flop

SELF (a moment after having thrown myself on the couch across MB’s lap): So are your legs being crushed under the hideous weight of my 400 pounds?

MB: What are you talking about?!

SELF (mumbling): Well …. there’s how heavy you are and how heavy you feel.

You know?

i love this

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

— Phillip Lopate

it just keeps getting better

Today at Boheme:

MAN (not depressed braces guy): I was supposed to meet Carla, but she’s not here. (Exasperated sigh) DAMmit! She’s a !%?!-ing psychic! You think she’d remember!

SELF (rillyrilly trying not to laugh): Oh, I’m sorry.

MAN: I mean, why can’t she be something really useful — like telekinetic or something? I need some damn stuff moved!

i’m pickin’ up good vibrations

So this weekly business networking group has started meeting at Boheme. Remember how I share space with a wine lounge — coffeehouse by day, wine lounge by night, all very super hero sounding? So that just means there’s some nice space for demanding ingrate business people to congregate on a regular basis and we’re all very excited about it.

Anyway, through this group of very networky people, I have met … Carla the Intuitive Clairvoyant. It happened two weeks ago.

“Hi,” she said, putting out her hand. “I’m Carla. I’m an Intuitive Clairvoyant.”

“Oh. How interesting,” I replied, trying to sound interested.

“Yeah. What I do is — (I hadn’t asked, but) — I sense emotional vibrations from people (do you, really?) — and sense disturbances in those vibrations (oh, like a seismograph, I see, uh-huh) — and then I help people correct them usually by going back to something in their childhood. It’s always that.”

“It is, isn’t it?” And she wandered off, bored, I guess, by my emotional vibrations.

Fast forward to the next week. She walked in for her meeting. I greeted her.

“Hi, Carla.”

“Oh … hi. Uhm, you remembered my name, wow. And yours is …”

“Well, you’re the Intuitive Clairvoyant — you tell me,” I laughed, meaning it as a very special joke we could share together. She didn’t laugh. Her eyes instantly narrowed. She stared at my face. It was like a serious challenge to her.

“Uhm …. uhm … it’s ….. Janice??”

“Well, no. It’s Tracey.”

Her Intuitive Clairvoyant face fell. Not even close, really. Not Stacey or Terry or even Nancy with that correct “cee” sound which is what a neighbor lady called me every day for 6 years when I walked home from school and I was too shy to correct her so I answered to it.

Fast forward to today’s meeting. She arrived with one of the men in the group. I was behind my espresso machine — thank God — when I overheard this:

Carla: I sense some deep inner excitement coming from you.

Man: Well, actually, I’m depressed.

Carla: No, no. It’s deep level excitement, trust me.

Man: No, I’m depressed about my braces. They hurt.

I have no ending to this story, really. Just stay tuned for more adventures with Carla the Intuitive Clairvoyant. I sense them coming.

bless my moviegoing hyde

Turns out, what’s wrong with me is — I cannot go to the movie theatre.

Not that I’m not allowed to. No, that’s not it. It’s that I should not be allowed to because something happens to me on a cellular level when I enter that shielding darkness and stare at that huge screen. I think it’s some kind of hypnosis, some kind of altered state, something with my rods and cones that turns me completely nutso.

Because I literally have palpitations just thinking about the potential rudeness of any moviegoer around me.

In the pre-show semi-darkness, I sit and size people up with a furrowed judgey brow: Are you well-behaved? Are you a nutter? Do you talk loudly? Chew loudly? Rustle your wrappers loudly? Are you likely to sit anywhere too close to me? Maybe right next to me where we will spend the entire movie elbowing each other over the armrest? Because, we can’t have that. I will engage my patented water-spill-on-the-seat trick just to avoid that.

I will go insane.

Like yesterday, a couple wandered in rather late and plopped right in front of us. There were plenty of available seats in the place. But nope. RIGHT in front of us. Oh, and instantly started blabbing their blabs and munching their munchums — LOUD-ly. A split second later, I insisted we move to different seats, thereby cementing this outing as yet another precious memory My Beloved will have of good ol’ easygoing moi. We moved two rows back, leaving the requisite buffer row between us. (In my slim defense, I never move seats more than once. I do have some limits.) But then …. well, I started to worry about other people, newer people, later people, sitting in my buffer row and turning my nice new buffer row into another invasion of my personal moviegoing space.

Look. I know I sound insane. Basically, it boils down to this: I become insane worrying about the potential insanity of others. Which really makes me the most insane of all. I totally get that. But I never, ever get that in the moment. In the moment, I am Mr. Moviegoing Hyde and disturbed on a cellular level and I am not responsible for my actions. But, to bolster my insanity defense here, we always sit in the back of the side sections, never in the plump meaty middle because, well, of the overpopulation of nutters. And I need to do all I can to lessen my exposure to them — like a werewolf and the full moon or a vampire and the sun — so we sit on the sides. And who wants to sit on the sides? People like me, who are in control of their emotions, that’s who. There shouldn’t be a problem, right, because all you crazies want to be crammed in the plump meaty middle leaving me alone on the sides with my fine mental health and all. Well, actually, not alone because poor MB is dragged along like dead weight wherever I need to go to stay sane.

So there we were, re-assed in new seats, with that nice buffer row, and I was still feeling nervous about a potential nutter encroachment on my nice buffer row, so I muttered to MB, reeeal casually, “Heeey, baby, can I have some popcorn?” He passed me the tub, not suspecting, I imagine, that I would begin to strew the popcorn wildly all over the seats and floor in my nice buffer row as an encroachment deterrent against, you know, all the nutters.

“What are you doing??”

“I don’t want anyone to sit there and I don’t have any water! Will they give me a free cup of water out front?”

Heavy sigh.

“Honey, I don’t know.”

I jumped up and climbed over him — because I am Mr. Moviegoing Hyde in this moment, remember — and dashed to the concession stand to recon the area for any stray, cuplike devices. I found none and rushed back, muttering under my breath, “Well … I think the popcorn should do the trick ….” as I climbed back over MB.

We sat for a few moments in relative stability, watching the ads on the screen. Well, one of us was watching the ads; the other was swiveling her head this way, that way, a perfectly normal person scanning the area for nutters.

Just then, a man across the aisle in the semi-darkness started playing with his Blackberry or Burberry or whatever the heck those things are. Alert, Tracey! Beep-beep-beep! Obviously one of those worrisome nutters! I mumbled to MB in a steely, Clint Eastwood-like voice, my lips against his shoulder, “I swear ….. I swwwear … if he doesn’t stop when the movie starts, I’m throwing popcorn at him.”

“What?!?”

I kept on, all the while staring at Berry Face in the darkness. Staring the stare of death and popcorn flinging.

“Or maybe some ice cubes from your drink,” I breathed.

“WHAT??!”

“Yeaah. Ice cubes, that’s gooood ….” Sanity is now just a dot in the distance.

“Uhm, honey …” His voice was calm, sympathetic, and it washed warm all over me, a soothing flow.

I stared at the floor, counting the stray bits of popcorn that didn’t make it to the buffer row.

“I have movie theatre rage,” I mumbled while plucking buffer row popcorn from my lap.

“I know,” said MB, all matter of fact, as he put his arm around me. “It’s a real problem.”

My head slumped to his shoulder. “Will you still love me when the movie is over?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

mom, why did you hate me?

So very much?

dutchboyme.jpg

Oh, I see such a bright future for my little Tracey! Perhaps as …..

…. a little boy who discovers he’s really an earl and warms hearts everywhere he goes because of his bitchen hairdo:

fauntleroy2.jpg

…. a brave prince of The Round Table who defeats the Huns with his bitchen hairdo:

valiant.jpg

…. a young successful Dutch dude hawking gallons and gallons of paint the world over — all thanks to his bitchen hairdo:

dutchboy2crop.jpg

Oh, my little Tracey. I’m so proud of him. Her. Him. Er, yeah ….. what?

bad weather

We are having a massive March storm.

cold3.jpg

Southern California weather is so unpredictable, you know?

stuff i’m working on

Oh, dear. Oh, dear, peeps. I’m working on a post that will probably end up being almost impossible to finish, like this one or this one.

I don’t know why I’m doing it. Maybe I shouldn’t. Because I hate that feeling of “I cannot ever ever finish this post” that I have about those other two. Where I’m feeling like a total failure about it. And, still, I keep doing it. Sheesh.

Anyway, maybe another destined-to-be-unfinished piece will be posted soon.

Sigh ….

big news

This is my post to tell you I’m not posting today because I am so so very very tired. “Today” being tomorrow, really — Thursday — but it’s late now and today seems like tomorrow or tomorrow seems like today or some other nonsensical configuration of the space-time continuum that I wish would stop until time catches up and makes sense again.

Know what I mean?

So really, it’s like this: When you wake up and click over here or go to work and click over here or even bother at any time “today”/tomorrow to click over here, I will repay your kind support with sloth and slack-assery by not having anything new. Except this. My post telling you I’m not posting.