Holly Northrop Blog

I have more bling in my mouth, via a new gold tooth. Yes, that makes two. It's in the back so who cares but it is kind of fun to have. I told Martha she doesn't have to buy me jewelry just buy me teeth.

For the first time in my life, I have borrowed a camera from a friend. I know, I know I'm scared too but this camera he has is very unique and I couldn't help myself. It is a Horizon 202 and it shoots pans but what makes it super cool is the look and feel of the pans. Plus, it's Russian. I have a thing for Russian cameras. I've wanted to Kiev 88 (basically a Russian Hasselblad) for years and my Lubital, while heavy and a picky bitch, is super fun to play with.

Anyway I'm going to take the beast into Manhattan this week and well, we'll see what I get. Just because the camera is cool doesn't mean I know what the hell I'm doing with it.

Jasmine has started looking for an apartment in Pittsburgh. Ah yes, the average Pittsburgh landlord is truly unique to the region. South Side, Squirrel Hill, Bloomfield, Friendship and Shadyside all have distinct 'characters' and so do the Landlords.

Just in Pittsburgh alone I've lived in seven places, ten if I count the three dorm rooms I was in while I lived on the campus of Duquesne University. One of those places was a four bedroom brick house that Martha and I owned in Friendship. The funny thing about Pittsburgh is that I'm not from there I just happen to end up living there a lot. I went to college there but then I've moved back (of my own free will) two other times. Martha, who is from there, would move back in a heartbeat.

So now Jazz has begun the process of meeting prospective new landlords and witnessing just how fucked up people can live.

Two apartments come to mind that I've had the misfortune of standing in while apartment hunting in Pittsburgh. Both are from the same hunt and I think they were both on the same day. It is from the time period that Martha and I were looking for our first apartment together. I was unemployed (surprise, surprise) and Martha worked all day, (again surprise, surprise) so it was my 'job' to scope out a good apartment and then bring her back later for final approval.

The first place was a one bedroom right on the edge of Shadyside near The Center of the Arts. They allowed pets, but it was on street parking. The outside of the building was awesome Big old sloppy Pittsburgh row house. Just huge. It was four stories high and the apartment was on the top floor. It had amazing original woodwork and the bedroom was possibly the largest bedroom I've ever seen. It was the whole top floor and while the ceilings were slanted in that attic way, there was good overall floor space and it had a balcony just off of the kitchen. There was just one MAJOR problem.

The floor looked bizarre. It was wall-to-wall carpet but it had a weird texture to it. When I asked the crunchy hippy chick who lived there what kind of carpet it was, that is when she told me that she had never vacuumed the floor in the ENTIRE two years that she had been living there. She had a cute little dog and the carpet was COVERED in dog hair.

My mouth dropped open and I looked at her and then the owner and then back at her in total disgust and confusion. How could you not vacuum a carpet for over two years AND how could you show an apartment in that condition and think for one second that anyone is going to rent it. What was even more bizarre was when I made the comment that the whole thing was disgusting she shot back with a 'vacuum cleaners are expensive' explanation.

The second apartment was just down the street, also in Shadyside and had an even more disgusting problem. The place was huge (two bedroom) and again, I would have totally considered it except the kitchen had roaches crawling all over everything. The stove, the counter tops, you name it they were there. Some dead, some living and all of them not even running away from us.

This apartment still had people living in it so really, I'm not sure what the hell was going on. There was a kid's room, so there was a child living there and the furniture was nice but the apartment was infested with roaches. And again the owner just shrugged her shoulders and went rambling on in some heavy Slovak accent about how great the neighborhood was.

Needless to say, Martha never saw either one of those places.

Day two of my commute last week and I was ready to either quit my job or sell the house. Balls to the wall my total time is six hours a day, that's three hours each way. That is totally insane, this I know but I won't be doing it every day. I will only be going into the office probably two days a week but not just yet. There are still some technical things that need to be worked out. One being my new computer and the cable modem that is coming on Wednesday and the other is setting up an open connection between me and work. Characteristically, that has always been a problem between us, but technically, we should be able to work it out.

So for now, I make a pilgrimage that consists of an hour and a half car ride with Martha (the most enjoyable part of the trip); a forty-minute train ride through New Jersey suburbia and urban decay; a sweltering Path ride from Hoboken and then finally, a nice little sun filled ten-block walk to the Voice. Awesome and when I get to work I feel like I should be somewhere other than just the fricken East Village where everything smells like baked butt crack.

I go from fog and deer roaming around in a flowering meadow to masturbating homeless men lying in the middle of the sidewalk, foot traffic splitting around him like commuter cars moving around a stalled blinking vehicle. All that visualization within a three-hour span, no wonder I'm worn-out. I'm so fatigued I'm kind of numb to all of it. I have started smoking pretzels to psychologically make myself feel better. I have also invited the Starbucks monkey back on my back. Can't help it I need crack in a cup all the time now.

I want new pets, ours seem to be broken. Zoë is a total whack job and Lily is insistent on waking us up at 5am. Five in the fucking morning, people. She paces around our bed, the sound of her nails clip, clip, clipping on the hardwood, meowing a top volume (getting a nice reverb off the high ceilings) yanking us out of the deep sweet sleep that Martha and I crave. Once I get up, Lily then follows me everywhere, meowing all the way. She's like a whinny baby in a walker. Kind of like Jazz used to be, or just... kind of like Jazz. Kidding, I'm kidding.

It took Martha, myself, plus a last-minute maid hire, most of Saturday to clean out the old apartment. It wasn't that the place was so filthy; it is that management is so damn picky. They gave us a list of how much stuff costs. Everything from a $5.00 light bulb to repainting the entire apartment at "current contractor rates". Scary shit. We will be charged an arm and a leg. I know it and am just going to have to embrace it. There is only just so much I could handle cleaning and painting before I was either going to just throw the mop down and jump out the window or make Martha open the checkbook. How much do I have to pay to get out of this?

(YUNZ GUYS) CHECK MY MESSAGES?
Jasmine is currently supporting Europe's economy. She has spent, in one week mind you... $1200. She was supposed to make a grand last the whole three weeks. Europe is expensive and the dollar is shit, but Jesus Christ. She'll be home in two weeks for some down time, painting my stairs and general harassment on the parts of all parties involved. I miss her so much and can't wait to squeeze her. I just wish she'd get her fucking head around money. Well, she's got her head around it all right, it's just screwed on wrong. She went to Stonehenge on Friday, (hippie) and her and a gaggle of her friends went into London on Saturday. All in all she sounds like she's having fun and she's even managed to pick up a slight British accent. Marble mouth Pittsburgh with a British flair. Kind of like Madonna, Detroit chunk with proper pronunciation.

SNACKS THROUGHOUT THE DAY
Martha goes back down to North Carolina this week. She'll leave Thursday morning and won't be back until Sunday. She is leaving me alone in the house. Ahhhhh! It's fine, really. It's a little soon but fine. Cable should be hooked up in the bedroom by then and I already have my train tickets for work, (I get to take the big train!) cutting my commute down by a third, so as long as I don't have to deal with anything too nuts I should be fine.

Things are getting ugly for her folks. Dad keeps falling and mother creeps each day a little closer to the crazy glue. Denial is an amazing thing. Her father actually thinks that he should be able to start driving again; even after he fell off the toilet. My dad used to say, "It's hell to get old, Holly. Avoid it."

Okay dad, I'll make sure to slit my wrists before the age of fifty.

Anyway, while I do agree with his core thought about aging, I also know that it doesn't have to be so terrifying like Martha's parents are taking it. In many ways, I'm ready to go to a retirement community right now. Sign me up for meals on wheels and all day TV. I most certainly would not have to commute six hours a fucking day, unless it takes me that long to shuffle on down to the dining hall and back to my little room with Martha.

Moving sucks. No real surprise there. No real surprise when the thunderstorm came blowing through Jersey City, dousing my filing cabinet and no real surprise that the movers had already blown their total time budget before we even got to the new place. So the yelling at the end of a very long nine-hour-move, between the movers and Martha was totally and in an curious way, expected.

Zoë almost had a seizure and I really mean that. No shit. Move day was super long and hard for that cat. It started out for her by spending over four hours locked in the bathroom with Lily while the movers carried all of our stuff out of the apartment. She meowed like a colicky baby. I sat in there with her for 15-minute intervals, spraying Feliway cat spray on my hands and then petting it into her fur, just shy from spraying her directly, which the label warns against doing. But, I could see why an owner just might go on ahead and spray the cat. Anyway, after the first hour of her pissing and moaning, I left her alone. (There is only so much I can take.) Part of me wanted her to blow just so the rest of the day she would be a zombie. Selfish, I know but best for all involved.

When it was time to go we shoved her in a Kennel Cab with Lily and hit the road. Staring at a three-hour drive from Jersey City, I was concerned that she would flip out in the cage and pee all over Lily. I could almost see the pull over to the side of the road anxiety but she seemed pretty doped up and able to deal.

The drive was uneventful, except for the phone call from Jazz letting me know that she had missed her flight to England. She was supposed to have flown out on Friday, not Saturday. She didn't figure all this out until she was at the airport and freaking out on some airline staff. The tension was high as she navigated and forced her way onto a flight to Philly with a connecting flight to Gatwick airport. We agreed to have her call me when she was at the gate (with boarding pass in hand) for the flight to England. It concerns me that she fucked up her itinerary like that. I mean what the hell, Jazz?

We got to the new house, locked the cats in the upstairs bathroom, and proceeded to help unload the truck just so we could get the hell away from the movers and be done before dark. Our shit is a wicked combination of volume and weight. Takes forever.

We let the cats out after the movers left and that is when Zoë went into overload. She seemed all right when she was walking around on the second floor but it was shortly after the big scary all by herself walk down the stairs to the first floor that she started panting. Cats don't pant. Oh god it was ugly and Martha and I were convinced she was going to blow. I kept spraying my hands and then petting her very slowly, trying to get her to calm the fuck down. Finally, she seemed better, sort of. The pacing and the panting stopped and she just wanted to lie in the hallway.

It then occurred to me that it had been several hours since I had spoken with Jazz and she should have called by then. I picked up my cell phone and called right into Jasmine freaking out. The Philly airport had been closed earlier due to storms and when I called her, she had been sitting on the runway for over an hour waiting to de-board the plane. The pilot had turned off the air conditioning and the passengers were not allowed to get up to even use the bathroom. Jazz was stuck in a middle seat on a full plane, sweating and crying. She had flown out of Pittsburgh, went to Philly, circled around Philly for twenty minutes, flew halfway back across the state of PA only to land in Harrisburg to refuel, and then took off again, flew back to Philly, landed in Philly and then everything came to a dead hot stop. Wow that is pretty fucked up. I did my best version of Calm Mom and managed to get her to at least sound better.

It was around that moment that I paused and thought it unusual that both Zoë and Jazz were almost on the same page.

After all that, Martha and I went out for sushi. What the hell, there is really only so much we can do for that cat or Jasmine and besides, we needed to eat.

I spoke with Jazz one more time while she was at her gate. Her flight to England had been delayed but not canceled so she was able to eat, charge her cell phone and get some cash before she flew off across the ocean and arrived in England at 4 am, (our time).

Jazz is in England, and we are in our new house. Wow.

Things I am going to miss about hi-rise living:

Jasmine's leaves for England on Saturday and her passport finally came just the other day. Months ago, while she was home for spring break, Jasmine without much bitching, got her shit together and shuffled on over to the post office to get her passport. All went without a hitch and I immediately became suspicious. Six-weeks later, her passport arrived here. Martha and I opened it and her first name was spelled wrong. Those fricken yahoos had left the 'e' off the end of Jasmine.

The next day the three of us had a conference call, (Martha in Jersey, me in Manhattan and Jazz in PA - we do this all the time and they should be recorded) to discuss the odds of her being stopped by our Homeland Security buckaroos or having trouble with the Brits on the return trip home. We made the group decision to send back the passport in the hopes that they would return it in time for her trip. A few weeks go by then one day Jasmine's passport is returned to her in PA with a stamp on the unopened envelop that reads "wrong address". Now, instead of the government agency that the passport was mistakenly sent to forwarding it to the proper department, they sent it unopened back to Jasmine. By this time, the clock was ticking and Jazz only had five weeks before she was to leave for England. Against Martha's protests, Jasmine sent it back to them at the correct address with a sweet little note inside explaining that she is a college student (blink, blink) and could she please have this corrected and returned before the 22nd of July.

I just assumed that once she stuck her passport back in the mail that she was fucked and would be spending the rest of the summer helping me unpack and settle into the new house. But magic does happen and hot damn if they didn't not only correct the spelling error but managed to return it to Jasmine one whole week before she escapes to England.

So now the last minute focus is on how much money she is going to need. Given this child's total lack of economic understanding and the current exchange rate, I am frightened. Thank god for Grandma Northrop's money because without that, there would be no studying abroad.

"The dollar is worthless. It's double. You gotta think like this Jazz, if a cheeseburger is $8.00 here then it will be $16.00 there. You are going to spend a shitload of money." Martha sighed.

"I know, I know. Starting next week, I have to make a packing list. I already know I need conditioner." Jazz replied in all seriousness.

2ND FLOOR SM. FRONT ROOM
Packing up everything you own all by yourself sucks. I chose to combat the solitude by doing the one thing that I know how. I smoked pot and drank coffee all weekend long and I did my best work as a gum chewing stoner, packing up negatives as well as playing with tape. Even though we live small, we live thick. Our crap is concentrated and when I say our I really mean me. I have books and music; countless binders of photography negatives; plastic drawers filled with working prints; Polaroids and framed photography from past exhibits; zip disks and binders upon binders of backups of either photography or computer work. The biggest collection of stuff that Martha has is her clothes, something that I just don't care all that much about. If is could get away with it I would wear the same baggy shit every damn day.

Martha spent the weekend in North Carolina handling her parents affairs and their decision to sell the house and most of their stuff and move into a nursing home - right now. Thankfully, it all cannot happen within a seven-day period so Martha came home for the move this weekend, and to get me more boxes. She will be going back and forth a great deal over the next six-weeks until they are safely moved into the nursing place or she cracks. The timing and logistics of all of this is a little wacky but like Jasmine' said; "That's how we roll mom. As much ridiculous shit as possible happens all at once. Whether we do it or the universe does it."

She's cute. She called me several times over the weekend just to check on me. Probably because I told her I was freaking out but whatever. Love is love.

But having all this stuff makes it difficult to feel like there is any forward motion in packing. For hours, I would stand in one place, packing box after box and stacking them on one side of a room but never even making a dent in the source. It made me think of what it would have been like to pack up my grandma's coal pile, if for whatever screwed up reason that had to happen. I bet it would have taken all day.

GIVE BACKS
So there I was home alone, stoned and boxing up my life, and what do I start thinking about? My mother. Left alone and well after the stereo was packed I had no choice but to go there.

I am starting to have the same level of anxiety about moving upstate that is usually reserved for things like my dentist or hi-speed interstate driving. The interesting thing about being the child of a mentally ill parent is that you spend most your adult life looking for little 'signs' of a possible inheritance of the illness. Kind of like WWMD: What Would Mom Do? perspective and then adjust accordingly.

All odd behavior is questioned as to its normalness, if that makes sense, and making sense is important. The minute that you feel as though you are not being understood, well that might be the crack in the door that lets the dark little crazies out of the backroom of the brain.

Have I ever thought about throwing myself off my 32nd store balcony and swan diving it on down, well, no but only because I don't have a 32nd store balcony. Have I ever thought about jumping out of my 18th floor window, and trying to belly flop onto the roof of the fucking hi-rise across the street...

...well actually I thought about it a lot as I kept pausing to look out my window while packing up my office.

"Fuck this." I though. I'll just mark all the boxes Goodwill and jump out the window.

This is obviously a slight panicked response to moving. For little slivers of time, my solution to moving is to just not. Fuck it, I'll get off here. I would rather jump out a window then move upstate.

What the fuck is that?

Some things are no doubt learned. My mother's long ago dead phobias are now mine and when I trace them back, it goes right to the point where I spent an absurd amount of hours watching her flip out about shit.

Nothing like having an existential meltdown while boxing up my life.

After it rained all day last Monday and well after I had been sitting at my desk, cold and wet for hours on end, I came home to two notes. One was attached to the elevator informing the residents of my building that there was no hot water and will not be any hot water until after 11:00am Tuesday morning. The hot-water pipe had burst on the roof and now the penthouse was flooded. That can't be good and it probably isn't just the penthouse. All that water had most likely run down the walls to the lower apartments. We live eight floors below that nonsense so I was a little worried. This has happened to us before and more than once. In fact, I almost expect it to happen again.

Anyway, the second note was attached to our mailbox. I had to take that little note and walk over to the doorman and sign for a larger packet of paper. Inside the packet was our new lease, and should we choose to stay in this deluxe apartment in the sky, the management company was informing me of their intention to raise our rent by $400.00 a month. The new rent on our apartment would be $2420.00 plus an additional $160.00 for parking. That's, $2580.00 a month for a two-bedroom in Jersey City. Jesus Christ.

Monday could have been so different. I could almost see the alternate version of the evening playing out in front of me in the dark corners of the apartment.

If we were staying in this luxury apartment, Monday would have been a freak-out fest. It would have marked the start of the apartment scramble and the crazed race to find something that costs at least what we are paying now (before rent hike) with the same amount of space, safety and comfort. The horns would have been blown. There would have been yelling and many, many phone calls to various people who could not help us or give two shits about helping us. My guess, we probably would have called a lawyer.

But, because we are in the middle of buying a house, all that bad vibe stuff just kind of lingered in the air and then faded away. Oh sure, we have to let them know if we are leaving and there are all these crazy rules about how to move out. Extra 'move out' deposits and a general attitude of "fuck off, you tenant you", but we'll work around all that. Frankly, they can kiss my butt. I love this apartment and will miss the view and all that extra crap but not for $2580 a month.

MOMENTS OF ZEN ARE ALL AROUND
Usually, at least once a week but sometimes way more, New York City develops a certain synchronicity that is bothersome. It usually comes together over a two or three block radius before you realize that everyone has taken extra cranky pills that day. It happens slowly. You might look up and just so happen to catch sight of a well-dressed elderly woman aggressively giving the finger to a cabdriver who almost ran her over. As you keep walking, you come upon a group of folks standing near the corner dominating the entire sidewalk while waiting on the 101 bus, behaving as if they are trying out for The Jerry Springer Show. They scream slang and general obscenities at one another while you try to push through the crowd without being smacked in the head. And it's right around then, when you'll notice that you have been walking the block with a fire truck that is stuck in traffic with the siren blaring and horn in the on position. Your eardrums are about to shatter. You make it to the corner where black Lincoln town cars and yellow cabs have created a logjam at the light and the whole city smells like butt crack.

It is the exact opposite of that weird magical moment when for a few seconds the entire area of the city that you are in goes completely quiet. Not a sound is around and it is the middle of the day. It is so quiet that you'll start to hear birds chirping. A soft breeze blows down the street and the sent from the flowers at bodega on the corner floats around you, inviting a smile. If you close your eyes, you will swear you are in the middle of nowhere. Like a swing that has gone just a little too high and is momentarily suspended in the air before gravity pushes it all back to earth, the sounds and smells of the city rise back up to the normal rhythm, only to slowly swing the other way. The screaming butt crack way. New York does this dance all day long, all over the city.

EMPTY
In what is beyond a joke (and well beyond believability) yet another person in my department quit last week. Honestly, I have never seen anything like this and I've seen an enormous amount of shit in this business. We are now down to the final three and goddamn it, I am going for the prize.

Several months ago all the cream was let go from this company and now the whole wing of offices that held the executive staff is empty. It is kind of creepy to walk down that darkened hall with all those empty offices tree-branching off into nothing, but at the very end of this dark tunnel is the executive ladies bathroom and I've got to tell you, it's a whole other private world back there. As long as they keep that door unlocked, I will never use the public restroom on the fourth floor again. I feel like George Costanza.

MOVING JASMINE
This week we will be making the fine, fine trip through Pennsylvania to visit with Miss Jasmine. She is moving into her very own apartment and we are driving there to help her settle in. I can't wait to see her. I haven't seen her since that whole eyeball thing in March but it feels like it's been so much longer. No sure why. Hmm, regardless, I can't wait to squeeze her.

More road tripping but I think this is the last of it for quite some time. The next big drive will be when we move upstate. Okay it's not a big drive but for a car full of two cats and two neurotic woman, two-hours is considered a trip. And technically, it's is three-hours from our current overpriced apartment in Jersey City to the house in Hudson. I figure once we get in the house we ain't going no where. We will have this thing called a yard to deal with, among many, many other things.

In what was not just a road trip, but also a road trip highlighting one of Martha's worst phobias, Saturday, overall, was as much of a bitch as we all knew she could be. Saturday actually started late Friday night when I packed the Jeep to the ceiling with all of Jasmine's crap. Packing a car like that is the equivalent of three-dimensional Tetris or, depending upon your headspace, the cube puzzle box from Hellraiser. Without a seat for me, it all fit—even the easel. As much as I wanted to go, the chance to deep clean the apartment seemed more alluring to me anyway.

So before dawn even cracked, Martha and Jasmine headed west across the great state of Pennsyltucky, destination: Jasmine's new apartment.

The drive was uneventful and Martha made great time. Over six hours later, they pulled into The Apartment Store parking lot and Jasmine ran in and got her keys. All very exciting stuff. They then grabbed Patrick, (Jasmine's roommate) and unloaded the Jeep. Then, Martha and Jasmine drove across town, out on the edge of the boonies to the storage area where the rest of Jasmine's crap was waiting for them. At this point, things got ugly.

At some point during the summer, Jasmine's storage room had become infested with spiders. Over the phone I heard varying accounts but my guess is that there were between one-million and one-billion spiders, (including egg sacks) all over Jasmine's, clothes, books, TV and knick-knacks. Martha said there were cobwebs ALL OVER everything. Martha is afraid of spiders. Like run right out into traffic afraid. She and I have an insect arrangement. She kills the flying bugs that unfortunately find a way into our apartment and I kill the crawling ones. This is an important point within any relationship. You have to know who is going to deal with the bugs.

But this was beyond any agreement and besides, I wasn't there. So they had to suck it up, wipe off what they could and load up the Jeep with boxes that looked like they came out of The Munsters prop department. Sounds like fun, so glad I missed it. I would have rather sucked cat litter out of all the little nooks and crannies of our apartment.

After the spider thing, they went to the bookstore to pick up Jasmine and Patrick's books. While they waited in a line with all the other spiders, err —I mean students, plans for the Wal-Mart trip came together. According to Martha, Wal-Mart did not disappoint in its hourly shot of adrenaline to the local economy. One billion spiders, one billion students and one billion Wal-Mart shoppers buying carts full of crap made in China.

After that, they then went to the carwash and vacuumed out the inside of the Jeep so that no little spider could climb up Martha's jeans during the drive back home, causing her to veer off the road and fly off a Pocono mountain top.

Anyway, Jasmine is in and she is officially a junior. Christ. This year not only does she have an apartment but a hefty course load. Combine that with almost no money and we will see what we get. Shaken not stirred, I'm praying for good grades.

Last Thursday and Friday, I went back to work. It was over 90º both days and I thought I was going to choke to death right there on the fucking sidewalk in front of The Gap. The first day, Jazz walked me to work, turned around, went back to New Jersey to the dentist to have two cavities filled, then came back to The Voice, and sat next to me for three hours until it was time for me to leave. She was my very own personal bodyguard and honestly, I was glad she was there. Thursday did not even mark two weeks since the surgery so I was a little nervous about it all. Friday was more difficult for me and I was alone that day. Whatever, I have exactly one week to get back up to speed because they are closing my subway stop and I will have to walk at least 5 blocks (ish) out of my way until February (06). Some kind of horseshit subway construction at the Cortlandt street stop that totally fucks with all of our lives starting August 20th.

SHIT, PISS & LAUGHTER
After Martha and I saw The Aristocrats, we went to the grocery store where we proceeded to make our own version of the joke while walking the isles of suburbia. Our slant, involved two over forty lesbians in debt up to their eyeballs and desperate for college money, seek a life of extracurricular Carney activities with their "gifted" 21-year-old daughter and two lesbian cats, one of whom has a crusty butt. Oh man, that movie is so funny I laughed almost the entire way through it - something that I have not done in ages. I felt like I was 10 and it was probably the most cathartic thing to happen to me since I rode a bike with a basket.

PROCLAMATIONS
"I refuse to fear September," said Martha and I thought, okay, sure, why worry about it? No one knows just how it is going to go, so, fuck it! Good approach to a yearly issue. Why ruin August with worry? Good and bad shit does seem to happen all year long. Just because the ninth month marks the end of Virgo and the beginning of Libra and we move from Earth to Air, Mutable to Cardinal and Mercury to Venus, not ALL that seasonal shit really means beans. Right?

At least Mercury will finally be out of retrograde soon. Jesus.

CLEANING HOUSES
Jasmine leaves in two weeks and although I cannot make the drive again this year because she has so much shit she needs my seat, I do get to clean the apartment. Believe it or not, I am excited about scrubbing it all down. We all have been living real strange in this tiny apartment with me being sick and Jasmine's constant hoarding and it will be nice to sterilize and spread out. Martha and I will get our living room back and I will have my office. Oh happy day.

It is time to move the creative therapy magnet on the fridge off of the "Freaking Out", slot (which Jazz drew in special for this house) back to the "Love Struck" slot, its permanent place.

CHOCOLATE SEX
Melissa sent me a box of crazy SoHo Chocolates from Kee's Chocolates and Martha and I sat in bed on Sunday and snorted half the box while Jasmine was at work. It was awesome and better than a good number of the drugs I have done. This place (Kee's) makes clever stuff but the good ones are fantastic. The Thai Chili was strange but I had to spit out the Passion Fruit. So many others were beyond yummy. Coconut, Almond, Hazelnut, you know the usual suspects but it was fun to try the intimidating ones. I am still holding out on the Balsamic one though. It was like stoner stuff. You know, "Hey man I wonder what pepper and dark chocolate would taste like rolled into a ball and sprinkled with Allspice?". This place is so off the wall that they drew out by hand the chocolate chart. Thank you Melissa, you rock.

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.

On Saturday, I shot Kips Bay for The Voice and after four hours of walking around in gorgeous 65-degree weather, both Martha and I needed serious naps. All that god damn fresh air and sunshine made me dizzy and loonier than normal. We walked from 28th street to 34th back and forth from Park to 1st avenue and while normally, I really would not consider something like that a big thing, right now it is a very big thing. I have all the cadence of a heroin addict.

Martha wants a digital camera for her birthday, while I seem to be going the other way. I have now fully assembled my pinhole camera and I am currently working my intellect on how to make the bathroom light tight. I am so excited about making paper negatives and doing contact work again that my heart races when I think about it, making my murmur flip out and for a second I feel a little pukie. Anyway, between my Holga and the pinhole well, the only high technology that is being used is two double A batteries for the flash on the Holga.

I went to B&H on Sunday and almost the entire store was on the digital camera side, slammed up against the counters like fricken traders on the floor of the Exchange. Consumers are just nuts. At this point it isn't even about the whole tourist thing. Nah ah, it was all about the shinny little Get Smart devices that had the folks pupils dilated. After a dizzy round of digital camera dialogue with a bearded Hasidic Jew named Avel, I found myself in the darkroom supplies section. It was great because no one was over there; hardly anyone uses chemicals these days and I was able to fondle enlargers and linger around the loop display case totally undisturbed.

PEPPERMENT ROCK, SPINS ME OUT
Jasmine comes home in three weeks for the summer and all of us are a little nervous about it. Before she comes home, we need to buy the Ikea storage bed for the office. Then, the first week in May Martha and I will be driving the rest of her shit across the fine, fine state of Pennsyltucky. Martha and I have rented storage space in the middle of nowhere for all her crap. Every time I think about a storage facility I remember that scene from Monster, where Charlize Theron is talking with Bruce Dern while sitting in her storage unit. Trash and ratty clothes are strewn about… that whole visual made me realize that when all else fails you can always go sleep in your storage unit.

Yuck, anyway, Jazz needs a job and simply must make money. Grandma has pulled the purse strings and there will be no more college money. Martha and I are now paying up to almost $300 a month on her student loans with the total of around $22k and two more years to go. She'll need to save those pennies cause next semester she has an apartment. I'm trying not to worry about it because there really isn't all that much I can do. We only make so much money for fucks sake.

I am also convinced that I will be laid off this year. I don't know why but I just have a feeling that my name is on a list somewhere. If not at work, well then somewhere. Let's just hope it's not that BIG LIST in the sky, eh? The union contract is up for negation, hard to believe it has been three years, even though it has nothing to do with me, I feel that I might be affected by whatever path the negations lead the paper down. Management always finds a way to pay for concessions and I am merely a cog in the big environmentally toxic paper pulp windmill. Call me crazy, and many have, but I have a feeling that my name has been mentioned in dark paneled windowless conference rooms with sexy recessed lighting and they aren't talking promotion, if you know what I mean.

Clearly, I have either lost my mind here and soon you will see me walking down the street swatting at imaginary flies or my tumor has now given me an even greater sense of intuition -something I really don't need in my life. If I get any more razor sharp about day to day bullshit I am going to give myself a lobotomy and not just for my own benefit. I am already so damn close to being impossible to live with that I would view an icepick to the tear ducts as an act of self-preservation for the entire family. Some days the best thing that could be done for me would be to put me down just like Zoë. She is so tortured and such a nervous Nelly. Too fat to play and too crazy to live.

But with so many other things to flip out about why add work to the mix. Whatever happens, happens, right?

I hate getting sick in public. I wasn't in the mood for my normal lunch of a weird side salad/nut combination so in search of something different I walked over to the grocery store on St. Marks to dig around. It was somewhere around the soy chip isle that my stomach started to flip-flop and I became nauseous. I couldn't figure out if I was getting sick because I needed to eat or if Paul McCartney's voice "speaking words of wisdom" to me over the sound system was making me want to vomit. Forced to listen to Let It Be is never a good situation to find one's self in. I don't even listen to it at home when I do play either version of the album. The Long and Winding Road is another one that I simply cannot stomach at all and my fear was that if I stayed in the store long enough I would hear that one too.

In a sweaty panic, I grabbed a blueberry yogurt and a large water and headed for the checkout line. Yes, that was lunch. Sometimes in New York, all of the food choices for lunch can result in no food choices. I barely made it outside. After about half a block, I felt noticeably better. It must have been Sir Paul that caused my uncontrollable need to retch.

GADGETS GET ALL THE GLORY
I love, love, love the Holga camera. Too bad I don't know what the hell I'm doing but it is fun to learn. The digital gives me the constant reassurance that I crave but waiting on a 120 process/contact harnesses enough anxiety and self-doubt to feed a whole classroom full of first year photography students.

Now I just have to figure out the cheapest way to reproduce the images. The scanner negations between Martha and I have begun. I already have a good one but it can only scan 35m not 120. Getting prints at $10.00 a pop, on a roll of 16, will drive Martha to tears in no time. After all, this is WHY she bought me a digital in the first place. Film processing, prints and contacts were killing us. But if I get a new scanner... the birds will sing and she can inherit mine. It is quite an offer.

I have started making posters of the 2003 and 2004 Photo of the Day archives. The 2004 file has roughly 350 photos on it (duh, it is a yearly archive) and until I get everything just where I want it each image is on a different layer. I think the file size is something crazy like 150 mgs and each image is only around 2 inches wide. The final piece is 23 x 35 and will be pretty cool, but right now, I am just trying not to crash my computer.

Martha ordered a cooling system for Jasmine's computer and I ordered a bunch of Japanese incense. Somehow, the two things are related I just know they are. When the laptop fridge comes, I'm going to run the shit out of her computer until it either shuts off or I get bored and surprisingly I don't get bored as quick as you might think. I'll probably be burning incense when I work on it so maybe that is the connection. If the cooler thing doesn't' work then we are going to replace the fan but I would really rather not have to open it up. The whole idea of the what's under the hood mentality never really caught on with me. When I was a kid those 'Do not touch risk of electric shock!' stickers seemed to be on everything and I took all of that very seriously. I never fucked around with the back of my stereo except for the splicing of speaker wire but even Barbie can do that. I never messed with the guts of a TV or a camera and almost every computer that I have ever had, on the day it went to the dump, the seal was still unbroken. I once blew the Mother Board on a Pentium II that I had a few years ago but I made a friend come over and deal with that nonsense. Forget about anything motorized. The closest thing I have ever come to dissecting and general mechanical fucking around with, was the vacuum cleaner and that was the monthly digging out of my long curly red hair from the roller. Nice.

MOVING TARGETS
More Vancouver talk. Martha wants to lock down days for the trip. I wish we could take two weeks but it looks like only a week. This is no time at all to gauge a city properly but I usually fly by the seat of my pants with these things. In May of 2000 I few here with two pieces of carryon luggage and from the moment I got out of the taxi mid-block on 53rd Street I knew not only that I wanted to live here but that I could handle living here. I could say the same thing in reverse about moving to DC. From the minute that the moving van pulled away from the curb and Martha and I tried in vein to find someone to deliver food to our new apartment, (no one would come to our Shaw neighborhood), I knew that I didn't really want to live there. I needed a job and everything about that city was temporary - except for Sheri. Oh no, that girl is the real deal and probably the karmic reason we ended up there in the first place. But handling the District of Columbia was never an option because Martha and I were never ever able to cope with DC.

Admitting that you can "deal with DC" is a very different animal than saying you can "deal with New York". The two cities very different places.

Moving to Denver was even more than I had anticipated because I had never been west before and this was the first big move without my parents. I was nineteen, newly married and a college graduate. It was Halloween and things just sucked all around because no one had a job. Ugly turned pathetic real quick and by spring, all I did was cry. But it took me five and a half years to leave that city with no other motivation than the sudden realization that I hated my life.

I commuted an hour and a half by bus to a job in the foothills of Golden Colorado for a company that made trade show exhibits. I was one of two graphic designers. The other one was a total Bronco loving asshole that never said two words to me. I suppose in some ways that was best for all involved. I spent most of my days alone in the darkroom shooting stats and blasting Sonic Youth's Sister & EVOL, Husker du's Candy Apple Grey or on those rare 'up' days, a Cure tape that had Faith, Seventeen Seconds and a little bit of Three Imaginary Boys on it. At the end of the day, I would get back on a bus full of crazy Colorado people and ride on down to Littleton where Jim and Jasmine would pick me up an hour and a half later in our Dodge Omni at the bus stop.

We lived in a two-bedroom grey condominium complex called Southglenn Commons that was right across the street from Southglenn mall. The only reason we lived down there in all that fucking republican whiteness was so Jasmine could go to good daycare. We were totally the shitend of the demographic down there and all of our money went to rent. (Hey, that sounds familiar.) By that point, I was 24 years old and lived like a middle-aged housewife.

But Denver wasn't a bad move it is just one of those moves that everyone makes and some usually ride that shit out and some run like hell. Some carve a little bit of something out of nothing and make a life. Oh sure, Jim and I could have moved up into the mountains to a little shit shack and had a real nice time of it growing dope and hording firearms. Jasmine could have gone to school in the little mountain towns of the Colorado. Jim would have his model train collection and I could have taken up sewing.

I don't regret living there 'cause there are much harder cities that I could have learned those early twenty something lessons in. Christ, I remember there was talk about moving here in 1982. That probably would have been bad. I would have "handled" New York City in an entirely different way then and it just might have killed me. But hindsight is neither 20/20 or funhouse mirror with thoughts like those. It is all just memories with a few "what ifs" added to the pot. Sometimes I really can see how things might have played out if I had not of freaked out. But I was destined to flip, so it was probably the best to do it in Denver. It's a good town to flip out in and run from. Not as good as DC but it is a well deserved second.

So we made the move and we are in. Woo hoo! We love it and we never want to leave, at least that is the word on day two. It is quiet and the cats are totally flipped out. They are so flipped out that untouched Fancy Feast sits in a bowl just waiting for a cat to take notice of it.

Amazingly, it did not rain and the movers did not suck. It took longer than we thought but it was well worth it. Overall, there was minimal bullshit. The cable person even showed up an hour early and we have had cable since before we were finished with the movers. There were only a few scrapes; Martha cut her finger and dropped my old office chair on her foot while taking it down to the trash. My legs are bruised and I look like I had to fight off an attacker and Jasmine seems to have hurt her shoulder but overall we are pretty tiptop.

Jasmine and I now share a room. Her bedroom is also my office. I don't think she is too happy about it all but she DOES go back to school in four weeks and she will have her VERY OWN dorm room to decorate with all of her fine tuned angst. The bill for her sophomore year of college came right before we moved. Talk about a buzz kill. Jesus Christ, I'm going to be long dead before that shit is paid off.

This apartment makes me feel like I am on vacation. I know that will pass, within time but honestly, I don't think I have ever lived like this. Except for when I was on the company dime. It makes Martha and I somewhat uneasy but that is just because we are waiting for the crap to start. It is a pathetic view of the world but one she and I have sadly, grown used to.

Ah yes, work. I didn't win the lotto, I just moved. Work is still work and I have a good two-week run of it until I can completely fuck off for seven sun-filled days. My vacation is going to consist of reading, sleeping and seeing how fucked-up I can get. We bought a beach tent, a beach towel, and summer reading books for all. I personally bought a big floppy blue beach hat and matching blue sunglasses. I am totally working the Sophia Loren, Jackie O thing with these glasses. They almost cover my face from my forehead to my mouth. I look like an aging movie star and some days, in my head I suppose I am.

Lily, our black and white nut-bag cat, has suddenly become the morning alarm clock. Every morning at roughly 5:30, she busts into the bedroom and starts meowing in a rapid, car-alarm precision. She started doing this about two weeks ago and she will not stop until one of us gets up out of bed. All she wants is someone to be awake. In her little walnut sized brain it is time for the house to get up. It is madding and she has no concept of weekends or that one of her mothers has a sleep disorder and probably has only been asleep for two hours when she decides to call it "day".

I think I have managed to replicate the Manhattan skyline in my apartment with the moving boxes. Well, maybe not the WHOLE skyline and it isn't to scale but in the dining room I feel that I have captured midtown. The living room however is closer to the low-rise feel of the East or West Village. We are officially living in a cardboard box jungle. Saturday is the big day.

I have one, rather bothersome and probably nothing, concern. For almost a week now, I have ordered three wardrobe boxes from our movers. First, when they did not show up on Sunday, we called and they told us we were not on the schedule. Okay, but we were. Anyway, Martha yelled at them so on Tuesday they didn't come because they were caught up in the torrential rains and flash flooding that seems to be in fashion lately. Wednesday, they said they would come around 6-7 o'clock. They didn't and they didn't call either. Now they 'assure us" that they WILL BE HERE at 9am Saturday morning. Am I worried? Yeah, sure but what the fuck can I do? All of us are pretty much over a barrel on moving day so it is best to practice the deep breathing, I suppose. Smiling might help.

So I have been watching the DNC and a few things have stuck in my head:

I wrote this at the Laundromat down the street from our apartment. I was at the Laundromat because all six of the washers AND dryers in our apartment building are broken. Martha did not discover this until around five o'clock Sunday night. Now, the super is gone because his mom died and he has my sympathy but what I cannot for the life of me understand is why, in a block-long, 80-unit apartment building when one person leaves for a family emergency the entire system falls into catastrophe. Why things here are held together with a pubic hair tolerance for error is beyond me and I suppose, in a nutshell, why we are leaving. Hopefully, the fucking elevator will be working by Saturday when the movers arrive.

What an amazingly frustrating weekend. All we did was pack and watch shit break around us. The weather was beautiful and I could think of about fifty other things that Martha and I could have been doing. Trying not to be too disgruntled we resided ourselves to a weekend of cleaning, packing and last minute phone calls from the landlord wanting to show the apartment. I gave up trying to make it look nice. Fuck it we are in the middle of moving and he is just going to have to parade these folks through our filthy, boxy mess. Sunday was worse because they didn't call us until very late in the day and things were already a total disaster. The landlord had set up three showings all within a three-hour period.

Yeah, Sunday was the worst. Hell, by noon there had already been tears and that happened well before the parade of Jersey renters and the laundry thing. Martha had taken her "Joyfully Subversive" button off that she had been wearing all day Saturday. This, of course, being the clear indication that all of her fun was done.

Anyway, the first contestants were a very attractive early 30's gay couple. I had to suppress my overwhelming desire to tell them to run away. This place is chalk-full of cranky uptight breeders with strollers where the word family means very different things. The second couple was a young soft-spoken family from India. The mother was in her full dress, including dot, and while she was simply beautiful it kept getting snagged on our boxes as she tried to navigate the labyrinth. Their child was so quiet and well-behaved that I had forgotten they came with one. I have been telling Martha for months that I believe that the only thing that could stand to live in this apartment, (once they fix the heat, that is) and not only live but possibly thrive, would be a loud, young couple with children. Kids - plural. Something that would naturally raise the noise level from this apartment in an attempt to drown out the stomping crazy-man from above and the door slamming bitch from below. Loud children in a loud children tollerant apartment building would be a natural thing. So with this in my head here comes the third family. A nice young Jamaican couple with a 3-year old terror named Justin who loved to run, cry and cough (mouth: wide open in perfect circle, projection: straight into the living room, hands: flailing around at sides) while running up and down my hallway, knocking shit over in the bedroom and screaming at an incredibly high pitch. I think we have a winner. Everyone say "hey" to Justin.

The Laundromat, interestingly enough, it is just as noisy as my apartment when everything there is firing on all cylinders. When Jasmine is watching TV in the living room, crazy-man stomping back and forth at rapid speed over my head and the jackhammer kitchen renovations from the apartment below all measure up to about the level of a crowded Sunday night Laundromat. Ah well, I kind of needed to be here anyway. LALA*LAND's theme next month is Laundromats and I was wondering how I was going to meet that. I didn't just want to bust into one and start snapping photos. I could and would have but this is much easier - would be one way to look at it. Everything is a photo-op once you get up and over it, I suppose.

After a particularly nasty (missed) paper deadline on Tuesday, I ran screaming from the building for my lunch break but, by that point in the day, I wasn't hungry anymore seeing as how I had been eating weird shit out of the vending machine(s) all morning. Some days are just vending machine days, you know? Anyway, I needed to get the fuck out of there and maybe go to a record store or purse shopping. I decided to go over to Tower, an evil place I know but it is a good place to kill an hour listening to music and pretending the whole store IS my record collection. At one point, I actually considered buying an old Fall album just because I wanted to hear it right at that moment but I stopped and thought to myself, "Does anyone actually ever BUY Fall albums? Don't they just end up on mix-tapes?" Not tapes I make seeing as I don't think I actually own any of their albums but I do seem to get a great deal of The Fall via tapes. Don't get me wrong, they're great, it's all great.

Anyway, I started to get pissy with myself because I can't remember what the hell it was that I had read the night before from David Fricke, about some band that was in the "must buy now" or "hear this now out there" thing. I thought that it sounded interesting but obviously not interesting enough for me to write down. So I become irritated with myself for becoming irritated. Try as I might I can't remember so I fondled the new Sonic Youth DVD, searched in vain for the Donnie Darko Directors Cut and left, but not before some guy with long stinky dreadlocks informs me that I am "hot".

Music, music, it is everywhere, and thank god.

I have been slowly packing up my music. They vinyl is all crated and so are the tapes. I am holding out on the CD's and have asked Martha and Jazz to return their seats to the upright position and bring all stray CD's home for packing. I would like to get a handle on what is where. Martha is usually pretty good but Jasmine... Jasmine is in Tennessee for a week of hot humid air and grandma (insert quiet bliss here). I went into her room to gather up what I know is mine and had to be buried somewhere in that teenage wasteland. Well I guess it's unemployed twenty-something wasted land now, eh? Anyway, I found Death in Vegas: Scorpio Rising, My Bloody Valentine: Loveless and, AND Pink Floyd: Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Just the cases, she has the disks with her. In the middle of Tennessee Jasmine's little musical travel patch is a psychedelic hippy tripping mix with Grandma Northrop and Southern Baptist churches as visual aids. Music: Thank God.

So yes, let us see... Miss Jasmine has been bitching at me for the past month or so about not being able to see very well out of her right eye. Now, understand that Jasmine does tend to bitch about everything and yes she does come by that honestly, but when she would complain about her eyes she did so late at night AND after she had been reading all day in the cold, dark apartment, or after she had been playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City all fucking day. Okay? Well maybe I'm just a little distracted and her eyeballs are not on top of my list of things to flip out about right now. Whatever. Sunday we finally drove our lazy asses five blocks to the mall where she had an eye test and guess what? Peanut needs glasses. Reading glasses, but still. Who knew? Well technically, she knew. Upon hearing the news that she gets to wear specs she immediately came at me wanting more bling-bling than the insurance will pay for. She WANTED $200.00 Vogue frames; her new, very smart looking silver no-name frames will be ready in two-weeks.

Packing and more packing, it is truly endless. We keep putting out knick-knacks and oddball furniture and folks keep scurrying out of their apartments to collect it. I have not actually witnessed anyone slithering away with my old candle holders or Martha's sixteen-year-old magenta bowling ball, but hours after we put something out there it is gone. We are putting out good knick-knacks that's for sure. Even the pack rat in me knows this. So far, we have managed to give away Jasmine's dresser, Martha's desk and my credenza. The dresser and the desk went to the same woman who kept calling our furniture "appliances" on the phone. I don't think she actually meant "appliance", but that's what she kept referring to it as. I wasn't very hopeful but when she showed up with her seventy-year old asthmatic father, her daughter-in-law and her three-year-old granddaughter (they were the muscle). I new they were very serious about free furniture. Martha helped carry both pieces to their van and the woman was so happy she gave us hugs. Twice. I told her to "have a beautiful life" not with the least bit of misery or sarcasm in my voice. Straight up. I'm thinking that this is the best thing I have done in quite some time. It makes me want to just give it all away for a hug.

So this Tuesday is the 35th anniversary of the moonwalk? Jesus, I am old. I remember that day. I remember my dad standing on the back porch calling me in from the sandbox-swing-set combo and into the house so I could watch the moon landing on the black & white TV console in the family room. I remember at the time I felt as if I was being stared at or watched, kind of like a guardian angel in the sky above me. Not watching just me, but all of us. The PLANET I mean. It was weird. There were people walking around up there, and from that moment on, I never looked at the moon the same way again. I also totally bought into the Jetson's way of living and that by now, 2004 thank you very much, that we would be living on ALL of the planets, and not only in OUR solar system, but the whole big damn deal. I believed that we would be living AROUND the universe. I would have a dog with a space helmet bubble on its head and a powder blue bubble sky-car that made a really cool zippy sound. The whole thing made me actually give a shit about science, technology and fashion even at that pre-elementary age. I wasn't Sci-Fi so much as I was a romantic. I guess I still am.

The hardcore packing has begun and I must say it is liberating to throw shit out. If I could I would just hurl it all out the windows but instead I gather up piles of crap and make Jasmine drag it to the basement. I have to say that this is cathartic in ways I could not have imagined. The apartment is officially trashed and as if I needed further proof that my shit is shit and I can't even give it away, Martha has placed an add on CraigsList.

FREE FREE FREE FREE FREEEEEEEEE
(1) Sofa
(1) Chair
(1) 7-drawer Desk
(1) Antique Credenza
(1) bedroom dressing table w/round mirror

The couch is going to our landlord's father and outside of a small interest (one girl who lives down the street) in the desk that has been it. Goodwill has yet to call us back about picking ANYTHING up and the one donation place Martha called wanted only full dining room sets. I just do not understand this. I have a dining room table that I use as a work/photo table. I have never had a dining room set except for when I lived with my parents and we all know that none of that shit was ever mine. Our dining room is my office. Who lives like that or more to the point who lives like that and shops at donation centers? Who the hell around here has the space to live like that?

Oddly enough if we leave crap out in the main hall, by the laundry, after a few hours (in some case minutes) it disappears. Things like; a small metal chair; a huge plant; pots for planting; a small metal table; you know, crap that if we had a yard to have a yard sale in I would put a sticker on it asking for a dollar or two. But, if Jazz leaves it out in the hall, folks scurry out when the coast is clear and drag it off to their place. It is official we hate our neighbors and they hate us. Awesome, the circle is complete.

Not only is Tuesday Miss Jasmine's 20th b-day but we all three of us are going to see Prince. What buzzy thing that is. I haven't seen him in; God I don't how long it has been, fifteen-eighteen years.

Jasmine is hell bent on doing the South Beach Diet a