Okay, bear with me for a minute, or ignore me. My brain formulated and reformulated and ran over and backed over things the whole drive home. I played Annie Lenox - "I've Tried Everything" - from the Sopranos CD (twice), told myself it was because I love her voice and love hitting and holding those high notes with her (or trying to), but it was really because I wanted to cry. And I did, on the second time I played it. I think I was trying to "get it all out." It hadn't worked this morning. This has been a case in point (not "point in case"). I had a "moment." This is where searching for grants on shitty websites all morning when you should be reading teaching theory (but damn it you just don't want to!) will get you: bawling on your hubby's belly while he strokes your hair and pats your head, just before you need to head up to take a shower. The whole day just started out wrong (and I keep trying to blame it on PMS or my new seizure meds, but, of course, I talk myself out of excuses - note for later). I am horrible when I get caught up in this technical shit. We know it doesn't suit me well - but I need one to have the other (the part in which I actually get to CREATE for myself). My best friend and my sweetheart helped me get through this wretched fuckified day by just listening a couple of times. That's pretty damn cool. So fucking cool. Almost too cool. Why so cool? Why so nice . . . to me? (slap in the face, again) Back to my case in point.

The story is no longer "I Was a Teenage Mommy." This part doesn't matter so much any more really. I tried to explain it and I lost it again, early evening this time (I knew it was coming) - there on floor #3 with undergraduates waiting in the hallway to get into the classroom. It was one of those "hold it, hold it, explode!" moments. It isn't the story I want to write anymore, and, well, I just can't. Actually, I'm a little pissed at myself for ever having such a plan (another case in point). And I did have such a plan, and I thought it was a good one at one time and I confessed this: I once romanticized it. I once romanticized everything. Okay, I still do it, sometimes.

Here's where the real story might be (and what might culminate into a Master thesis)(and I understand that there is likely no way in hell that you're followin' me on this): me, NOW, still effected ever so strongly by what was then, ever so eager, still, to self-mutilate in round about ways, ever checking my back thinking Kharma's gotta' be creeping along ready to pounce on me at any minute, always thinking I'm not worthy of the fact that things are not so bad and I'm doing okay, always thinking that hardly enough punishment will ever take place. I haven't talked myself out of "fault" yet. I don't want to - do I? Sometimes, I feel childish for it; sometimes, it feels like the more responsible thing to do. Why wouldn't I be defensive of everyone ever around me, influencing me? Why do I have to blame parental figures? I've laid witness to a million excuses. I've tried out lots of them. I've tried ignoring everything, just "being." That's not so easy either. So . . . the story is bigger than I ever imagined, even five years ago. I'm back to that question of "rooting." Where are you now? Whose voice do you want to use, if you choose to say anything at all? and . . . Why do you need to say something now, if you feel you do? (It makes me want to slither back over to poetry. I love poetry. I was okay with beating myself up allusively.) The story has to change from "that was then" to "this is now."

The other day, I came up on a semi, an 18-wheeler in Daleville rollin' in off of I-69, and it had a sticker on the back of the trailer. In red letters, it read "Silly Boys, Trucks are for Girls." And, as I pulled past the truck, I peeked up to have a look at the driver way up there in the cab, and I fell in love with her. She was hunched over, wrinkled hands on her big skinny wheel. Rising hot pink sun in her face. Short dusty hair. Angled nose. Owning the road. And, yet, she reminded me of an Aztec blanket.

This is close to where I get - or maybe what I want. More knowledge. More knowledge on this odd self-destruction. I want to understand it. Know why I have yet to move past it. I want to have it in red on a fucking bumper sticker. Say, "I know this." The end.

Points to self:
no more stories from the "wrong" perspectives unless you're prepared and capable of putting yourself back into that self, because that self is gone and something you'll have to go looking for (and it might hurt because you might not like it). detach.

no more loser moments like today's. no more annie lennox on the drive home on said loser-moment days. no, you haven't tried everything. yet.

no more guilt. it's weak storyline.

Babble that I must disclose: I watched a smalltown Homecoming football parade on Friday - It meandered right through the park, past the Falls, through town, backing up five o'clock traffic to cross highway 9 and arrive at the High School. Adolescent energy popped and fizzled. The marching band sweated in polyester evergreen. Shriners buzzed around in circles on their chopper-handled three wheelers. Giant diesel trucks pulled flats of hay, loaded with kids. Princesses (even some chubbier maids from the court of 1983) sat high on shiny convertibles and grinned and waved, grinned and waved. Moody horses brought up the end (of course). One horse even refused to step foot onto the bricks of Main Street. The sophomore float was a giant toilet (and it smelled - rumor was they added a septic tank for effect). We grabbed up a whole plastic Target bag full of tossed candy. One pee-wee leaguer hit me in the head with a Tootsie Roll - and then smirked at me (no shit). The whole Middle School football team passed by and half of them screamed "Hi Mom" (damn, THAT makes me feel old).

Saturday, I tried to write something in the "persona" of my father's dead alcoholic mother, then I wasted two hours watching Animal Planet (the seizure of forty cats from the little old lady who lived in a trailer in Houston was pure emotional trauma). Today, after dinner and walnut brownies at Mamaw's (and a birthday card containing $50 !!!), we went to the park and I swung (high) on a swing. I wrestled with my son in the grass for a roll of Smarties. :)



I didn't put off everything. I had my nose in my e-mails for the rest of the afternoon/evening. I read things. Then my fourteen year old had her seventeen year old boyfriend over, and they sat in the driveway in his little gold coupe until 9PM. I figured I'd rather have them here than elsewhere, where I couldn't run out and check in on them every five-ten minutes (and, trust me, there IS something terrifying about walking up behind them when they don't know you're coming . . . me thinks: 'please, please, don't let me see an exposed adolescent penis. Please, please, please . . . '). I'm trying here, people.


Other babble I've been dying to disclose: In a nonfiction workshop on Thursday, there were three of us gathered in a loose circle, and one friend said something of my "voice" - and it troubled me. We were looking over a story that I'd written about me being fifteen and lying to my Granny about being pregnant, there in the airport, just before I took off to Seattle to visit my sister (and disclose everything from the safety of 3000 miles of distance). My workshopping friend said something along the lines of this: "So my problem is rooting - " (gotta' love those forty dollar workshop words) " - It's your voice - it changes. I'm not sure if you're a sixteen-year-old looking back on the scene the day after or if you're a thirty-year-old intelligent woman remembering." It was a damn good question. I'm not sure either.

I confessed on the Reflective Journal Blackboard Discussion Panel today that I was feeling wimpy. Now, all of my fellow "colleagues" know of my insecurities (perhaps a stupid move - vocabulary and scholarly-name-tossing has been bubbling along the edge of competitive). I might've broken a glass ceiling. I doubt it. Eh . . .

I sorta' screwed up my little "how to use images" lesson this morning. I left the poor little students snoring. My mentor kept nodding ever so politely. I refused to ask questions . . . to "engage" them in the ten minutes that I was given. I showed them a page of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (which is always cool, right?). I brought up "illuminated manuscripts" (eek, maybe not no cool for freshmen). I told them they couldn't just Google and find copyright-free images (broke their dualist/absolute knowing hearts - but, then again, most were barely listening). I told them they were "lucky" to have me to inform them of such a thing, because - images and text? - I love 'em both madly! Well, I don't think I used the words "love" or "madly." My psuedo-confidence was met with blank stares (but isn't it always, there, in LaFolette's basement?). As soon as the words dropped and I dove straight in to boring hubglub, I felt shrunken and stupider. My ears were hot. My neck was itchy. I started overusing "uh," the magical time/space/thought filler.

But all is well, really. Really. I saw my error immediately afterward. I understand that my transition from student to teacher may not be an easy one (I've been a student for 10+ years and the classroom has never been "mine"). In fact, it hit me that I had ditched my original plan to engage them - and I think it would've been a good one, but I chickened out. Actually, I could've taken it a couple of different ways. And both involved an awesome discovery late last night as I attempting to throw this thing together (another lesson learned: these teaching efforts require practice, pre-runs, meditation, whiskey, something . . . ).

My awesome discovery was: The US Library of Congress Copyright-Free Photo Stream (in particular, 1930-40's in Color) on Flickr. All twenty-seven pages of the database made me giddy. Georgia sharecropper's in the fields in 1941. Women in factories soldering during WWII. Cowboys. Zeppelins. Grungy circus posters. Paratroopers. Kids sprawled on floral bedspreads. Family Portraits. Homesteaders.

Full color everywhere . . . and no known restrictions on publication. So I drifted back to the collection this evening and just sifted through the pictures to make myself feel better. I've got to do something with a couple of these images. I can't just let them sit there. Engage. Enjoy. Maybe I can use one for a writer's response type contest for CRT. I foresee a series of image/reactions/prose things. Then again, perhaps I should just save them all for me. Poetry. Therapy (from preliminary "how to teach english comp" courses).



This is the only one that I'm givin' ya'. ;) If you have a literary reaction, send it to ME.

Since it is (was) my birthday, I told myself I should/could really write something. This is as far it got. I missed the f-in deadline. Typical of my last 34 years. I could/should write a novel (but writing nonfiction has been making me feel clammy . .. why? I wonder . . . ). This evening, a lecture from a journalist about Global Warming (I like capitalizing it) was my cherry on top of everything. A smart ass kid got up and asked "Why can't we just pass this on down to our children?" (or something along that line - a lame attempt at making his fellow freshmen laugh). Then he bopped away from the mic, his hair swinging. And, actually, the little ass had a point. Such a manner we've been taught.

I have yet to take it all in and roll around on it.

I heart my Harper's "Findings" (October 2008). I think my subscription ran out, but they keep sending me issues. This issue came to me lovingly, damp and wrinkled by these tropic-like remnants of Gustav.

Scientists found that "alcoholic mice who are forced to stop drinking no longer try to swim when placed in a beaker of water, perhaps indicating depression."
(poor, poor alcoholic mice forced to quit hittin' the spirits cold turkey . . . there is not a sorrier lot)

"Spanish euro notes, said chemists, have accumulated the most cocaine."
(so . . . I wonder how many times my fingers have picked up microscopic remnants of cocaine [or other] from US dollars that have once crossed the hands of local drug dealers . . . but then I don't touch the larger bills often. Drug dealers use vending machines.)

"ecologists in Wales feared an invasion by carnivorous nocturnal blade-toothed eyeless ghost slugs."






















"Scientists who designed a computer model of a street full of drunk Welshmen concluded that fights break out on nightlife-heavy streets because staggering drunks impede and thereby irritate other people."
(I am so glad that money is being poured into creating a much-needed computer-model for such a study. When I'm sitting on a corner, homeless, with my puppy dog eyes and my cardboard Please-Give-Me-Money-to-Feed-My-Children sign, I'll know to avoid all "staggering drunks" so that I might not be impeded nor irritated to the point of putting an imbalance to street peace.)

"Western doctors were concerned about growing demand for designer vaginas."
(What of designer penises? Doesn't anybody want a designer penis anymore?)

(note: when I typed in the word "vaginas", the computer caught the plural as a misspelling. I added it to the dictionary. It does not catch the word "penises", however.)

I'm much too tired to be thinking of designer penises.

Here's a link I received from a friend/artist: The Triumph of Shit. I'd asked him to send me links to any cool artist's sites that he came upon so that I might solicit these cool artists to submit work to CRT. He said: "Here's one of the most honest appraisals of on-line (or any, for that matter of today's) art I've yet to find." I think he's depressed. Or, worse, he was serious.

Something that depressed me: "Percentage change since last year in the prices of eggs and toilet paper, respectively: +34, +9" (Harper's Index)" And the flaming shit bag on the porch is out because shit has been elevated to a more respectable status (see Triumph of Shit link). WHAT fun will THIS Halloween be??? At least we still have the carnivorous nocturnal blade-toothed eyeless ghost slugs (I have my costume!).

For twenty sleepy minutes this morning, I thought I was ahead of myself, that I had done all the reading that I could do for my TA classes, and that maybe I could get away with poking my head into Erica Lopez's Flaming Iguanas (I know that sounds wrong). The dog had jumped up the stairs and into our bedroom to scratch himself before daylight. His little dog tags jingled and jingled until I finally pulled myself out of a dream that I was manning one of those red Salvation Army buckets (but I don't think it was X-mas . . . ). If I could only get myself up, I told myself, I could sip coffee. Lazy around. Kids are gone. The toddler always sleeps past 8AM (unless she pees the bed). I'll take the whole couch to spread out. I'll snuggle up with my gray afghan. No TV. No other luminous evils. The notion of free time just sorta' fizzled out with the sunrise. My god. When was pay day again?

Today is another one of those long days - I have a class lasting til 9:10PM. I did run into Bets in the hallways of TCOM yesterday, and it would seem that we're determined to make our Thursday nights into One-Single-Desperate-Beer-Before-the-Week-Ends events. I smiled evil and told her "You know I'm up for it." I walked away whistling. I am excited. Too bad the Fickle Peach doesn't sit next to a massage parlor, where I could sip my foreign orangey-flavored brew while I have all of the tension released from my shoulders by way of some Asian lady's magical fingers. Maybe I should re-take up shooting pool.

I don't have much to say this morning (I've been pouring my heart and the dregs of my stomach into NonFiction workshop - well, trying to anyway), but I did receive two books in the mail that promise to be promising. I confess, I stole a minute and read two or three stories out of Hobart #9 as soon as it arrived in the mail. Barry, it would seem that there are few of your stories in which the I-guy in the story isn't getting a blow job . . . I read "Bad Beat" and wanted to go ritualisticly burn my bikini and thank the gods that I never felt compelled to traipse around in stilettos for a "Bikini Showdown" (just kidding, I don't even OWN a bikini . . . now). I also received an anthology from Graham's literary mag: Dogzplot. I flipped through it and saw lotsa' poetry. Anyone can borrow one or both of these from me if you'd like to have a look at them (that is if anyone's reading this) for I won't have the free time any time until perhaps after the New Year to actually sit and read them myself . . . I am a bad time manager. We'll see how this fault effects the future . . . when I become - *gulp* - a first-year English composition teacher.

Note: On this day, in the month of my birth, nearly precisely 34 years after my birth (and I promise I didn't give my mother much trouble leeching and tunneling around as an infant - I am Virgo), I discovered that I have acquired white hair. A few strands at the top and around my pudgy baby face. Well, it was yesterday, really, and, yesterday, I was a little shaken by it. I preoccupied myself with it (mirror check, pluck, mirror check, pluck). I think they're mostly gone now (this is when preoccupation and vanity is a self-service). And I guess it wasn't me who discovered it; it was Matt who pointed it out to me while we were having a smoke break before our lunch break (a girlfriend told me that him pointing out the fact to me was plain evil - he should've gently plucked the hoary strands from my head while I was sleeping). At first, I blamed my Sun-In Bleach spray - white blond, I say, it's white blond. Then it hit me as I was sitting alone in my office (after a half-hour long mirror-check-pluck thing in the women's bathroom, not caring who was watching) - Cedar Point! The Dragster and the SkyScraper scared the holy shit out of me - Remember? Henry in King's IT - hair turned white as Vitamin D milk after seeing IT's unseen form just once (and what did IT turn out to be in the book - a mystical turtle or something?)??! Could be. Could be. Then, at the football game last night (Overtime! And we still lost it - I hope those kids at the grocery store were buying the toilet paper to TP the house of our own kicker) another possibility hit me: these teenagers! These teenagers are speedily aging me, wearing on me, yanking at my teeth, weakening my immune system, forcing me into seizures, screaming constantly, begging me for money, leaving trails of trash behind them, worrying me that they'll be having sex, catch funky warts or crabs, then spawn other people irresponsibly. I am living with THREE teenagers. Of course. It's the teenagers. Well, that was easy. Then again, I could just as easily blame my mother and genetics. Mom has a lovely white/silver horsey tail going.

This may sound strange, but I think the white hair was just what I needed for where I am at this point in time. I think I might dye it all white, cut it off, go pixie.

Tonight, I sipped an imported beer from a bottle at the Fickle Peach after humming my way through a latenite class on how to teach English. I was thinking that my Nonfiction Class should've all met me there, at the bar, given the nature of our first workshop/reading. We all splayed our guts wide open this afternoon. The cool thing was that we were full of it (guts I mean). Therapy is therapy. I needed it (the beer, I mean).

Because it's late and because my little calendar is so fucking full that in the days to come I may not be writing much, I decided to post a bit of my little nonfiction draft here (remember, I take criticism - and praise - well):



Fark, The Intruder

We had room for a table in the kitchen once. When I was five, Mom married an infantile man with jet black hair and four chins, and we tried eating there in the kitchen as a family in the evenings. These are my earliest memories of round-the-table eating. These were pretentious dinners. Slobbery and gluttony en cluster. The large man frumped around in dark shoes, dark slacks, and mustard yellow works shirts. He must’ve sold something for a living. Vacuum cleaners? Car parts? Spring of 1980, from the end of March to the end of May, I remember being in kindergarten trying to write my last name as “Fark” – “fork” with an “a” or "fart" with a "k" – because I thought since Mom took his last name, I had to assimilate. My cowboy daddy, Ronnie Hartley, had been replaced.

Mom was never a cooker, but she had tried to please her man in her first marriage, and she tried again in this one. Lumpy hand-mashed potatoes, canned corn, frozen Salisbury beef patties in boxes. The old stand-by: fry the meat alongside taters in one giant grease vat. Or her one specialty: baked chicken rolled in saltine cracker crumbs and Parmesan cheese; add a side of peas.

For the wedding, the man’s mother sewed all three of us itchy polyester dresses. My sister’s and mine were pink with lines of white lace placed strategically from our wastes and up over our shoulders to look like overall straps. My mother’s dress was A-line and aqua. Heavier ever since she had me, her hue and shape was not unlike 70’s refrigerators still lingering on showcase floors. Her dark, foot-tall bee-hive was the shape of a pudgy cookie jar.

It was a small ceremony at the First Christian Church. Red bricks and ferns for a backdrop. We girls made perfect flower girls. I don’t remember what flowers we carried (but I bet they were plastic). I don’t remember any professional photos, and I only have one snapshot from it, folded in half, of my sister and me – glowing strawberry blondies in those unlovely pink dresses, fake smiling and holding on to each other tightly with the front door of our little house wide open behind us.

In the weeks to come, Fark ran over my sister’s black and white kitten in the driveway and huffed and sneered like he was disgusted when she had wanted to bury the squashed remnants. He threw a tantrum when mom wouldn’t let him eat our boiled Easter eggs before we ever dyed them. She slapped his hand, and he fussed and jumped up and down in the kitchen, rattling pots and glasses in the cabinets, rocking the stove out away from the wall. While Mom played Easter Bunny, placing pink and pale blue eggs in the nooks of trees and in tall onion-grass patches, Fark poked his thumbs through our baskets looking to steal our Cadburys. My sister tattled on him.

One evening, Fark sent me to bed early because I refused to eat the fat ring on my Shake-n-Bake pork chop. And then he finished it up for himself; at least, that’s what my sister told me. I remember that round table in the kitchen. I’m on the chair hanging my head upside down to see under it. It would’ve been nice to have a puppy. I’m up again pushing a blubbery strip of grisly pork fat around my plate with my fork thinking it’s an oiled up choo choo train. I’m not sure what exact words are said but the gist is “eat it or else.” I ate all the real meat, the white stuff. This stuff would be slime between my teeth, like chewing a loogy. Then I’m in my bed, a room away, listening to forks still clanking around on plates. Mom shows up like an angel and I convince myself that, yes, I must’ve needed her. After dinner, Jim had stretched out on the black vinyl couch and dozed to Quincy or Fantasy Island, and Mom had wandered in where I cried and wiped my hair away from my forehead, squeezed herself into the bottom bunk and assured me, yes, I was a good girl, and, yes, that man was evil. Surely, I pooched out my lip and nodded. This was all she needed. Before it ever started it was over. He wasn’t enough like her Ronnie. And she knew, in truth, Ronnie would’ve rather spanked me and then sent me off bawling.

A divorce so early wasn’t easy on Fark. Not that I remember him crying over it. I just remember him disappearing and a mild form of happiness resuming again. Mom took up sweet freedom. Embraced it, swinging sweet and single, keeping it visible for Ronnie who had immediately remarried Mitzi, the fruit of his soirees way before Mom had ever left him, a drinker not unlike himself. But, I think Fark moved back in with his mother. In Illinois maybe. I think he wrote my mother a few sad, boring love letters. He tried to get our house in the divorce. It seems my cowboy daddy stepped in like a hero and scared him. Maybe he cornered him in an alley. Maybe Ronnie, 6'4" and sturdy, just stood over him. Once. Drunk. Maybe Ronnie kept his mouth shut, and all I ever heard really was Mom telling a friend, “Ronnie bought this house for me. He wouldn’t let someone take it.”

The courts gave Fark nothing but an order to pay child support and alimony - $6 a month – to a woman and two daughters who barely knew him. I never knew of this until a few years ago, when my mother and I were talking about divorces and old lovers, and she threw the fact on the table like a second-place ribbon. She said he might’ve sent two or three checks in the envelopes with those letters. She said, now, nearly thirty years later, Fark owes her almost two-thousand dollars.

All of my mother's phone calls of late begin with "Did you hear the bad news?" and then she tells me of a recent death - always someone I barely know (remember Whistle Butt?). The stories are a constant flow, a creep up from where I once was. A wire ever-connecting me to small town insanity. A fucking freakshow. It's easy to see why I ran AWOL. This guy, the coach, I went to school with. I still didn't know him really. I remember he was a chubby little kid with freckles who kept his hair buzzed. He was a go-cart racer (and it pinched and squeezed his tubby thighs - I saw him and his father and brothers race once). He was well off. Well, better off than me. He had stuck to the area - the dark butted corner of southern Indiana - and had become my nephew's football coach. He was 31 years old. Although the article says "no comment" as to cause of death - I've heard that he hung himself and left a letter beneath his feet (I don't know what's true). I know the team wasn't doing so well. My sister had just bitched to me a couple days ago about how he had wanted the team to practice on Labor Day; she wasn't going to let her boy go. Marty taught Bible Literature classes (Does Bible Literature in Public High School NOT say enough???) there in the one and only high school in the county (a county filled with farmers and coal miners - where even the rich aren't so rich, but you only know that if you travel to an actual city to see actual rich people). The comments on the article (linked below) are amazing. They're picking at rumors, putting the head of Darth Vader on the local prosecutor, calling the county "old school," quoting the Bible. Some were too nasty and they had to remove them. This isn't the first creepy story to come out of Pike County. Let's just say, there have been murders (lots of pits and squirrel banks to dump bodies in). And I used to skinny dip there??? My sister called me tonight on her way home from Indy (where she had gone to be with her step-sister who had just had cervical cancer removed - "a spot the size of the end of my thumb" she said), and she tells me, "If he was here right now, I'd smack him. I am pissed." She was fresh and steaming. She wanted me to tell her that it was okay to call the school tomorrow to ask them how they would be handling things. She wanted to tell me how shocked she was (repeatedly, for over an hour while she was driving). She knows it's something that her son will carry with him forever. What has he shown those boys? What was he afraid of? What was he hiding? I say, "He killed himself. Those text messages . . . definitely something dark. Sometimes you think you know someone when . . . Then again, he could have been depressed following that gastric by-pass surgery. Isn't that a side-effect?" I don't know anything about anything. I don't have an answer for suicide. I don't have any answers for what goes on down there. I just take note with amazement (most times I end up laughing, sometimes I just twitch a little). I told her she needed to be straight up with Ethan, because he was 16 and they were going to hand him piles and piles of bullshit (he'd already heard a ton of it and was picking and choosing his own truth system). It reminded me of my cousin Jimmy's suicide - At the funeral they exalted him (played Sweet Home Alabama like an anthem and showed up in blue jeans, stoned to recant back-when-Jimmy-was-Jimmy stories); meanwhile, his two kids were made to stay at Grandma's. Then my sister's cell phone went out just after she passed Pike Central High School (she was checking to see if they had anything flashing on the board outside - words like "You'll be missed, Marty" or "Counseling Chapel, tomorrow at noon"), and then I lost her. Typical.

Ah, Pike County

Today, we celebrated my toddler’s 4th birthday in Mamaw Great’s lacey blue livingroom. We showed up in two cars - my own three teenagers, Matt’s teenager, and two extra teenagers (Ash’s boyfriend from military school and my 17 year old boy’s latest girlfriend). I felt guilty for showing up with so many extra faces to feed without having given those in charge of grilling the burgers some kind of forewarning. It sorta’ darkened the whole dinner for me. The guilt started bubbling up while GrandDad speedily versed the usual prayer. Matt’s family can be hard to decipher. I kept imagining them all angry and myself oblivious. So I was trying not to be oblivious. I turned on my fully sensitive sensors and jumped at every snicker and raised eyebrow. I avoided eye contact with Matt’s moody younger brother all together. Once I saw that there was plenty of food left over (teenage girls go easy on grilled beef and hotdogs), I relaxed a little but was back to being tense – almost queezy—watching my little birthday girl open present after present of pink, frilly, Disney Princess themed toys. How am I letting this pink princess shit remain a constant in her little developmental mind? At least I had refused to buy her The Little Mermaid sheet cake and convinced her that she wanted the one with SpongeBob. I even angled the shopping cart as we were picking cakes so that she wouldn’t see The Little Mermaid sitting there curt with her red hair on top of all that sea green frosting. I was happier when she came to be infatuated with one little cheap Dora the Explorer marker and book that I’d bought her. The Cinderella doll and the Beauty and the Beast Polly and the Pockets were left to the wayside for the evening.

Today was the end to one long and eventful Labor Day weekend. I wish I could totally revamp the days and the details – all of them – that I know I made note to myself to remember later. But most of the little details are gone. I still have a few . . . I’ll share a few here.

On the drive up, we sailed by an old paper mill in Ohio: The Piqua Paper Box. What a great name. I made myself remember it (although I had to check the map again for the name of the city). The factory was a parched heart. The city had spun an invisible web over it. But I think it was still running, pounding out boxes, employing a handful.

Where we stayed, where we ate breakfast (the continental breakfast was just donuts and pour your own waffles so we shrugged it off and went to McD’s), etc. there were large portraits and framed newspaper articles in honor of Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison everywhere.

The hallway by the washer and dryer, not far from the indoor pool, just by the stairs where we went up and down to our large hotel room (FOUR full size beds!) smelled distinctly of mansweat – mansweat strong enough to almost completely knock out the lingering chlorine – as if someone had soured the dryer with a pair of the raunchiest pair of sneakers and shorts. I mentioned it, but no one else seemed bothered by it. Not even Matt’s moody little brother – who considered calling the main office to complain about the mold blossoms on the ceiling of our room’s bathroom. The smell did not drift up. It was only bad upon passing through.

At Cedar Point, I surprised myself. I was able to endure and was feeling testy – like “Let’s see how high and fast I can get before this little headache really kicks my ass.” EVEN after The Dragster, the finale, the last ride we had time for – after my fourteen-year-old drug me through crowds of flashing gel necklaces and red devil horns to find the long line to ride (because I was so pooped I could no longer run AND I needed to PEE) – a migraine never showed its full face. I even managed to hold my pee until after 3.8 seconds of 120 miles per hour all the way up to 420 feet – twisting, blurred lights, constant screaming (my throat hurt afterwards), tearing wind. Imagine: a jet airplane crash, then wanting to do it again.

I am only ashamed for throwing a tantrum beneath the propeller-like wings of the SkyScraper because my hubby refused to ride it with me. I got him up there finally, but I’m telling myself that I hadn’t really thrown a tantrum to get my way – I was pissed because suddenly we were snapping at each other like mad seals, suddenly he was refusing like a baby and I had my teeth clenched, suddenly his moody little brother was making fun of us, suddenly – as soon as the tears rimmed my lower lids (which is a typical event when I get pissed) – everyone was in my face trying to make it all better. I had to stomp away furious to smoke. I don’t like to think of it as “Hey, it worked.” An eventual scuffle was inevitable. Matt agreed to go up there with me, and we thought we might die, but it was (of course) a massive turn on (which is a bad thing when you’re sharing a room with five other family members). No regrets. No regrets.

The absolute BEST was viewing the sunset over Lake Eerie, roller coasters silhouetted black against tangerine-upon-peach-upon-strawberry skies, UPSIDE DOWN while spinning on the massive pendulum that was MaxAir (a ride that Matt’s moody little brother called “pussy” and refused to ride).

Put-In Bay was a scratchy wool cap on the hot head of our trip to northern Ohio. Note to Self: If you’ve blown all of your money at Cedar Point the day before, don’t go running to Put-In Bay thinking that you’ll actually get to enjoy yourself. It’s a party island. Yuppies looking for wine. Tan shirtless boys on mopeds. Bands playing in bars without walls (I swear I heard a bad version of the Scooby Doo song). If you can afford the Ferry ride (don’t forget, it’s round trip – X2), you’ll have to afford a ride into town once the Ferry drops you off ($3 per person in Ken’s long white, red-interior-carpeted taxi wagon). Then, if you’re going to get yourself around, you’ll have to fork over $50 for a golf cart (Of course, with our large group we either needed TWO golf carts OR an eight-seater, which were nowhere). We didn’t rent a golf cart, we just sort of strolled around. The Ferry ride was enjoyable. Seagulls always cheer me up. People crowded into small places (like the top floors of small Ferries) always make my ears perky.

On the island, we did end up riding an elevator up to the top of the 3rd tallest national monument, a lighthouse shaped thing, marking some British-American battle on the waters during which men died who had manned ships with names like Scorpion, Ariel, Lawrence, and Porcupine. The chubby white-haired man manning the elevator tried to make things interesting and asked us on the way down “Does anyone know the other two tallest national monuments?” We weren’t a cheery crowd (and, yes, I’m a tad claustrophobic). My son proudly states, “The Eiffel Tower.” I sunk in the corner.

The drive back was long, and the air conditioner kept me shivering and awake. We took a toll road over to I-69, and it was so straight, such a fucking boring view out the window that I was squashed up against (as my fourteen-year-old snoozed on my shoulder). I tried to convince myself that Indiana was more colorful than Ohio, but I think it was only the sun shifting out of my eyes once we turned south, towards home. Or maybe it was all of those bright-ass Out-of-State Fireworks billboards.