubes T.
+Christian S.
+Nathan B.
+Heather H.
+Countless other friends whose presence makes me happy and whom I rarely interact with outside of my job.

I'm drinking at least one Sparks today. Don't try and stop me.

08 September 2006

In Lisa "Suckdog" Carver's recent book, Drugs Are Nice, she recalls a statement her father made that I will attempt to paraphrase here; I cannot quote it because I loaned out the book.
"[sic]Lisa, you have no idea how hard it was not to hit you growing up. My parents hit me, my grandparents hit my parents; I didn't want to hit you but it was really hard not to -- sometimes you really deserved it. I did it, I made a conscious effort not to hit you so that it would be that much easier for you not to hit your kids[sic]."

Seriously, I wish my parents had thought of that. Because he's right, it's fucking hard to come from a place of violence and not hit them. I've read study after study that practically proves that violence, although it starts out as nurture (haha), quickly imprints itself and becomes nature.

I come from a habitat of extreme violence. Of being hit with fists, of being hit with objects, of bribes from parents not to tell other people where the bruises came from and of yelling as a normal substitute for calm talking. I am a yeller and a hitter and a tantrummer and I spend about 73% of my day quelling rage, whether it's directed at society, the Bush administration, gas prices, my lot in life, my son, my husband, sexism, fatigue or finances; I am in a constant state of stopping myself from completely flipping out. And, as any adult on the receiving end of my rage can attest, I can disassemble the constitution of a grown man in three paragraphs...I've done so and have been ashamed of it. I have become quite skilled at expressing my discomfort and dissatisfaction with my tongue and brain, working in quick conjunction side by side. I have frightened myself.

I'm trying to stop. They don't know if it's anxiety or depression or a mood disorder; they put me on drug after drug and it breaks through, every time. I go to therapy for it because it can be dangerous, I could get myself into real trouble, I could lose jobs, I could cost us our home or funds to improve our standard of living, I could alienate neighbors, I could isolate myself in a single conversation. I'm trying to stop.

On some levels, I'm proud of it; it's handy to be silver-tongued in certain situations, like the time when I witnessed blatant discrimination against a black family waiting for their sick cat at the Pet ER on Christmas Eve (wha? I know, random) and I got insanely angry and managed to channel it into Plan B, which involved confronting the family to let them know that I saw what had happened and that I would really like to confront the admin with them (if they wanted or needed me to); Plan A involved a lot of shouting and shaming so it was good that I had the support of my sister and Brian, who helped me formulate Plan B, which actually turned out well: the family spoke, I spoke (in a normal tone of voice with a tinge of anger and authority), the receptionist and the vet cried, and the baby Jesus had a great birthday. It was actually hard to conjure the courage to channel the anger properly but I did it and it lives on the hand of other times it's been well-used, which is to say not many. I give it the "thumb" position, because it's the most significant. Another time I publicly confronted someone that I thought might have been libeling me online; although it turned out to be the wrong person, I felt that I represented myself well and that it was great practice, although I have yet to confront the actual agitator and that will be real hard because I heard she hits...anyway, that one gets the pinky. I could live without the pinky but the hand looks better with it.

Back to violence: I work this really exhausting night job which just gets more exhausting as I get older; I usually lay my head down around 1am and my son, the love of my life, almost without fail, wakes me up every morning in the 530/630 hour. So I average 4.5 - 5.5 hours of sleep each night, with nary an opportunity to catch up on weekends and days off, so fucked is my internal clock; I actually have to drug myself sometimes to get more sleep when I have the opportunity. I reserve time almost daily for a nap, which makes participation in all daytime activity practically impossible and I miss out on things like the park and fresh air and so does my beautiful boy. But my very first emotion of the day is anger, inevitably, at being woken up mid REM in an indescribably exhausted state that is my whole existence at this point, anger is my default, anger is the first thing I feel toward the world when I open my eyes way too early in the morning.

I often yell at the boy, whether it's to go back to sleep, a rant about it still being dark outside (soon to be truer than now, what with that daylight savings time fast approaching), a futile conversation and a loud attempt at reason with an unreasonable being about how "mommy works late, mommy hasn't had enough sleep yet, mommy's not ready to get up," none of which work at all and are surely planting the seeds of resentment and future rebellion in other ways -- sleep deprivation and angry moms are the actual gateway drugs, not marijuana and alcohol! Get with the program, Nancy Reagan.

This thing could get long if I got into all the research that proves that people rarely transcend their fiscal demographic, that it's something like 90% of four or more generations stay in the same financial class as the previous three before the cycle is broken...the point I'm making is that we're poor, we both have to work, we're undereducated laborers that made our beds long ago and aren't necessarily too old to change direction but it's damned hard to get a foothold on progress without motivation, funds and time...from that point I will make the point that it is futile to suggest getting a dayjob, because daycare costs approximately a gazillion dollars an hour and they might actually hit him and I can't risk that.

 It's just hard and I'm having an angry day.  I was hoping I could spit this out with a nap and lo!  It has happened.  Don't judge me.

06 September 2006

6 September 2006

I told my friend Brian last night that I was going to start writing some really personal shit on here, publicly, for the purposes of self-actualization and the practice of writing, which I abandoned almost permanently a few years back and is my actual life-aspiration -- although I do love me some waitressing, make no mistake. If you don't want to know a lot of stuff about me, don't read; there are other motivations (maybe you'll glean one from this particular essay) to keeping it public and it's my choice so, you know, gimme your feedback or shut up. Love you.

There is a long tradition in my family of naming first-born daughters "Mary," which my parents thankfully broke with me (although my name, which means, "Christian" in Danish -- no offense, Christian -- doesn't thrill me but at least I got to break a cycle), making me the first first-born daughter in some six generations to be called something else. And being that all of these women started bearing children in their teens -- my mother included -- there were, until I was well into my teens, four living generations of first-born daughters: me, my mother, my grandmother, and my great-great grandmother (my great grandmother died before her mother, which, respectfully, at that age seems irrelevent...) were frequently pictured in photographs together and they were shown off with great pride to anyone who gave a shit. Which was a surprising lot of people; folks are easily impressed, I guess, or I was so accustomed to it that it didn't seem odd to me. Of course, the storytelling behind the showing of the photograph never forgot the fact that I was called something else, "the first first-born daughter in four thousand generations of this family not to be called 'Mary'...her mother was a real rebel...we've forgiven her now."

Another fine tradition that I mercifully broke was one that involved marrying and procreating (not necessarily in that order) by the age of 18 and my mother was no exception, marrying my father at 18, two weeks after her high school graduation and secretly 12 weeks pregnant. She wore a mini dress (very scandalous!) and everyone in the photos is smoking and drinking heavily and looking terribly grim, although to hear my grandmother tell the story it was a beautiful occasion and they loved my father, dearly; it seems that everyone did, everyone loved my father. Just not forever.

Fast forward a couple of years, into the early '70s, when the tide of the sexual revolution washed swinging onto our shores and my parents, whose marriage of a couple of years might (or might not) have been growing a bit stale, decided to engage in this fun new trend with a high school buddy of my dad's and his wife. I remember going to their apartment as a child, their apartment over a funeral home, where they had the standard '70s decor including ferns and papasan chairs and incense and smoking -- cripes, everyone smoked like a fucking chimney...oh, wait, that hasn't changed -- and we'd have dinner with this couple and their two daughters in their breakfast nook that they had in lieu of an actual dining room (we were just some boring WASPs with a regular table -- exotique!) and it was pretty regular, these meetings. After dinner, us girls would get bowls of ice cream and then we'd bed down in their room, with them on their bunk beds (jealous? you bet! again, I had a regular old WASPy twin bed) and I in a sleeping bag on the rug. What went on in the other parts of that creepy funeral apartment is a totally different story.

My parents were swapping [opposite sex] partners with the other couple; whether all this sex was going on in the same room or if they were splitting off into separate corners or what, I have no idea, but this swapping went on for quite some time -- with small children in the other room, mind you, this was a very small apartment -- until my mother became pregnant with my younger sister, at which time something happened that I neither remember or I've blocked out.

My father, by his own account, was not as much into this swapping thing as my mother was or, at least, he was jealous of the relationship that had organically (c'mon! you have hot sex with someone on a pretty regular basis and some kind of bond is bound to occur, wouldn't you think? Do the math, people.) sprung up between his wife and his buddy and he became suspicious that my sister was not actually his child. Naturally, he and his buddy's wife decide to run off to West Virginia together, not to return for weeks. I am unsure as to the reasoning; I know this woman and she's always been kind of an aloof lunatic -- my father prefers his lunatics to be quick-witted and intellectual -- so I can't be sure that it was for the purpose of actually running off together, but I know that he was freaking out -- he told me so. I don't remember his absence, I don't remember his return but I do remember the night that my sister was born and that my father took me to McDonald's while my mother was at the hospital; he vomited his dinner, smoked a whole pack of cigarettes and drank four cups of black coffee with three packs of Sweet 'n Low a piece before driving me to my great-grandmother's house (not yet deceased -- five living generations, people! Amazing!) and returning the next morning with a sack of Barbies for me and bags under his eyes.

Soon after my sister's birth we moved from our detached home with an expansive yard and a tall tree in Arbutus to a town house in Columbia with a cement patio and a small square of grass, fenced between a rottweiler and some people that had bad housekeeping skills and roaches that would sometimes make their way into our home (and they didn't come from us, I'll tell you what -- my mother would die before keeping a home that attracted bugs), at which point my mother would use racial slurs and bang on the walls. I don't think it was an effective protest, for the roaches kept coming and the rottweiler kept barking and eventually we moved out, leaving my dad behind. We lived briefly, my mother and sister and me, with another single mom and her kids; we lived in Ft. Meade where I went to [part of] first grade with a bunch of army brats (that really were brats -- talk about socially awkward! Me, I mean) and where we were only allowed pencils with no erasers as big around as a thumb, and that glue that came in the clear brown bottle with a flexible rubber tip that always clogged and didn't work well as an actual adhesive. It wasn't even good for painting your hand with and peeling off...anyway, my father was busy gambling away his measly paycheck he got from the Sunpaper (that's one word in my family) to boss around the paper boys and soon defaulted on the mortgage, which was primarily in my mother's name.

She must have been saving money while we were away because she quickly bailed out the mortgage and kicked out my father; we moved back into the house and my father moved in with my maternal grandfather (seriously, try and keep up: it's exactly as it sounds), who had recently separated from my grandmother. Essentially, my parents and my grandparents were divorcing at the same time; at this point, my mother was working two jobs (three, if you count parenting, which I barely do at this point when it comes to my mother because she kind of sucked at it, honestly) and dating that guy, my dad's buddy who may or may not have knocked her up with my sister.

Talk about sketchy! This guy wore double-knit cream colored suits with black shirts underneath and boots with heels from Florsheim; this guy had long hair and a beard, for the love of maude; this guy smoked Marlboros (my dad smoked Tarytons, then switched to Vantages, then later to something that I can no longer recall) and filed his nails and had a cherry red Chevy Nova with a white vinyl interior and loved Steely Dan and sang, "the Cuervo Gold, the fine Co-lum-bian, make tonight a wonderful thing," like he wrote the damned song and it wasn't until I was older that I understood what that meant. He kept a bottle of Cutty Sark at our house and he was kind of dry and unfriendly but he made my mother happy, I guess, and before I knew what was happening he was living with us.