Holly Northrop Blog

Still shooting with the Horizon 202 and I've got about another week before I should 'respectively' give it back. Seeing how I have to go into Manhattan twice this week I should be good. Going from the solid square format of my Holga to shooting in panoramic is a refreshing change. Suddenly the world has opened up. Not all shots can be pans, although it could be fun to do a series.

Martha and I went to see Batman over the weekend. We originally had tickets to the IMAX in Nyack but we decided against making Martha basically drive to work on a Saturday. After driving all week long from Hudson to Mahwah and then back, by Friday she's pretty bat shit crazy so adding another day, is nothing short of cruel. At the time we ordered tickets it sounded like a fun idea but on the day of the event we changed our minds and went up to the local crap theater, here in Hudson.

There were maybe fifteen people there but the truly stand out bunch was a family that sat in the last row up to our right. There were four of them, mom, dad, and two sons and all so very, very overweight that together they could have made three more people. They sat in the last row with an empty seat between each one of them and proceeded to wrinkle paper and chew food for a solid two hours of the two and a half hour movie. They would eat and eat and then every fifteen minutes of so they would send one of the kids down to the concession stand to stock up on candy and free refills on popcorn and soda. They only stopped eating when the food trough closed. Finally, the last thirty minutes of the movie were quiet.

The movie was long and Heath was awesome. I found the nurse outfit more disturbing then anything else. Free refills and processed foods should be eliminated.

I think I might be reaching the end of my ability to go to a theater. Martha and I have large TV so honestly what the fuck are we doing? At home we can get fucked up, pause for bathroom and water breaks and the occasional 'I need a moment break' without any trouble at all. I can touch and lay on anything I want without fear and stickiness. The only things that are sticky in my house are the things that are supposed to be sticky, like tape and spray mount. Ok so we don't have surround sound and for the moment we have to wait until things are released on DVD but still.

Jasmine's apartment saga continues. She's found a place that she loves, and is in the high range of her price range. That's funny, it's not really her price range it's more like ours now isn't it. Martha spoke with the landlord, she being the more responsible sounding out of the two of Jasmine's mothers. Technically, Jazz has three mothers, but none of us considers that beer-drinking bitch in PA to be anything more than a pain in the ass.

Speaking of asses, Jasmine's father has yet to pony up any money to help his daughter out. He gave her 100 bucks for her birthday, which she proceeded to spend on gas money to go see him, visit a friend in Pittsburgh and then back home to school. Nice. You know, I could get over shit faster if he would stop doing shit.

Anyway, the plan is to go to Pittsburgh once Jazz is a little settled. I think we are going to stay a few days and hang out with her. I want to visit my grandparents' graves and Martha wants to see actual living people. It will be hard to resist the urge to drive that extra hour up Route 8 and burn down a certain brick house with a recently landscaped yard, but I'll try.

I did mange to do a few things over the holiday besides lay around and watch movies. I cleaned up, or more likely messed up, some of my code; added a new logo thing and did some general site maintenance. Real boring stuff. I pulled work for the Krappy Kamera Contest and Toycamera.com has me as the featured artist. I'm not sure for how long I'll be on the homepage so the gallery link is here.

Miss Simon came through here Tuesday-Wednesday and then again on Saturday night. She has her very own version of travel hell that only underscores our decision to stay here and have the rest of the country clog the nations highways. Why travel when New York City finally clears out and one can move about without too much annoyance? Shave a few million off the total and things become quite nice. So nice that a trip from Jersey to Queens really wasn't that fucked up even with the 7 train running on a screwy schedule.

Jasmine went to Grandma Northrop's house in Tennessee. According to Jazz, grandma has been sick and therefore the two of them didn't do much. Jasmine spent the majority of her trip to the deep dark south hanging out with the twenty-three year old neighbor boy and his friend, smoking dope and getting drunk at an all-night bowling alley. The crabapple certainly didn't fall very far from that tree. She stayed up partying all night Saturday and then boarded a 8:30am flight to Charlotte where she had a small layover until her flight to Pittsburgh dropped her off at her fathers. By the time he saw her I can only imagine what she smelt like. I am so glad I was totally out of the loop on all of it. It's way funnier over the phone then in person.

Thanksgiving was different this year. Well, wait, Thanksgiving has always been a little different seeing as how I haven't played the roll of 'daughter coming home' in twenty-five years.

As your average disgruntled fucked up kid of the 1970s, Turkey Day was always my favorite day to do a shit-load of drugs. That is if we did not go to Grandma Schneider's House. Grandma lived on a hilltop full of black snakes, about 15 miles outside of Midway, PA. She had a chicken coup and every year slaughtered her own turkey. Grandma Schneider's house was crazy scary and anything stronger than a joint was NOT recommended. The coolest thing at Grandma's house was her black and white dog named Zippy. I hung out with him as much as I possibly could.

If we stayed in Ohio, I would hang out with dad all day while he watched hours of football. It was the one safe place to be, even if he fell asleep. Mom would never mess with a day of sports and I would lie on the floor between the TV and my father, reading horror novels. (I became the dog.) Salem's Lot and football saved me from my mother and myself.

The last time I "went home" for Thanksgiving was in 1980. I had been away at college for the five months prior and after eight hours on a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh, I arrived in Cincinnati with a duffel bag full of neurosis and a head full of acid. I was having a good day and it was precisely because of the drugs that I was able to be pleasant.

It is almost as though my dilated pupils had taken a photo of that particular day. I remember the image of dinner so very, very well. Probably because it was the last time I ever went home for a holiday. I remember it better than I remember any actual conversation that most likely happened between the three of us. The image of the turkey candlestick holders that caught the wax drippings from the candles, their light flickering off of my mother's china and for a brief moment, everything seemed comfortable, still lingers in the shadows of my psyche. I recall how my eyes followed the light around the thin gold rim of my plate and then looking up to my left at my mom just as she smiled at me. I then shifted my eyes over to the right at my father and caught a glimpse of him watching her with his crooked, Dick Cheney grin.

He had good reason to keep an eye on her. My mom could go from semi-happy and laughing to yanking her lit cigarette out of the beanbag ashtray and pointing its red ember at my nose, murmuring strange things about Meadville, marijuana, abortion or my 'rotten friends'.

Yes, well enough of that silliness, she is dead now and her china sits in a moldy basement in Butler, PA. C'est la fucking vie.

Thanksgiving was different this year. I made Filet Mignon and Martha ate almost a whole homemade pumpkin pie. We watched the fine cinema of Fritz Lang with his masterwork M and we took naps. A little bit of German horror, a nap, extended family floating in and out, and turkey lunch with friends in Queens. It all sounds pretty perfect to me.

Jasmine called me from Charlotte NC while in route to her Grandmother's house for Thanksgiving. The child had several layovers (she is young, it is cheap and when she makes the big bucks she can fly straight through) but the one in NC flipped her out 'cause everyone at the gate was staring at her. I said; "Well peanut, look at you. They don't see things like you down there every day now do they?" She got snippy and said that she was in jeans and a very nice sweater. I pointed out that she wasn't in a t-shirt with stains on the front of it she laughed, became very quiet and then whispered, "Oh God mom, you're right."

She then rode a puddle jumper in a thunderstorm to the middle of nowhere and to Grandma's house she went. What is it with old folks living in the woods? It is not as if her Grandmother grew up there. She moved there very late in life. Now my Grandma, who was the crazy old age of 101 when she died, lived in a house that my Grandfather built way up on a goat path that was damn near impossible to get to. It sat on top of a hill and what he hadn't plowed up for farming and the chicken coop was overgrown with wild lavender bushes and wasps. To this day whenever I smell lavender, I think of Grandma and surprisingly, this is not a bad thing.

The nearest town was Bulger, PA and that was 40 minutes of twisty back country roads to the A&P where Grandma could pick up her six-month supply of meat. My dad was always driving our smoke filled Buick Wildcat (a car the size of my current living room) at least 30-40 miles over the speed limit, praying for a fireball type of death he was, I am sure. My mom chain-smoked whenever we were around Grandma and as far as I can tell, she had every reason to. Grandma bitched at my mother relentlessly and it was the only reason I enjoyed going down there. Grandma trumped mom and we all know what mom did to me. It really was an amazing carload of crazy women all without seatbelts and I cannot believe that dad did not kill us.

My Grandma lived there up on the hill until the day she pulled my grandfather's shotgun out of the closet, loaded the double barrels in the driveway and fired at the Wheels On Meals van. They WERE ON HER PROPERTY, would be one way to look at it. After that, they moved her to a "community" where she lived another twenty-five years and drove anyone who came near her to the point of tears. It was only the last two years of her life that she sweetened up a bit mostly because she didn't know who the hell anyone was and asked every one if they would get her a bowl of ice cream.

But when she was younger and as sharp as a railroad spike, she didn't have so much of a temper as she had a "way". She was Scotch Irish and had a look in her ice blue eyes much like that of someone who could slit your throat or let you live. Either way was fine with her. What the whole Scotch Irish thing means is that I come from crazy blood that was boiled deep in the heart of the Northern Ireland's right to bear arms and blow shit up nuttiness that settled here, in Appalachian country bringing all that catholic/protestant, us against them crap around here. Any kind of coal mine uprising and Union talk started with these folks. They are all nuts and are proud to defend their right to be nuts. Think militias or The Freemasons, and you have it. My Grandfather and my father were both Masons.

Yeah, right, anyway, my Grandma had waste length, coal black hair that she kept up in a bun except for when she was sleeping. When my grandfather was alive, I had to sleep in the same bed with her. They had separate bedrooms (I do not want to know why) and my god I have to tell you she was a true fright to sleep next to. I actually do not think I slept there -ever. I would lie there next to my grandmother and stare out into the pitch-black room waiting for the vampires to come.

My grandfather died when I was seven, (heart attack right there in the middle of the living room) and after that every Thanksgiving for the next ten years I had to sleep alone in his bedroom. This was a whole other horror story due to my grandmother never having thrown out any of his clothes. All of which were still hanging in the closet in his bedroom, at the foot of his bed that I was trying to sleep in. Every morning I woke up shocked that I was still alive. My dad, who by this point in his game of "my fucked up life" had completely embraced the bizarre by packing only a travel bag with shaving supplies and a few other toiletries when we would visit. The entire time we were there, he would wear grandpa's clothes. All of it, shirts, pants, jackets and shoes. Within five years of my grandfathers' death, there was not enough pot on the planet for me to smoke to make any of it better. At fifteen I brought almost a pound of dope with me and it was gone within a week. I think I was just sitting in the woods in a snowdrift eating it like candy after I ran out of rolling papers mid-week.

Every year around Thanksgiving, I think about my Grandma, mom, dad and the whole bird thing. See, Grandma would kill the bird right there in the backyard. I could watch from the kitchen window if I wanted too but didn't have to since that horrifying year she took me out there with her when I was five and saw shit that no child should ever see. After that, I always stayed in the house at the farthest point away from the back porch where she would be plucking the larger feathers off the headless dead bird. Then she would bring it in the house, running it under hot water and flinging it around the kitchen, hacking out the various organ meats and saving the good ones, things known as "gizzards", off to the side to make gravy and side dish crap that I, gun to my head and starving to death, would never eat. Yet somehow, this bowl of chunky grey liver and heart pieces always ended up sitting next to me on the table. Her pies where the best ever and usually that is all I would eat. I would smoke pot and eat pie. Yep, that's about right.

After dinner, Grandma liked to watch Professional Wrestling. She would sit in her rocker and scream in broken English with a thick Irish accent at the RCA Black and White TV. She would laugh, cackle was more like it, when the black blood would spill and she loved it when they vomited off the side of the ropes. Sometimes we all would play cards but that never lasted very long. My dad and I could play for hours and hours but that is a different story.

We did this every year until I ran away from home when I was seventeen. I had one other Thanksgiving with my parents when I was eighteen. It was at home in Ohio in the dining room of all places. I brought a boy home with me from college and we both dropped a hit of microdot about five hours before dinner. From what I remember, that is the last time I saw my mom's china and my dad was in his own clothes.

Last Saturday, Sheri, Martha and I went into a store that sells candles, incense and other shit that I have no idea what it is all used for. The incense was on sale and I picked up the only package of Lavender, opened the end took a long slow smell and it all came rushing back to me. I held it to Martha's nose; she took one whiff, wrinkled her face up and said, "I hate lavender." I put it back in the bin and that was that.

Ah, yes but that was my Grandma, Jasmine's great grandma, and she has been dead now for only three years. The Grandma that Jasmine is staying with is different in a more calming, birding kind of way. Sweet woman who hates me only because I left her son. Fair enough.

WORDS ARE THE NEW CRANK
Miss Martha has a blog. The other side of the coin, the other shoe, the voice of the sane one, on good days anyway. This should be fun.

Martha bought me a pill cutter and the other night I sat in bed and cutup half of my Xanax into bite size morsels for easy continuous daily coverage. I did this while jotting down album lists and reading the Sundance catalog. These surges are no fucking joke. My headache's are back and by Friday I should be unable to function. Pain is constant; Xanax makes me not care for about an hour.

It is good to feel like I am at least part of the planet again. For almost three months, I have been in a fog and with the meds gone I feel like I could eat raw meat and kick someone's ass. Probably at the same time. I have so much energy that I am back to running up steps, tucking sideways into subway cars and I even carried a gallon of hot house red paint home from K-Mart the other night. I feel like I could build a house, burn it down and rebuild it again.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!