Holly Northrop Blog

It took eleven hours for us to drive to Pittsburgh due to rain, fog, traffic and one highway closing accident. PA threw everything but snow and flying baby monkey asses at us. Well, at least with the detour I was able to see Altoona again. Woo Hoo! The day we arrived Jasmine was sick as a dog and we didn't see her for three days. The last time I got sick, I ended up in the emergency room so fuck that.

Martha and I ended spent five nights in a row at one person's house, instead of the original agreed upon three. We will be forever in debt. Thank god, she did not have to spend any of her daytime with us. Just the exhausting nighttime, where the only break she got from us was the one night she went to Seven Springs to see Ted Nugent, or 'Sweaty Teddy' as he is referred to.

This was a total cat visit. I met Jezebel, the most beautiful longhaired puff of a cat who is the closest thing to Mona that I've met since Mona died. I visited with roughly four or five (I cannot remember due to volume) of Amy's cats and one sweet aging greyhound. I saw a photo of Dee's two babies and of course, our grandson Oscar, Jasmine's new one-year-old part Main Coon boy kitty.

Martha and I went totally nuts at PetSmart. We bought him a new kitty tower, with scratching post. He is a big time scratcher. We bought a round plastic circle thing with a ball in it that spins round and round, hours upon hours of entertainment. (If I could only be so exhausted by shear joy without being chemically altered.) He played with that thing so much that he fell asleep on it.

We got him a gratuitous string toy, a big bucket of litter, a big bag of food, a case of wet food, three bags of Greenies, and three cans of the special Fancy Feast® Elegant Medleys®.

Man did he hit the jackpot or what. He was just days away from being abandoned or put down and now, he is living the good life.

While Jasmine new apartment is totally adorable, she didn't really have anything in it. She had a bed, Martha's old desk, which used to be my old desk, our old coffee table and a TV. It was kind of barren to the point the even the cat was bored. Yes, yes I know, most of us had sheets on our windows until we were 30, but still.

The next time we visit Pittsburgh we want to stay with her so we bought a futon couch. She needed something else to sit on so we bought her a chair. We went a little thrifting and found an old school desk that will make a great end table. Stuff like that that turned into a day of me wondering around a PetSmart, The Salvation Army, some weird discount furniture store on McNightmare road, Target (for fucks sake) and a Big Lots, all over a two day period.

I got a heat headache and cottonmouth from walking around slack jawed at the whole presentation of consumerism. Martha, amazingly, remained calm and up to the challenge of spending WAY too much money. Of course every morning I gave her a little "cocktail" consisting of a Tylenol® Arthritis, a prescription anti-inflammatory and just a touch of Xanax so the day would go just a little smoother.

Basically, we bought Jasmine a new apartment and Oscar a new life.

Jazz and I struggled (to the point of absurdity) to put the futon frame together. We put it together in every wrong way imaginable before it was finally right. Well sort of, the one piece in the back is supposed to be in front but after Jazz unscrewed the rails for the third time, she refused to do it again. After about an hour of fucking around with the futon, Jazz looked over at the new chair and there was Oscar lying on the ottoman with every fan pointed at him. He looked most comfortable while Jazz had sweat dripping down her cheeks and a runny nose from bending over for minutes on end.

Outside of the whole Jasmine money pit thing, Martha and I drove all around Pittsburgh, which isn't that big of a deal really. A person can go from Squirrel Hill to Mt. Lebanon in fifteen minutes. It was awesome to see people. Well, I only have two people but two very cool people.

We did try to find my dead grandparents. We drove around to several cemeteries that I thought might be the ones. We even went into the offices of two of them. At one point, Martha and I sat across from each other in a cemetery conference room lined with headstones, while the woman made a few calls to other places. Every time I looked at Martha, all I saw was the wall of gravestones behind her.

Thanks to Amy and Nellie King, we were able to not only go to a Pirates game but also sit behind home plate. With the idea that dinner was going to be at the ballpark Amy turned to me and asked me what I would like to eat.

'Well, I'm a vegetarian and I don't eat carbs."
She brought me back a huge kosher dill pickle.

Oddly, I realized that I do miss Pittsburgh. I've not been back in eight years but it is a place that I've moved back to three times in my life. I'm from Ohio, but Pittsburgh is most certainly a second or third home. Even stranger, I could see myself living there again.

However, I cannot believe what they have done to the South Side. What a fucking nightmare.

And clearly The Beehive people have totally lost their minds and have bestowed upon the obnoxiously carb heavy city of Pittsburgh, The Double Wide Grill. All I can say is WOW.

I mean the South Side was kind of a dead zone with the old J&L plant being leveled and yes the whole toxic waste fields thing needed to be dealt with but they made it a yuppie paradise. (Seriously, Forever 21?) I'm not so sure I'd want to eat one bite of a GODIVA® CHOCOLATE CHEESECAKE from the Cheesecake Factory on the former ground of a Superfund site, now labeled a nice and tidy word like Brownfield. Dirt is brown right, so Brownfield makes complete sense. It's just dirt.

I suppose a little plastic materials (which never biodegrades) and resin particles here and there is what we're all made of, right? Never really hurt anyone.

I remember sitting in my fifth floor dorm room window at Duquesne University watching the J&L furnaces lighting up the night sky. The glow was surreal. The furnaces operated 24-hours a day and on certain nights when the fog came in the silhouette looked like a large demon climbing out of the ground. Even in the daylight, the damn thing was frightening with its coal furnaces glowing from deep within and years of caked on black soot covering everything. It looked like they were burning a hole to the center of the earth.

I don't really have a solid answer to what should be there. On the other side of the river, where the other half of the plant was, they built the Technology Center so that area was repurposed for job growth. Maybe continuing with the theme of advancing technologies by dragging that shit across the 'Hot Metal Bridge' would be interesting.

One could argue that retail jobs are job growth but, not really. $7.00 an hour does not a career make no matter what city you live in. Relying on consumer shopping to boost the local economy is foolish in that if we are all working for Ann Taylor then we cannot afford to shop at Ann Taylor. So Ann Taylor will leave.

Ah yes, but now we are back. We came home to a weird smelling house and an orange cat puke stain on the carpet. It took us over ten hours to get home but that was because we had to pull over at a rest stop and sleep for two hours. At least we had our pillows with us.

I haven't been in to Manhattan for over a week to shoot and I'm starting to get a little wiggy about it. But, Sunday is Miss Harvey's birthday and it's a big one. We are going to a wedding on Saturday in Manhattan so she rented us a room for two nights at the Waldorf-Astoria®. Two nights and one whole day of nothing but Manhattan to shoot, you can bet I'm going bring more cameras then god intended. I'll probably even bring the Lubital, which hardly ever makes it in because it is so boxy and heavy.

For two days, we are so going to live a different life. Then it all comes to a crashing end with a 2:00pm dental appointment on Monday. This time, Martha will actually get to go to one of my dentists. Apparently I have a mouth full of cavities and I see nothing but a horror show headed my way and while I'm glad that she will be there, I know she's going to be pissed sitting in the waiting room with our luggage. The cool thing is instead of calling her from the dental chair and bursting into tears with horrible news, I can just walk out and drop the money bomb.

After that, we then get to ride the path, to the train, to the car, to the thruway to home. Awesome. Like I said, crashing end.

Big news around here is that we got Reverse Osmosis. Woo, hoo. But seriously, this will cut down enormously on the amount of plastic bottles this house brings home every week. We recycle, but you know, I lived in Jersey long enough to know that just because you put you shit out on the curb does not mean that it actually ends up in the right place. Besides plastic does not totally break down. It just gets smaller and smaller.

I remember when there was hardly any plastic in our lives.

Milk, juice, RC Cola, mayonnaise and Listerine® were all sold in glass. Toothpaste, TV Dinners, cream cheese, fancy cheese spreads, (including Velveeta®) were packaged in foil packets. Food was stored in foil, wax paper and meat was either cut or ground fresh and then wrapped in butcher paper. Lunchmeat was also cut fresh, wrapped in a wax paper and then in butcher paper.

Boy, you can really tell that I grew up in White Land or as I like to call it, Mayonnaise Land.

Almost everything was in a cardboard box of some kind and potato chips and pretzels could be bought in large tin drums.

Of course, this was way back in the day when you could smoke in grocery stores. I remember riding in the child seat, sitting next to the little red beanbag ashtray that my mom had with her everywhere she went. She carried an ashtray, isn't that the oddest thing? Anyway, when we were at Kroger's sometimes she would accidentally singe my leg when she bent over to pick something off the shelves. Whenever this happened, she would give me a small brown bag of M&M's to eat.

At the check out all of our crap was put in paper bags and then a bag boy would go out to the parking lot with us and load the bags into our excessively large trunk. When he was finished, mom would tip the kid and then slide into our gas-guzzling Thunderbird. We would then ride off into the sunset without wearing seatbelts.

Every mother had at least one piece of Tupperware in her kitchen but that was it. No one lived by plastic like they do now. Even at cookouts we used paper plates with real silverware. Hardly anything in the kitchen was plastic. I remember when my mom and dad bought a new dishwasher and mom tragically put a knife with a rubber handle in there; it melted stinking up the whole house and ruining the washer. It was winter, we had to open all the windows to air out the house, and my dad was so very, very pissed. Pissed at my mom, pissed at the usage of rubber and pissed that it was winter. It's a good memory as most of them are.

Ah yes, week four of our home renovations starts out with the siding people still here. The creamy yellow siding is all up; gone is the flapping foil and chunks of demonic wasp nests. That's right, I'm not just fucked-in-the-head over wasps, there really was an infantry of horror behind the old aluminum siding. The boys, (as we now call them), pulled out big slabs of nests all along the back of the house. Some still had wasps in them, but because it was cold, they died upon exposure. If only it were that easy. I can think of a few people that if all I had to do was to rip them out the house onto the front lawn where they would die from exposure, well then Martha, fill up the Prius 'cause we are going on a road-trip.

So what did we learn here? Sometimes, I am not as zany as I may appear to be. I am kind of like that warning on the side view mirrors; objects may be closer than they appear. Just because I'm freaking out about something does not mean that it isn't real.

Anyway, now all that is left to do on the house is the window treatments and all the other little details, which if I remember correctly, is where the Devil lives; in the details.

On cloudy days, the house looks (no doubt about it), yellow. On sunny days, it blends in more with all that damn sunlight and seems to be more cream.

Every part of the outside of the house has been hammered to death. What that means is that all over the inside of the house is dust and little one hundred year old dirt particles. Mostly the dirt crumbs are all around the edges, window frames, outside wall baseboards and any furniture that is against any outside wall. So pretty much everything. I've been trying to keep up with it but it's just useless. So once they leave, (hopefully by Tuesday) I have a immense whole-house cleaning to look forward to.

On the other side of torment, somehow, I ended up on a peculiar mailing list at work. Roughly twice a month I receive a package with a God book in it. I'm on a Christian mailing list. Of all the things that could come to the Voice it is hardly one for the record books. The fact that this package is addressed to me is odd. Someone out there decided that I needed to get my God on.

So far, Thomas Nelson, Inc. from Nashville, TN has sent me:
The Trouble with Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises
Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion back
Finding Our Way Again: The Return of Ancient Practices
And, from the Ancient Practices Series: In Constant Prayer

I've made a little shrine for all these books over my desk. Seeing how I really don't have much personal stuff there anymore. I have been putting up 'my flair' with either weird things I find around the office from past employees cubicles, or things that come to me, like the god books. Up until a few days ago, I still had hanging there my 20 x 13 photo of dead Pope John Paul II that Gianni Giansanti took and that I personally think is one of the top ten amazing shots of 2005, but I brought that home because I didn't want anyone else to snag it.

In addition to all the Jesus crap, I have a Sexual Harassment pamphlet thumb tacked to my cube wall, a webby award that the old web team won back in the 'tail end of the days' when we did shit that was cool, and a copy of a TPS Report.

Walking by my desk one would think that I am some kind of crazy religious dyke with the conflicting protestant and catholic concerns.

While poking around the Thomas Nelson's, Inc. from Nashville, TN website, I noticed a few interesting things. I particularly liked the menu on their homepage for the first three sections; Fiction, Non-fiction and Bibles. It is interesting to me that they find a difference between them. Upon closer look, the line between them all is pretty fuzzy but when you start using the term Non-fiction in reference to anything having to do with Christ aren't you already blurring the lines of reputable classification?

The reference section is more like self-help on how to read The Bible, which furthers my belief that all self-help books are bullshit. In all of the reference section this book: Captivating Heart to Heart Study Guide: An Invitation Into the Beauty and Depth of the Feminine Soul, bothers me the most.

Here is the first paragraph of the books description:

"Every little girl has dreams of being swept up into a great adventure and of being the beautiful princess. Sadly, when women grow up, they are often swept up into a life filled merely with duty and demands. Many Christian women are tired and struggling under the weight of the pressure to be a "good servant," a nurturing caregiver, or a capable home manager."

Eww, eww and yuck.

It's like Haiku:

little princess girl
capable home manager:
tired woman's dream

What the hell is a capable home manager? Is that what they are calling housewives these days? Well, by that classification, my mom was an incapable home manager with a "slight" prescription drug problem, but hey, maybe she just needed a little more GOD in her life or to be dragged out on the front lawn.

In the video section, I found out that James Brolin stared in a A Dramatic Presentation of the Birth of Christianity.

James, (Marcus Welby; Amityville Horror; Barbara Streisand's husband), Brolin plays Peter. The guy who put the Reagan in The Reagans. I hated Reagan so much (still do) that I just wanted to punch the TV anytime he was on the screen. Judy Davis was awesome as Nancy and the reason that I watched it in the first place. I remember thinking at the time that her version of 'Just Say No Nancy' reminded me of my nightmare of growing up in a house of republicans.

This is that movie that the Republican Party got all pissy about and threatened to boycott. But I'm confused here, it's network TV. Who the hell cares if a political party decides to boycott anything that is broadcast on network television? What is the larger message here; does the Republican Party own Nielsen TV Ratings?

Anyway, CBS caved to this threat and moved it on over the Showtime. Showtime, the channel that has always excelled in stupid programming and will run the sloppy seconds of HBO in a heartbeat. This explains to me not only why The L Word ever made it on the air, but why it is in its (gag me) fifth season.

Right, okay, let us see I've covered God and the Devil, home renovations, politics, mom issues, lesbian sex and drug use. Is there anything else I'm not supposed to write about? Why yes there is, but for now I'm good. So I guess I'll go flip back and forth between a little mind numbing girl-on-girl no sex/stupid sex, and the Nielsen TV Rated Oscars, while abusing a just a little bit'o prescription drugs.

The first night I was in North Carolina, I slept for 11 hours. Not straight through, I did get up three times to go to the bathroom, but the total bedtime was 11 hours. The only thing that made me get up was that I think my organs were starting to fail. I finally woke up with a splitting headache and lower back pain that felt as if my kidneys were shutting down. My brain having checked out for so long that the overall decision was made to power down. "She must be dead, shut her down!" I guess I'm exhausted because I also ended up taking a 2 hour nap the next day.

On Saturday at Wendy's while Gen was waiting at a table for us, Martha and I were in line sandwiched between a group of really white folks from the Bridges Church in North Carolina. They all had a Jesus saying on their backs and I wish to God (ha, ha) I had written it down, but the whole thing in general was so surreal, that I was absorbing other things instead of t-shirt slang. At the register was a seriously weird man in a Boy Scout uniform, which at quick glance looks like a cop uniform. Just something I noticed, that's all. He had moved off to the side and was watching the group of church people. He looked normal enough except for the uniform and the doughy smile he had on his face. He was waiting for one of the church folks to notice him. Finally, their eyes met.

"We're new in town," a churchwoman said.
"I know, I've heard all about you. We knew you were coming." He replied in a heavy southern drawl. He then removed a handful of business cards from his wallet and passed them out first to the adults and then to the children. The church folks then dug out their business cards and passed them along to the Boy Scout leader. I started to feel a little queasy.

Another church guy who was in line behind us was on his cell phone constantly. He was talking about the overall turnout of the carwash that they had just had. He had counted 26 cars but someone named Cory counted 50. Seems like a large discrepancy, it must be that Christian math.

We make it through the line and were in the middle of eating lunch; the Christians having made a nice large table for themselves over on the other side of the dining room; when Gen started telling a little Martha story.

"When Martha was little I took her to the doctor, oh what was his name? Oh well, never mind. Whatever..." she trailed off.
"Koons! Dr. Koons. Koons! Koons!" Martha shouted as if she was on a game show.
"Jesus Christ, shut up." I whispered to her as I look around at the staff of Wendy's.
"What dear? Oh right, right Dr. Koons. Anyway, I took her to the doctor and he put her up on the table and looked at her and said, 'That child is cross-eyed!' and I said 'She is not! She's beautiful!'"

There's Nothing Funnier Than People
So God was very much in the air and all around Winston-Salem. This trip was a God trip. I even wore my 'Jesus Loves Me' t-shirt on the last day, just to fit in. Gen turned to me in the elevator at the assisted living home and asked, "What the hell are you doing walking around with that on?" "Note the irony," I said. We all laughed.

I read an interesting little tidbit in the local Winston-Salem Journal. It seems that unemployment in NC is on the rise. The report cited two main reasons. One reason is because the housing prices are so much cheaper in NC then the rest of the country and folks are just moving to the state without any employable skills. They are unable to find jobs and end up on some kind of public assistance. (A personal fear of mine.) The second reason, one, which I found comical, was that most people could not seem to pass a drug test.

Favorite Gen-ism:
"I'm not anti-social, and neither are you," she said pointing her finger at me, "I just don't want to participate anymore."

He Showed Him How the Cow Ate the Cabbage
On the day we were to leave NC Martha and I got up at 4am and drove in the morning dark towards the heat lightening. Once at the airport, the very first thing we noticed was that our flight was the only flight delayed. The only one. The problem was that because of a 'crew issue' we were going to miss our connection out of Boston. On the way down to NC, we flew out of Albany to Boston on a 40-year-old plane no bigger than an MRI machine. They only fly that plane from Albany to Boston twice a day and we were going to miss the morning flight. The next one out of Boston was at 5:00pm and it was full. Everything was full. The guy tried every combination on every airline to get us to Albany. The only flight out of Greensboro was to LaGuardia. Now here is the thing, if you live here, or if you have had to travel to New York a lot, you know to stay the hell away from LaGuardia airport. Kennedy or Newark are the better choices, hell, Newark will fly in anything. But LGA shuts down on a whim.

"I'd rather shoot myself in the head." Martha told the Delta ticket guy and that about summed it up.

It didn't matter if Martha threatened suicide or not, we were going to LGA. Delta shuffled us off to USAir at the other end of the terminal. Once there, new tickets were issued, (last row, directly in front of the bathroom but hey they were together).

Because of the airline change, USAir issued tickets that, unbeknown to us as to the meaning, had four capital letter S's at the bottom. We found out what these meant at the Homeland Security part of the trip. Four S's mean …"that you have been Specialty Selected by your airline for Security Screening".

Ah man, fuck this.

Martha went through the machine first, Mr. Security guard noticed the ticket and yelled out "One female no alarm." They escorted Martha to her chair, asked her which containers' were hers and removed them from the X-ray machine, taking them over to the special screening table. It was all rather pleasant in that southern way.

Next I go through the machine, he looked at my ticket and yelled out "One female no alarm." Right out of the gate, (literally) they started shit with me. They told me to go sit in the left corner of the holding pen. I noticed that while they managed to grab Martha's purse and laptop, my purse and sandals are just sitting at the bottom of the conveyer belt where anyone can take them. So I don't sit down I yelled at them to grab my stuff. The security guy who was facing me and did not take his eyes off of me and kept repeating, "Ma'am please sit down in the left corner" and I kept repeating, "Could you grab my shit?" But he wouldn't look at anything other than me because I wouldn't sit down. Finally, a woman over by the X-ray machine figured out what my problem was and took my purse and shoes over to the special table along with Martha's stuff. Just as I sat down in the chair I hear the security guard speak into his walky-talky, "She's sitting down now." I got the feeling that I was minutes away from being forced into the chair.

At this point, a rather large woman came over to me and asked if she can pat me down. "What. Ever." I reply as I stood up and did the Christ on the cross stance. Up down and all around she went as I watch them dig around in my purse. All through my drug pouch, all around my camera and even swapping my baggie of trail mix.

They finally let us go, I grabbed all my shit while muttering dumb obscenities under my breath. It is not even 7am yet, fuck these people.

We walked down to our gate in a desperate search for coffee. We came upon a small coffee and muffin stand that was manned by a middle-aged Asian woman and an obvious stroke victim. Her face; contorted like an old racist Loony Tunes WWII character that they no longer air on TV; was exaggerated by the use of heavy makeup and her choice of a brightly colored floral dress and the constant utilization of the word "Honey", heighten an already overwhelming situation.

"Okay honey. You got it honey. Two coffee honey? That'll be $4.17 honey." I felt like we had stepped back in time through the David Lynch door.

The flight to LGA was on time and of little concern except for the poo smell coming out of the bathroom. However, once at LGA we spent 5 hours waiting for our 40-minute flight to Albany. LGA kept delaying the flight in 20 minutes increments. Or as Martha put it they were 'slowly trying to kill us'. It was here somewhere at LGA that my deodorant failed. But I was far from the only one in the room.

We arrived in Albany after 10 hours of traveling. It was 92 degrees and once we found the Jeep, we were unable to find the parking ticket. After bartering with the ticket guy in long-term parking we were finally on the road home in our Jeep, without air-conditioning. We will be traveling back to NC in about 6-weeks.

So we had Orkin come to the house and spray for wasps and various other kinds of things that freak us out. Wasps are all I really care about so we did the bare bones treatment. Of course the normal neurotic mess that I am when someone is in the house was already the baseline for the day (also known as Wednesday) when he arrived, everything was heightened a few notches by my total conviction that deep down this was going to kill that cats. I can't help it, I tend to get a little wacky when poisons are sprayed in and around my home. Green smeen, there is no way all that shit is 'pet friendly'. Besides, I know a misuse of a buzzword when I see it. Right, all of your poisons are Green. Right, define Green. Please, it is poison; you cannot kill EVERYTHING the Green way. How about you just don't kill my cats, K? K.

So the Orkin guy thinks I am a total loon. Well he's in good company. Everyone who has ever met me knows I am a total loon.

The whole thing had me so frazzled that long after he had gone, as I was vacuuming the floors and getting ready to scrub them, I noticed that I had left the lid open on the washer while it was running. I was staring at the agitating bubbles, all frothy on top of the washer, when it occurred to me that I didn't remember actually putting any clothes in there. I pushed the vacuum towards the machine to look closer. I stopped next to the machine, still holding on to the very loud and very on vacuum cleaner and replayed the last ten minutes in my head. I remembered turning the washer on and putting soap in there but I didn't remember loading it with clothes. I looked back at the laundry basket in the bedroom that was still full, but then I couldn't remember how much laundry I had had to begin with. So check this stupid shit out; while holding the extension hose to a running vacuum cleaner I stuck my hand into a swirling washing machine that was full of soapy water. There where no clothes in there, but then it occurred to me just what the hell I was doing as I snapped my hand out of the water and said out loud,

"Oh my god! You did not just stick your hand in tub of water while vacuuming! What the fuck is wrong with you!"

It is as if my inner voice actually yelled directly at me you dumb motherfucker. What an idiot. See, this is how I'm going to die. Something so beyond stupid that Jasmine will have no choice but to become the greatest short story writer ever. I mean how she could keep her shit together when telling the tale of how '...my mom died when she electrocuted herself with a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner'? It's already the beginning of a bad lesbian joke.

No Flash Needed
Ah yes, it is New York and spring is very much here. In Manhattan, things are full on blooming. I love shooting NYC in the spring. Winter is good for the 3200 black and white film but spring, the flowers, the sky and the people are just alive with color. Even the midtown people strip down to their suit jackets and the reverberation of pounding high-heeled open toed pumps invade the sounds of my iPod. Everywhere I go, someone is there and they are up my ass. So what do I do? I decide that it's a great time to shoot Times Square.

Lunch hour on a Friday and I was there, in the thick of it. I started at the bottom at 42nd Street, but could only handle it up to 48th street before I bailed and turned around. Up Broadway on one side and then turned around at the M&M World Store, which is right next to a massive Hershey mega store. Crazy chocolate up there, I tell you. Seriously, we are talking about a whole block of chocolate and you know, it didn't even smell like chocolate. I know in Hershey, PA it smells like chocolate miles before you even get there. But not in New York.

Anyway, I went up one side and came back down the other and for the first time in the entire seven years that I have lived here, I saw The Naked Cowboy.

I ran to the island in the center right before the light changed and it was only after I landed there that I noticed I was stuck there with him. It was just the two of us in the middle of Times Square. We chatted, he posed and I shot photos. The only time that I didn't have throngs of tourists touching me was when I had a man with a cowboy hat, boots and wearing only underwear sharing a ten foot space with me. It was the calmest I had been since I started shooting in Times Square. I'm not sure what that means but it's somehow comforting. Standing there with him was just the break I needed.

Finding something indigenous to New York in Times Square has become a serious challenge. Walking around there is like walking around Vegas. Nothing is real, everything is bigger and more obnoxious than the thing next to it and the idea of fake is excessively celebrated. On some level, it has always been this way but before I could always see slivers of old New York. I don't see old New York anymore.

Times Square has finally pushed through to pure middle-American plastic and Middle American pours in like crazy. They travel across the country to visit a place that looks exactly like what they left behind, minus all the day-to-day annoyances of their individual lives. Everything costs triple what they would normally pay, unless you are from the UK, then everything is dirt cheep. They can shop, eat and walk down a sidewalk five wide (complete with strollers) just like at their local mall. In my walk, I could have pet a NYC police horse; gone to the bank and had lunch at anyone of the three-dozen or so "Family" restaurants. If I were from somewhere else, or if I was someone else, it would have been great.

Of course I could have grabbed a slice (if I ate pizza), walked and shoved food in my mouth. Just like a true New Yorker, I could have collected city bits and hair on my food, except that a true New Yorker would never have been in a Times Square lunch crowd unless they were shooting it, stealing from it or most unfortunately, working in it.

The oddest thing about being up there is knowing that every second of my journey was being filmed. Times Square has one of the most intensive security camera set ups (that is not a military compound or Ground Zero) in the Untied States with over 600 cameras within at 10-block radius. Everything I did was recorded and archived, for what purpose I am not sure. This is not original to New York and ultimately is not really for the individual citizens' protection so much as the protection of the corporations that now live in Times Square. It gives the allusion of safe but has nothing to do with safety. I could be mugged or groped but no harm will ever some to Toys R Us.

Oh and the noodle shop that I love to stop at every now and then, is gone. The whole building is gone replaced with some unknown slice of the New Americana. The even weirder thing was that most of the crowds seemed perfectly happy with the massive absurdity of the volumes of people on the street. Like it was okay for it to be that congested. That's kind of weird when you think about it. But then again, why am I there? To photograph part of the insanity and to be part of the insanity. I know that very early on Sunday mornings when no one is around, Times Square is eerie with its absence people. All that neon and animation still going on and on yet no one is there to absorb it. The whole thing is down right spooky. A very different kind of disturbing then the ant settlement mentality of the lunch crowd. If no one came to Times Square, would it still be interesting?

My favorite show to hate is back for its fourth season, The L Word has returned with all of its zany lesbian tête-à-tête and wacky hairstyles.

Just the sentence "Bette is on the run from authorities" that was taken from the episode synopsis makes me giddy like a schoolgirl and revs up my snark-o-meter. And then there is this: "After binging on drugs and alcohol, Shane spirals out of control as she takes off in Cherie's Jaguar and crashes it on the Santa Ana Freeway." Again there are only two things that are fun about this show, Rosanna Arquette (the person), and Shane (the character).

Jenny, who should be forced to live in a box with her own writing being read back to her on a continuous stereophonic loop played at half-speed, sees this thing again. The only interesting part of all that behavior was that it set the bar on just how stupid this show was going to get right out of the gate in the first season. Marina was only in the first season (smart girl) and she aggressively pursued Jenny to the point of embarrassment - I was embarrassed for my TV. But then again this is also the only show that can make Jane Lynch look like a bad actor, completely misuse the talents of Kelly Lynch and pull out an awkward performance from Sandra Bernhard. Cybill Shepherd is on board this season but I really don't have much hope for that either. The only guest actress that has ever appeared on The L Word and remained completely unaffected by the script was Holland Taylor. She rocks but her character is the mother of quite possibly the dumbest rich girl I've ever seen on TV.

The fact that Showtime canceled Huff but this shit lives on, is truly amazing. At least Huff only had one annoying main character. The L Word has twelve. My only hope and I really do mean this, I hope to fuck that the writing does not suck this year. Really, I don't want the Emmy stuff, (not really a worry here) or the difficult but fascinating plot lines —which they have tried and have failed miserably at, I just want this show to NOT SUCK for one whole season. Okay, okay, maybe that is too hard. How about not sucking for one whole episode?

Update: I just finished the season opener, never mind, this show is totally hopeless, although I couldn't stop laughing. Who throws moldy food on the kitchen floor and then rolls around in it? Or what supposedly well informed, hip and happening fifty-year-old pregnant woman ends up at a Right to Life clinic for an abortion instead of Planned Parenthood? Who has an all-out, coked-out bender for days-on-end but only in the bright light of the (supposed) Cali sun? Who goes to a liquor store, hell bent on destruction and buys mini-bar sized bottles of liquor and beer?

What's Your Name, What's Your Number?
The American Community Survey, a division of The U.S. Census Bureau had been after us for weeks now to fill out their survey. First, they sent the questioner, which we filled out, then Martha carried it around in her purse for a few weeks before thinking to herself, "fuck it", and then shredded it. After the deadline passed, the Survey people started calling, which, we all too easily ignored seeing how we never, ever just answer the phone. Then finally, while we were at work on Friday and Jazz was home alone, they rang the doorbell. The only reason Jasmine opened the door was because she thought it was a mail delivery. Instead, there stood an elderly woman with a computer, sounding all-official and wanting to come inside and ask her a bunch of questions. Jasmine only let her in to the entryway because it was raining and she was elderly. Jasmine refused to give her our names, phone numbers and just about any other fleck of information that might identify us no matter how much paperwork or even laminated badges this woman showed her.

Nicely done Peanut, although I would have never let her in the house because I would have never answered the door in the first place but I am much further along in my neurosis then you. But remember before you open that door, give the space the once over, you never know what might be on the coffee table just sitting there waiting to be noticed by the wrong people.

After a few moments of Stone Wall Jasmine, the woman gave up and left her name and number asking if we could please call her, which we did, but she was out in the neighborhood hounding down other paranoid freaks in the broad daylight of an unnaturally warm Saturday afternoon. Finally, late Saturday night she called back and Martha had a nice little statistical chat around commute times and annual salary.

Jasmine ending up staying two extra days last week, not because she loves us and wants to spend time with us but more because no one could pick her up at the airport until Saturday. Why she didn't have this all planned out before the eleventh hour I'll never know.

The house is disgusting and I have zero time to deal with it. Between work, a total nightmare, and my own photography that I am trying to pull together for two different submissions, my commute time and then the general nausea that rolls over me like a blanket, I can't get near the filth.

What is up with the snow? We have NONE. It is the oddest thing. Almost like we moved to North Carolina instead of 30 miles south of Albany. It was so warm Saturday that there was a wasp on my side door. A fucking wasp. Do you know how crazy that makes me to think that the wasps are all ready out and about? WTF? I've been a little afraid of the winters up here and it still could get nutty but this is too much. A few more days of warm temperatures and we'll have to cut our grass.

It's the end of the world.

Seeing how last weeks road trip was, for the most part, unplanned, Martha and I found ourselves cash poor and completely embracing the oblivious nature of capitalism based on credit. We charged almost everything. We had to and we hate that.

I spent all day Friday in waiting rooms. The first one was for Jazz's appointment with the eye doctor. This was the second opinion doctor and more of a specialist then the cute eye guy at the local mall. Jasmine's primary care doctor here wanted a real doctor to look at her optic nerve before racing ahead with a spinal tap.

Martha and I sat in the no-man's-land of a sterile, white-walled waiting room filled with elderly folks. Classic D-List rock gently drifted around the room as I shifted my bony ass around on a hard green chair in a vain attempt to find comfort. The only thing to read was the new People magazine (the one where Britney talks). Twenty minutes into the glossy goodness of People, I could feel the stupid slithering over my grey matter.

We waited for well over an hour and a half before Jazz came back to us from behind the brown door and said, "Yup, I need a spinal tap. I'm borderline but they need to check my pressure."

Okay Miss Borderline, set it up.

Speaking of pressure, Martha's back had turned into one big spasm. Probably from all the night driving, endless sitting, cash stress and well, Jasmine in general, I suppose. After the optometrist, we headed on over to the local 'Day Spa' where Martha and Jazz both got massages. Why not? It was cheap and everybody hurt. I seized the opportunity to walk around the back alleys of a small town and shoot strange black and white photos until the sun went down and my fingers were cryogenically frozen to the Lubitel. At that point, I was forced inside to yet another waiting room with yet more brain-draining magazines and local gossip. There was a little more staff interaction at the Day Spa when the local homosexual hairdresser tried to get me to put a green hat on my head because with my curly red hair, 'that color is just dreamy'.

Saturday was all about goofy fun and loads of laughter. First, we went to the thrift store were Martha found an 8 x 10 Last Supper painting, ("What kind of place is that to have a dinner?") and a lacquered three-frame depiction of Mary, Jesus and a couple of Saints. Jasmine, not to be left out of the blasphemy, bought a Pope plate commemorating the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963.

From there, we headed on over to a real music store, the kind with pianos, guitars and drums. The beautiful thing about three women walking into a music shop is that to the staff, we were invisible. Martha screwed around over by the guitars while Jazz and I set up camp in the piano room. Jasmine is quite good considering she has never had a piano lesson. (She took trumpet for a few painful years.) I remembered basic stuff and kind of sucked considering I had five years of keyboard. But she and I did have a moment, Jazz on one organ and I on another, where dare I say, it was angelic. I'm a sucker for those B minor, E minor, and F sharp combos.

But all that fun was just a diversion to the real mission of the obligatory trip to the dreaded Wal-Mart empire.

THE MAPLE SYRUP BAKED RIGHT IN
A visit to Jasmine always means that at some point, there will be a trip to Wal-Mart but on this trip, I noticed something different. Back in the far left corner of the store, and deep within the bowels of the demon, was proof that Wal-Mart is horrible to its very core. Way past the frozen Perogies and extra wide isles of soda, sat a McDonalds. Like a worm inside a rotting apple or cheese inside the pizza dough, or even like the McDonald's McGriddles® Breakfast Sandwiches themselves! So completely unnecessary, disgusting and of no nutritional value what so ever.

As I stood in front of the cart parking area for McDonalds, it occurred to me what was missing. They need to put a Disneyland inside a Wal-Mart. They could put the rollercoaster on the roof. If it's happening in Vegas why not at a Wal-Mart? I'm thinking something along the lines of a Splash Mountain theme with cartoon characters. Wal-Mart could come up with a series of loveable cartoon characters that would walk the store, greeting customers and entertaining the kids. Think of the Polaroid moments! Employees could not only have the opportunity to make a shit wage selling shit product, they could now do it from inside a suffocating 60 lbs Furrie suit.

Ah yes Wal-Mart, where I can buy not only non-descript beef patties, but also enough ephedrine to start my own personal little Meth Lab and a double sided axe for all my chopping needs. Trust me, I have chopping dreams, er, I mean needs. Yes, needs.

DOUBLE BUMMER SAVED US
I shot way too much film of local farms, abandon business signs and an old drive-in. All the little things that make up the dead towns that pepper the Pennsylvanian landscape. Martha said that everywhere out there, (as in 'not in here'), is weird and she blames me. She said that after 14 years with me she can no longer function properly in Middle America. Middle America is like a bad acid trip. I don't think I can take complete responsibility for just how much like brown acid the middle of PA is but I will bow my head to the idea that I do have a tendency to point shit like that out.

But why fight it? I stand out no matter what happens and sometimes the strange just finds me. Maybe because I just might happen to be standing in the middle of a Sheetz parking lot just outside of Punxsutawney, pointing a Polaroid up towards the sky.

"What the heck are you taking a picture of?" a local hayseed asked me.
"The colors." I replied with a smile on my face, not even trying to blend in at all.

The ride home was fucked up, and it sucked to be in the car with me. After a night of sleeping in a room that was located directly under a whole floor full of Christian, pre-teen, wrestling team boys, (no shit) I woke up sneezing and coughing all over everything. I didn't stop until some ten hours later. I even took two (2) Benadryls and one (1) of Martha's Allegras. Nothing helped, although I did pass out for an hour. But when I woke up I'd start sneezing all over again until I'd loose my breath and almost swallow my tongue. It was great and technically Martha was right, I can't swallow my tongue unless I chop it off and THEN eat it.

It took me all last week to scan the remaining Holga beach photos and because of that, and the sexy new pink chair Miss Simon gave me, my office is the place to be. Martha has a nice little set up and Zoë even naps in the chair when not in use by Mom.

Aside from feeling all itchy and weird, the days seem to be flying by. I have so many things I want to work on. I did manage to finish a 2006 Holga Wall Calendar. It's pretty awesome and if all four of you could buy one, I could make a few bucks and besides, everyone needs a calendar somewhere in their life. I make a dollar (seriously) per calendar, so collectively you will have paid my morning commute to work. Think of it as helping me out on a Monday. Or not.

The new, well actually it is 25-years-old but to me it is new, Russian Lubitel 166B camera came! After about thirty-minutes of fucking around with it I figured out how to use it —in theory. Now we'll see if I can actually create anything with it. I downloaded the English version of the manual because there was a button that, for the life of me, I could not figure out what it is for. I'm still not really sure because the translation is a little too exact. It says stuff like:

"It is enough to raise a little reflex viewfinder cover to see deep between the light protective hoods large and for any illumination distinct clear image according to which it is easy to fit frame limits when the object is already found or to find a new scene."

Right. And that my friends is a down and dirty Russian to English translation. Not for the basic stoner head reader. Put down the bong and focus.

I can figure out how to use the basic parts of the camera because, thank god, photography is a global thing. F8 is f8 in any language and be there is where you are. This little button in question is called a Reminder Dial. What the fuck? I have no idea. We'll see if it's important later on I suppose. If only it could REMIND me of what it is supposed to do.

I'M NEVER GONNA STOP THE RAIN BY COMPLAININ'
Martha and I drove 6 hours on Saturday to spend 5 hours with Jasmine and her roommate Patrick. Seems odd and silly to the average viewer but well worth it and generally normal in this here family. I would crawl the earth to see that kid and she knows it. Jasmine has the loveliest first apartment I have ever seen. She has learned the fine art of fabric draping, curbside furniture finds and the ever so complicated Salon Style exhibit living.

I love her apartment! The building is ghetto but her and Patrick have made a beautiful home. It was like time traveling back to 1978. Jasmine is a hippie—period. One would never have known it was 2:00 on a sunny afternoon while sitting in her living room. My baby vampire has learned mood lighting well beyond my highest expectations. Martha and I hung out in her incense-filled lair for about an hour, taking an abundance of photos and talking non-stop about everything. Patrick hit the big score when we invited him to tag along with us to lunch at Eat'n Park, the thrift store, Spencer Gifts, (two days before Halloween) a costume shop, (again, two days before Halloween) and so help me god - Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is the only game in that one-horse town and Jasmine needed stuff, that why yes, we could have driven further on down the road, in our gas-guzzling SUV, to a locally owned store an hour away that doesn't spend an enormous amount of its profits not only supporting "The Bush Agenda", but also obsessively importing products from China. Things are now so out of whack that I can't even live politically left if I wanted to. Keep killing the planet, support the president of the 'Kill the Planet' Club, or not buy Jasmine food. Those were my choices.

Sometimes I feel as if the only thing left for me to do is to move us out to the middle of the woods with no running ANYTHING. Just take it way back to the shitting in the woods, growing your own food, collecting rainwater and learning how to weave, stage of life.

Good Lord, Holly, land the plane, land the fucking plane.

Jasmine had a huge Halloween party to go to and all she really wanted was a Bat Girl costume, hair care products and a bunch of spaghetti sauce. But by God it was good to see her. She looks good. She looks happy and I tried not to tear up when it came time to go.

Martha and I spent the night in Punxsutawney. You know, the place with the groundhog. We had reservations at the 107-year-old hotel in the center of town with a lovely view of the park where, every spring, they yank the little guy out of his nest and see if he freaks out or not. While we did see PLENTY of groundhog road-kill on the way to Punxsutawney, we however didn't see any live ones while we were there. We did meet a fluffy West Highland White Terrier named Samantha from New Jersey on Sunday morning in the park but that was about it.

A truly bizarre thing happened at 8:00pm on Saturday night as the town clock chimed the familiar ...ding, ding, ding, ding, pause ...ding, ding, ding, ding and then gonged eight times. As soon as it finished with the last gong, it did something I have never heard before. It proceeded to ding out Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head in its entirety. I shit you not. It went on the full-length of the song, for like three minutes. At first, we could not stop laughing but then it became like crazy land. Martha turned on the TV to drown it out and a 30-year-old Laurence Welk Show came blasting on at full volume just as Myron Floren, the show's star accordion player, was working his way through his rendition of a Mauler symphony, a Welk original for sure. All of this was most certainly a glitch in the Matrix.

I was terrified at the thought of 9:00, and oh my god what if they do that every hour? We will never sleep! Not to mention ever get that fucking song out of our heads. But that was all for the big clock and it didn't even gong out the time the rest of the evening. Man, I didn't even know that you could make a clock to that. Or even think that you would want to. Just what kind of crack are they smoking out there in the middle of PA?

Ah yes Middle American strangeness is always welcome and the fall leaves were amazing to boot. I shot a few Holga and by a few, I limited myself to only bringing two rolls of 120 with me. I brought the little Russian camera too but intentionally loaded it with 3200 black and white film so I could focus on composition and tiny little knobs, F-Stops and shutter speeds. It took me minutes to set up a shot. Yeah, f8 and be there for the next few weeks, I'm afraid.

Choosing to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution, Martha and I drove our gas guzzling SUV right through the heart of Pennsyltucky last Friday to pick up princess Jasmine at college and drag her pickled body back home to Jersey City. There is nothing like a road trip akin to that to make a person realize just how much FOX News has a chokehold on the spoon-fed minds of the middle class. Between the Bush/Cheney bumper stickers tastefully displayed on various shades of deep red Buick LeSabres and the 'Support Our Troops' magnetic yellow ribbons slapped on the ass of the basic Ford Taurus, it was hard for me to gauge which one bothered me more. It was easy to tell however which one drove Martha crazy. Every time a we came upon a Bush/Cheney sticker (and there were PLENTY of those, let me tell you) Martha make a 'Uch' sound and flipped into road rage mode as she would flick on the blinker, hit the gas and zoom around them. Those cars can only appear in the rearview mirror.

Ah yes, but Pennsyltucky is almost the same as I left it, a complex five years ago, only now, more of why I left is on display everywhere. One could not help but notice under the deep blue skies and shining sun, flags as big as my entire living room whipping around passionately in the wind as fat-as-fuck natives shuffle between Wal-Mart and Eat-N-Park, their eyes dilated from constant hording.

But back to the task at hand. We made good time getting to Jasmine's small college town and without much fan fair, thank god, we actually moved her out of her dorm and into a storage space under the four-hour allotted timeframe. We even met one of her hippie chick friends (Yes, I got a photo) who was in the process of moving to California. But really the big thing for Martha was the Friday night dinner where we could talk about the "New House Rules" for the summer. All very exciting for Martha but not so much for Jasmine, who tends to get frumpy whenever ANYTHING changes. Turning Jasmine on to closed caption instead of blasting the volume on the TV is going to be hard, but I think it's a good way for her to learn to read.

Traveling in true lesbian form, we needed to stop at the grocery store twice for just an overnight stay. Ah well, there is shit you need and then there is the shit you forget to bring. Besides, who knew our hotel room had a refrigerator? And sweet Jesus, where else could I stand in line at the Bi-Lo and listen to Aerosmith's Lick and Promise while waiting to purchase fat free half-n-half and crossword puzzles. Well, maybe in Ohio, which makes sense if you think about it because those borders do touch. This explains why while I was in line, singing along with Steven, I had a flashback to the summer of 1976 when I spent a few months sniffing glue with a small group of dope fiends that I met in summer school. We would go over to the hardware store next to the Harley shop and buy a big tube of white airplane glue, always making sure to get a brown bag at checkout so we have something to squeeze the goo into. Then, we would scurry off behind the condos on Montgomery Road where the woods was thick and dark. So thick that the sun hardly passed through the trees and the forest floor was covered in cool sweet moss. It was the summer of the Bicentennial and the Seven Year Locust and those crazy bugs were everywhere in the woods, clicking away all around us as we sniffed glue and fried our brains.

Funny what a song can do, eh? It's like one big smear of the bizarre. No wonder I have a tumor.

The drive home was enchanting for about thirty minutes in that I met a friend's mom in Milton, PA where we picked up a wall clock and a bread maker. Weirder small town photo stuff is really the driving force here but Milton was quaint without the usual past religious percussion vibe that most small towns in PA seem to carry. After that, it was around three hours of nothing but studying the black crows hanging out in the barren trees of the Pocono's all along the side of interstate 80, patiently waiting for the next road kill. I guess they view the highway as a 24/7 deli. Just sit and wait, any minute now something is going to try to cross the road. Why do they do it? Only the crows know.

THE WEEKS LIST
What weekend isn't complete without a little trip up the road for some barium and meat? I have to have yet another CT scan at 8:15 Monday morning so Sunday is berry flavored Barium Sulfate Suspension day and we need to go to the grocery store. The chores of life even on Mother's Day.

I spent $700 at the dentist last Thursday where I had to get nine (9) shots of some kind of crap I need to counteract the damage that the tumor and blood pressure medicine are doing to my teeth. My stomach has been killing me for about a week, I have no idea why, probably nerves, but fuck if not one thing would do the job and make it stop. I am actually thinking of drinking whisky just to see if that still works. It was only when I was at the dentist and I accidentally swallowed a big lump of topical novocaine that it eased up for a few hours. The cramping and nausea returned for the following two days but for those few hours it was great.

Big, big week here and only two days of it are going to be spent at work. Aside from the awesome CT scan with 1 mil cuts of my pesky adrenal gland, Martha and I are traveling to NC to visit her unbelievably old but totally inspiring parents. They are both 85 and an absolute joy to be around. I cannot wait to see them. The whole deal down there is so low key that the only big thing of every day is lunch. I'm going to read, nap and laugh my ass off because they are a riot. Actually, it's the three of them, Martha and her parents, that is where the laughter and the love is crazy fun.

Wednesday is Martha's 42nd birthday. She opened her brand new digital camera on Saturday night after we came home. A good chunk of Wednesday will be spent dealing with more doctor horseshit but I hope I can at least take her out for dinner or something.

We are zooming in on the arrival of Miss Jasmine this weekend and oh, I must say the house is a flutter. Well, not really that a flutter but there is a lot of talk of flutter. Martha and I are chatting a great deal about the increase decibel level of the overall apartment and how we are going to try to combat that with teaching Jasmine this really cool thing called Close Caption. I don't think Jasmine is deaf she's just so god damn loud. But twenty-year olds are earsplitting no matter what you do. The trouble with Jasmine is that either she is on or off which means it is either noisy or blissful. There is never any gray white noise and lately, I'm living for the gray white noise, if you know what I mean.

This is the last week for her to attempt to pull good grades out of her ass. Wish her luck. Ah yes, but Jasmine, Jasmine, Jasmine is the most social of little creatures and how she came to be that way is a mystery. I guess we all try to become the exact opposite of our parents and while that idea works for a few decades, eventually it occurs to all of us (one extremely weird day) that we are just like our parents anyway. Fate and learned behavior certainly are interesting bedfellows. I may not be a republican but I am a crazy-paranoid-workaholic-fuck just like my dad. Hmm, I wonder what Jasmine will be?

This coming Friday, Martha and I will be driving across the fine state of Pennsyltucky to move the rest of Jasmine's crap into a storage unit. We have to stay an hour outside of the town she is in because it is graduation at her college, and well, we didn't plan this all very well. But at least we will be an hour closer in the morning when it comes time to leave. Yeah, right. Friday is going to SUCK. We have to pack up the Jeep, here in Jersey, with her bed and a few leftover boxes and leave before the crack of dawn just to make sure we are at Jasmine's building by noon. Martha and I then have to move her out of her 8th floor dorm room, preferably in one load, drive across town and up the hill, past the Wal-Mart to the storage space. (Keep in mind that it is graduation and the town and campus will be crawling with idiots) Then we have to be back at Jasmine's room by 4:00 (sharp) so the RA can check her out. After all that nonsense, we will then drive north for an hour to the hotel, were a room with two queen-size beds await us. Then and only then can we all stop bitching at each other and lay down.

Saturday is the long ass drive back but then by nightfall Jazz will be home for her summer run until August, unless she can't find a job here and then she goes to grandmas for roughly eight weeks. I am so not kidding here. She either works in New York/New Jersey or works it in Tennessee.

We have not ordered her bed yet because money is a little weird right now. It should ease up but not before she has to spend a few nights on the big fat red couch. She should be used to laying her ass on it anyway so I really don't see a problem. If it wouldn't drive me batty to have her out there in the living room I'd let her just spend the summer on the couch and save us all $300.

LESBIANS IN RUSSIAN WITH CAMERAS
Well enough of all that foggy thinking on to bigger issues like cameras. Miss Martha has ordered herself a brand new digital camera. She has chosen to stray away from the Canon family and will be trying a Kodak. It should be here within the week. The original idea was for the two of us to go to Willoughbys and physically buy it and then hop on the subway out to Brighton Beach. I had to shoot Brighton Beach for The Voice and we both thought it would be the perfect time for her to test out the new toy. But Willoughby's was closed for Passover so she ended up ordering it online while I forced her to watch The L Word. And just a side note here, the character Jenny, who is supposed to be this possibly brilliant young writer developing her craft (whatever) in an elitist class taught by Sandra Bernhardt, has a mouth like a Seattle truck driver hauling lumber the minute she ends up in any kind of confrontational dialogue. Isn't that an indication of an underdeveloped imagination? Gee, that's what I've always been told. You insert swear words because you lack imagination but if she is so 'fucking' imaginative in her fiction writing then what's with the "fucking, fuck, fuck" stuff? She sounds (and looks) like an idiot. Hey, at this point, no matter how stupid it gets, I am committed which I suppose makes me the bigger idiot. I keep thinking that the show might eventually have a point. Ah but I am a dreamer.

Anyway, we still had to make the hour and a half subway trek out to Brighton Beach though and both the sun and all the babushka mommas came out just as we arrived. Suddenly we were in Russia. Well, sort of. Probably the closest thing I'll ever see. Even thought Brighton Beach is just down the boardwalk from Coney Island it is a very different vibe. Almost all of the shop signs, food and a movie theater are in Russian. Martha grabbed a menu from one restaurant but the entire thing was impossible to read. At least with Spanish even an old hillbilly like myself can pick out a word or too. But Russian? Wow, no way.

The boardwalk was lovely and all the folks were out and about sunning on benches and trash talking the neighbors. I didn't need to understand Russian to know when someone is bitching about somebody else. Pretty great stuff there and the fashions were more mob boss like then the mob boss stuff I see out by the Badda Bing when Martha takes me into the bowels of Jersey. I must say I enjoyed Brighton Beach and will probably go back to shoot it on my own when there is no pressure to shoot for the paper. The people there were just too damn interesting.

Martha even bought a porcelain monkey to celebrate the day and because it's little face reminded her of Zoë our big fat monkey cat.

Some of the best birthdays are the ones that I can't seem to remember that well. I was either too young or too fucked up but I do remember thinking at the time that these were great days regardless of whatever distorted reasoning's.

Over thirty, birthdays are a time of reflection but at a young forty-two, I already have entirely too much thinking going on in my life. Does everything have to be so dreadfully serious? One of the best birthdays that I ever had was my fifth and all that happened that year was my Aunt Virginia and Uncle Johnny came to town and we went out to dinner. But the little details from that day are what make it a great day.

It was 1967 and my Aunt had given me a mod-orange, yellow and brown dress. The sleeves were puffy and made of translucent chiffon. The hemline hit mid-thigh and I loved it. She gave me a pair of white go-go boots to complete the ensemble. I'm surprised I didn't pass out. Maybe I did, I can't remember but I do remember sticking my left foot in that boot and zipping up the zipper to my knee. You couldn't have smacked that smile of my face no matter what.

From that moment on, my Aunt Virginia was the best person in the world. Aunt Virginia and Uncle Johnny were not actually related to me. They were friends of my parents and soon after my fifth birthday I didn't' really see them too much. By the time we had moved to Ohio they were just a memory in the house. Most of my parents' personal friends fell out of flavor after a few years but the business, country club friends stayed around much longer. I think it is directly related to anyone who actually came to the house. Once inside folks didn't seem to eager to come back around.

For my birthdays mom would buy a Pepperidge Farm frozen 3-Layer Vanilla cake with white icing and write Happy Birthday on it. Sometimes, she would make red flowers or there might be candles. Mom had convinced herself that I was allergic to chocolate so she would only give me vanilla anything. Easter candy was either pure sugar balls or chocolate vanilla - a total joke with the use of the word chocolate. All store bought cakes, cookies, milk and any desert item was vanilla. Halloween, well almost all of it was thrown out. I didn't have my own freewill with chocolate until I was a teenager and by then I was into a whole other kind of candy. In fact, I'm not really a candy person. Oh now I can motor through a box of Godiva dark chocolate truffles just as well as the next crazy bitch but 'candy' has never interested me. But I do make a wicked double layer chocolate fudge cake.

But back to my fifth birthday. That night we all went to the country club for dinner. I wore my new dress and boots regardless of the arctic wind coming off of Lake Erie. The maitre d' sat us next to a table where identical twin girls were sitting with their parents. I was mesmerized. I had never seen twins outside of the Ed Sullivan show and I could not stop gawking at them. They had long blond hair and matching black velvet outfits. And they were about my age. This blew my mind. Mom and Dad bitched at me all through dinner to stop staring at them but I couldn't. Besides they didn't care, they kept giggling and waving at me. I had bright red hair and that was something they had never seen before other than Bozo the Clown and THAT was assuming they had a color TV at their house. Most people didn't in 1967. We had our own little Carney show and if all of the adults would have just backed the fuck up and let the natural weirdness of children take place it all would have been fine. Instead, my parent s bitched at me and their parents bitched at them. No one had a good time except the three of us.

LIFE IN A LETTER
Sunday morning I was digging around in my old photo albums, the whole memory kind not the arty farty ones, looking for a photo taken of Sherry and me on my 17th birthday. I had been writing about this whole birthday thing and I wanted to run that photo, maybe, I didn't know but I wanted to find it. I have hardly any photos of my life before 17. I have one baby picture, three photos that were taken in Sherry's bedroom and my senior photo. So the pickings of a life prior are quite slim. Anyway, I came across a strange letter that my dad sent me in late July of 1979.

It was between my junior and senior year of high school. I was 16 and away at a summer arts program that I had paid for in cash pulled together from a combination of drug money and a full-time night shift job as a carhop at Frisch's Big Boy. The photo that I had been looking for, and had since found and displayed on the bed in front of me, was my thumbtack in time. The return address was a P.O. Box in Cincinnati, not the house address. He had also given me his private number at the office. Previously, I had only his secretary's number.

In the letter, he had written some very different things to me, unlike the usual mantra of what a fuck up I was. So different that he even wrote down that he was proud of me, that I had worked hard AND that he thought I was talented.

It is all very strange and it left me itchy and with a headache. I know better than to read his letters but this caught my eye because of the return address. I have no memory of it, except the one line about being proud of me. I do remember thinking something about it being in writing, words to hang on to, so speak and then sticking it in a book. Isn't that funny? Probably because it was so different that I just didn't have any idea how to process it. My mind is a terrible thing.

All this is just an overwhelming desire to find meaning in something that most likely does not have any to begin with. But, that is what we do. Look for meaning in the meaningless.

SAVE A TREE
The holiday library party wasn't too horrible with the general public in public thing and we even went on a geek tour of the stacks of books down under the main library. They have seven floors of books running under the library for two city blocks. That is totally insane. Sushi was great but I can no longer eat the tuna tartar that has the mayonnaise in it. It makes me sick, sick sick. After dinner, Martha and I toyed with the idea of buying a tree.

Every year, Martha and I always have the 'price' talk when it comes to trees. She wants a free one and I think anything fewer than fifty dollars wrapped in a pretty New York moment is great. We decided to wait and maybe Martha could pick one up out by where she works in during the week. So we go home and do the "I'll feed the cats Fancy Feast while you change the litter box" combination and life went on its normal Sunday night routine.

Martha took the cat litter down to the recycle room and there in the middle of the room was a beautiful tree measuring just under six-feet tall. It was laying there on the tile floor with a brand new, heavy-duty tree stand, still full of water, sitting next to it. It was as though someone had just given up on Christmas right out of the gate. She put it on the elevator and pushed it through the front door calling my name. I ran to the hallway and there she is standing there holding a tree with a big ass smile on her face. There is nothing wrong with it, the needles still stick and it feels soft and dewy. It is beautiful and it is Martha's favorite price, free.

Now I just have to stop at K-Mart to pick up new Christmas lights, I can't find ours. Actually, I think I gave them to Jasmine for her dorm room. I also finally get to buy a squirt bottle for Zoë. She's a bad kitty when it comes to the evergreen and this year is going to be a wet one for her.

But talk about a really super cool birthday present, eh? A free Christmas tree.

And oh yeah, one more thing, McDonalds delivery, seriously? Isn't that one of the seven signs apocalypse?