Holly Northrop Blog

The Hudson Artswalk is the 10th -13th this weekend. Come up or down or all around if you can. I have five pieces in the main gallery and three pieces at the CCCA Gallery space for the Hang Dog Show. Martha has four pieces in the main gallery also. Here's how queer we are. We volunteered this year but the stipulation is that we have to sit together. Lesbians.

I'm in another show in Texas. I wish I could see that one. It's a life after death themed show and I have three pieces hanging down there. One is The Cross at Ground Zero, another is of a grave I shot at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn and the other one, check this out, is of my dead mother in her casket. Yep, I went there. It's a great shot, so there. This holiday season is the five-year mark of her death and somehow it seemed fitting. The fact that I'm writing this on the exact day that my father died nine years ago is even weirder.

But anyway...moving on.

I never say this but it would be nice to sell something. Probably not the print of my dead mother but still there are other things that are not so disturbing, sort of. But it's not really a selling kind of time is it? We are all hording our money. Hell, I've turned into my grandma Schneider. Every day I tell Martha to withdrawal everything, bring it home, we will hide it all over the house and bury it in canning jars in the yard. Fuck them. Fuck the bankers of the world. The banking industry has NEVER been good to me.

I have all these projects that I'm trying to work on but doctors appointments and a general case of the head crazies have been prohibiting me from focusing on them. I want to make my yearly calendar, and oh, by the way they are no longer free to friends this year. Sorry but times are fucked and I am unemployed. If you want to do something helpful and you still have a job, buy my calendar.

I'm also trying to gather prints for a book, two books really. One would be a large photo book of my work and the other would be a smaller portfolio type book. I so need to update my design portfolio website and blah, blah, blah. I'm the busiest unemployed person I've ever known.

For about the past year, our sunporch has been slowing crumbling back into the earth. Now, when someone mentions that they have a sunporch it implies that they have a wonderful space with sundrenched-whitewashed floors and gentle breezes of lavender scented happiness that floats through pale yellow window sheers. Fluffy white pillows cover an inviting whicker-seating collection and beautiful dark green palms create pockets of cool shade.

The reality of our sunporch is much, much different.

To begin with, we use it as the main way in and out way of the house. More like a mudroom. The door is fucked up from when I had to push the screen in to unlock the door when we locked ourselves out. The weather stripping is coming off the bottom so when you open the door there are strands of rubber hanging off the door. Kind of like a rubber tire that has exploded on the highway.

The floor had hideous, and I do mean hideous, wall-to-wall teal colored indoor-outdoor carpeting. The previous owners even covered the red brick steps with it. The carpet was filthy, seeing how I had never cleaned it; not once in two years. Because there was a feeding station in there, the whole room smelled of warm cat food, regardless if the windows were open or not.

But the windows are cool, kind of an old 50's slat type. Each window has about fifteen slats of glass that open outward, but tilt down, so that even in a thunderstorm, it never rains in.

Oh but the water has been traveling through there in other ways. Ways I didn't even know about until we had the floor ripped up. Apparently, there has been a small stream running through it to the back of the house for about ten years. The good news is that under all that carpet and rotten plywood, there was an actual cement floor. It does have a rather large crack in it, but with a new layer of cement, some paint and new baseboard all that we will have to deal with is repainting the walls.

It's not like we actually have any money to do this shit. But we have to. The floor in front of the door was falling in because the water was rotting it out. Another winter and one frozen ice ball would have made it impossible to open the door. That would have been fun to come home to some cold dark night.

We had to get the tree in the backyard trimmed otherwise when the ice comes, and you know it will, some of the large droopy branches would most certainly have snapped and demolished the garage. Again, an interesting thing to either, come home to, wake up to, or watch happen.

We had to get new gutters because we barely made it through last winter. The three-foot long ice daggers that hung twenty feet above the front door last year, would have killed someone this year. And my god, what a fucked up thing to come home to, wake up to, or watch happen.

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.

A quick look at April and I see that Jasmine is coming home for a weekend visit. I'll be shooting a friends pre-wedding photos all around Manhattan. Then I'll be alone one weekend when Martha travels to North Carolina to visit her mother. This time I'll be baking cookies for profit and hopefully visiting lots and lots of art museums. Somewhere in there maybe I'll get an interview or two.

Before a job interview last week, Martha and I were lying in bed enjoying a little morning conversation.
"I had a dream last night that I had cancer." I said.
"Oh god holly"
"Yep, I was in a hospital bed and I had cancer. Oh and I had to have a little dental work done; they did it right there in the bed."
Laughter
"You were there, I had started chemo, and well yeah, that is it. It was..."
"God Holly", she interrupted, "why don't you cheer up a little?"

After I printed out the last page of my resume packet, the printer died. But considering that it's almost six years old and the endless amount of prints, resumes, letters and general directions I've printed out on the thing, it's amazing that it has lasted this long.

I use shit to death. I wear clothes until they are rags. I rip though coats like nobody's business. It seems like at the end of every season I need a new coat. My CD player is eighteen years old, the receiver is roughly thirteen, and the turntable and cassette deck I've had for at least ten years. The speakers however are new. I even have vinyl records that I bought when I was is high school. My Canon 35 mm camera is the one my dad bought me (new) in 1981. Even my Holga is over three years old and they are not supposed to last past a year. Right now, all Martha hears is that I have a bunch of shit that is going to break all at one time and I will need $1,000 to upgrade. She did buy me a new printer, however.

The older I get, the older all my crap gets.

There are only three physical things that I have left from my marriage. The emotional things are too numerous to mention and in reality, it's not what happened in the marriage so much as the outstanding shitty behavior that happened well after the divorce. But anyhoo, all three of these things were already old when we bought them. There is the Victorian lamp in my photo room. Originally, we bought two of them; Jim got the other one. I am sure his second wife promptly made him throw it out along with all of his guitars and other musical instruments and anything having to do with his former self. I suppose that is one way to weed out the past. Let the replacement dig through your crap and make a new life for you.

Ok, obviously I'm having a few issues here but let us press on.

Jim and I bought the pair of lamps at the Salvation Army in East Liberty for $14.00. The lamp I have still has the price on it, written in Sharpie Permanent Marker on the metal base. I have a 1960s marble table that I now use to cut mattes and file negs on, but back then, it was our kitchen table. Many a thanksgiving dinner and morning cereal has happened around the thing. I think we paid $20.00 for it.

Lastly, there is the 1940's red leather chair in the living room. Jim and I bought the red chair at the Salvation Army in Bloomfield for $45.00, the most we ever spent on a thrift store item. When Lily was a kitten, she went after it so there is some damage on the left side but over all it's in great shape. I am debating on giving it to Jasmine but not until she looks to be a little more stable in her housing. Could be awhile.

I've been thinking about throwing out a bunch of stuff. I know I should. I've done this before but I could always weed out more. What is the fucking point of dragging around crap year after year? Ok fine, I understand why it has happened. My mom threw away anything that I couldn't take with me when I left home. She tossed out paintings, drawings, journals, yearbooks, photos, furniture, art supplies, clothes, sketchbooks, reading books, letters etc. Gone, all fucking gone. The problem is, that shit was not hers to throw out. I would have eventually put it on the curb but I lost that opportunity.

So now, because I'm so damaged I hold on to things like grim death. I have a painting that a friend did, that I hate but cannot seem to throw it away because a friend did it. A friend I no longer talk to. So it sits in the sunroom facing the wall in the corner. I have old journals that I WILL NEVER READ, and most certainly do not want anyone else to read after I'm dead, so I really should toss that shit out. I have stacks and stacks of old VCR tapes from when Jim used to bring home the video camera from work. He would put the thing on the tripod and film whatever happened in the living room for hours and hours. Mostly, it is of Jasmine running around the room, chasing the cat with her bubbletop toy vacuum cleaner, screaming out total gibberish all the while looking like an add for Ritalin. Although the tapes could be used as a public service announcement for birth control, the thing about the VCR tape is that Martha and I don't even have the VCR hooked up.

So maybe some weeding is in order. Seems like my life, while tidy, upon a closer look is pretty chunky with useless crap. Throw out all the shit and have the VCR transferred to DVD is what I'm thinking. At least the storage of a DVD is much, much smaller. Eventually, things will be so small; I won't even notice them at all. And I suppose that is the real point.

In a coffee shop last week, while sitting amongst the tourists and the unemployed, I let my mind wonder as I watched a girl at the next table over. She was franticly thumb-typing on her Sidekick^TM (isn't that a $300.00 phone?) laughing and snorting to herself, completely oblivious to everything around her. Her wallet was sticking out of her purse, just inches away from me screaming to be stolen. Something in the way the late afternoon sunlight crawled across her Louie Vuitton Monogram Canvas Tote, combined with her mouth-breathing laughter, made me think of New Jersey.

Between the ages of seven and ten, I lived in Jersey, Trenton to be exact. My father moved us there one year after the race riots of 1968. I did 4th grade and half of 5th grade there before my dad moved us to Ohio. Jersey was so very different from Meadville, PA. Jersey is where I started playing with matches behind the school, had my first encounter with a bully and dabbled in the teachers' pet role by way of crossing guard. Not in that order, if I remember correctly, I think it was suck-up, bully and then matches.

My dad had a ranch house built on an empty lot on Darrah Lane. We moved in just as they were finishing the final details and the whole house had that new house smell. However, the yard was not finished. The whole thing was one big mud pit. Soon after we moved in the landscapers came around with their backhoe and in an attempt to level the back yard they smashed the digging bucket through the wall and into my bedroom, knocking my bed across the room, breaking the window and leaving a huge gash in the wall.

My mom freaked out, (obviously), but she was freaking out at the idea of at night, an animal would be able to crawl inside the house. My seven-year-old brain had not even thought of that until she mentioned it but once she did, I could not stop thinking about a foaming-at-the-mouth animal, clawing its way into my room in the middle of deep dark night.

For three nights in a row I hardly slept at all. This was the beginning of a long, long road of my mother's neurosis keeping me awake at night.

Anyway, when we first moved to Trenton we still had a baby grand piano in the living room but soon after we moved there my parents sold it and bought a Hammond organ and my piano lessons turned into organ lessons.

My teacher The Organ Lady, lived across the street from us and twice a week I would walk over there for my lessons. It was an hour of me butchering Bach's Toccata in D minor for organ (very fitting I know), a few show tunes and standards like Greensleeves. After my lessons, The Organ Lady would come over to my house and hang out with my mom.

In the summer, mom would always bring out two glasses and hand one to The Organ Lady and they would proceed to talk about my progress. Together they would stand under the tree in the front yard, drinking gin-spiked lemonade; my mother in her cream and white pinstriped Capri pants, laughing as cigarette smoke streamed out of her nose, while they both swatted their hands in the air at the mosquitoes.

Eventually the conversation would turn to the 'big accident' that happened about a year before we moved there. It was on the corner of Princeton Pike and Darrah Lane. The Organ Lady was clearly fuckup about it because it seemed like every conversation I overheard was eventually about the crash, a crash that my mom never even witnessed.

From what I remember overhearing, it was a massive accident involving four cars. One of the cars pulled out in front of a truck causing a chain reaction where a large white car became airborne and smashed into the house on the corner, killing the woman driving the car. Apparently, there was alcohol involved and I think a dog was killed inside the house. The Organ Lady lived next to the house on the corner and on that day, she brought a blanket out to cover the woman who, having been thrown from the car was now dead in the front yard near her property line.

Sometimes I would listen to this story while doing summersaults in our yard. Other times I would go in the house and stare at them from my bedroom window, listening to their low murmurs. I could always tell when they had stopped talking about the accident because as the sun went down the sound of my mother's cackles would grow louder, with an occasional snort here and there.

In the short time that I lived there, I managed to make a few friends. One friend who lived down the street had more toys then I had ever seen in my life. She had a younger brother but still, the entire basement was her play area. They even had a trampoline and an above ground pool. My parents used to tell me all the time how spoiled I was, but this girl was the living example of spoiled.

I had another friend that lived directly behind us. She was Italian and had seven brothers and one sister. She was the youngest and named after Saint Therese.

A few times her mother invited me over for dinner. Dinner at Theresa's house was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. They had two kitchens; one was in the basement that had a walkout into the backyard and the other was upstairs, on the first floor where normal kitchens are supposed to be. The kitchen in the basement was the summer kitchen. In middle of the summer kitchen stood an enormous 'L' shaped table with two plastic checkered tablecloths over them. All the dishes, silverware, serving bowls and glasses had been in the family for generations.

When it was time to eat we all held hands as her mother said grace and then everyone began talking, yelling and passing food around the two tables. Theresa's father did not speak English so most of the conversations were in Italian. I really liked Theresa's house mostly because it was the complete opposite of mine. Dinner at my house was a painfully quite event. We had a small square table, my parents sat on one side and I sat on the other, directly across from my mother. The only sound in the house was the sound of the kitchen wall clock ticking away at the night. Nobody had anything to say to anyone and one of my father's favorite lines was, "Children should be seen and not heard."

I had another friend who lived two houses down from Theresa but I didn't like going over there. Her house was totally trashed and I mean garbage and dirty toys everywhere. The whole place smelled like pee. It was disgusting and I'm not sure just what the hell was going on down there. In that version of suburbia, they clearly did not fit in.

About once a month, our next-door neighbors would get into a fight. They would scream so loud at each other, that I would sit in my bedroom and listen to them throwing shit; the sounds of crashing and glass shattering went on for well over an hour. Then I would hear the man crying out, "Help me, help me, she's trying to kill me. Please someone help me!" But no one ever did. No police car ever came to their house. It was weird because the next day, after an argument, I would see him walk out of his house and go to work, or I would see him mowing the yard. He didn't look like his life had been threatened. My dad used to say that they probably like to fight, that it got them all riled up. At the time, I had no fucking idea what he was talking about.

Jersey was weird. I had my bike stolen from our driveway and believe it or not, they actually found it. The cops found it in downtown Trenton. Some kid who lived in a horrible, burned out area in the city stole it. My dad and I went to pick it up. The kid had taken my basket off, removed my bell, changed the license plate, and ripped my banana seat. It didn't look anything like my bike but according to the serial numbers it was. My dad put it in the trunk of the Buick Wildcat and we drove home. But you know, I never really wanted to ride the thing again. Even when my dad fixed my seat, it just freaked me out that someone took it. I had the same feeling when someone stole the Jeep (again in Jersey only thirty years later) and they found it, stripped down to nothing but the frame, wet with rain and bird shit, abandon in a burned out field in Newark. (The repetition of certain events in my life is absurd.) Once everything was made to look all new again, I never really wanted to ride in the Jeep.

So where is all this going? I have no idea. Something about being unemployed in a coffee shop make me think of living in Jersey. Who knows how my mind works.

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 very first time I was ever laid-off from a company was in Denver, Colorado, (Aurora, to be precise), in September of 1987. It was a small design shop consisting of an owner; a female Art Director (an odd sight for the decade and someone I considered to be a mentor); and a female bookkeeper. All were full-time employees. I was hired as freelance contract work. Specifically, I was hired to paste-up the Yellow Pages.

There was a typesetter who came in twice a week to print out galleys and galleys of type that I had speced. Specing type is an art form unlike anything that goes on today. It's a mathematical formula involving a pica pole, words and the ability to problem solve without approval and/or praise.

While this wasn't my first job in my chosen field, I had previously worked at a print shop, it was the first job that I liked the folks I worked with and enjoyed, for the most part, coming to work.

I was young and had so very much to learn about business.

I worked there for roughly a year and a half. Once the Yellow Page contract was finished, I moved on to bigger and better projects. Things like hi-comp work, where I was able to play with Letraset films, papers, Pantone Books and press-type. Mostly I did hi-comp work for Coors Beer and AT&T. It was a good gig and I was happy.

Then somewhere around the beginning of spring 1987, the company hired a bearded hippy guy, who I considered to be a slimy fuck. He was a fast talker and knew everything about everything. He also had a knee-slapping laugh that sounded more like a bark, bark, bark, and a snort, then anything normal. The hippy guy was hired to help out on an enormous production job; pasting up direct mail pieces. You know, that junk mail shit everyone gets, discounts on dry-cleaning, and half-off on pizzas? Well, I've actually made those.

After a few months the direct mail contract was finished, and much to my annoyance, this hippy guy stayed.

Not only did he stay, he started going out to lunch with the Art Director, something that I had never done. The Art Director would slam me with work and then have closed door meetings with the hippy guy. Considering that the office space we all existed in was about the size of a one-bedroom apartment, having a closed door meeting of any kind was weird. Sometimes I was the only one who wasn't in a meeting.

As spring turned into summer, the work started to dry up. 1987 was a weird year for business. Reagan was president and in the middle of the Iran-Contra Affair, the stock market was going nuts, (and eventually crashed i.e. Black Monday) and the economy was starting to suck. I spent a great deal of time at my desk painting personal projects and turning up my radio to avoid hearing the Art Director and this hippy guy laughing at each others jokes.

Then on the first Friday of September at 4:45, I was called into the Art Director's office and asked to close the door. I sat there, all of twenty-five years old and wide-eyed like a puppy, notepad in hand, thinking we were going to talk about a new project when she folded her hands together on the table, put on a sad face and in a soft voice said, "We're going to have to let you go."

Go where? I thought and then it occurred to me that something very bad was happening. I immediately asked about the hippy guy (like this was important) and the Art director informed me that it was just me that was being let go.

I couldn't believe it. I was devastated but more importantly I was blindsided and I hate that. No one likes to be taken by surprise but I vowed to never, ever let something like this happen again. Oh sure, I can be laid-off, it is after all, the nature of this business, but not without seeing it coming first.

But back to September of 1987.

After leaving her office, I grabbed a cardboard box that was full of reams of copy paper, dumped the paper on the floor and started packing up all my shit. All my tapes, art supplies that I brought from home; rulers; orange triangles; a set of Rapidograph pens; a pica pole etc.; all jammed into a box along with my radio and Violent Femmes, Patti Smith and Husker du tapes. Intermittently I was spewing profanity at the hippy guy by telling him to 'fuck off'.

As I was just about to leave the office for the last time, the Art Director asked to see what was in my box. I was horrified. I completely understand this thinking now, but at that time, I was personally offended. I could not believe that she would think I would steal something. Standing in the small lobby, while the bookkeeper, hippy guy and the owner stood guard, the Art Director dug through my box of crap at a slow, meticulous pace. I just stood there with my mouth open, trying not to cry.

Then on top of that she pulls out a metal 12" printer's gauge claiming it to belong to the company. Hippy guy made a gasp and the owner took a step closer to me. I explained to her that it was mine, that I had brought it from home and I used it instead of theirs because the numbers on mine were easier to read. Theirs was faded. She then made me walk back over to my desk and show her the other one.

Once I got out of there, I threw all my shit into the back of the Dodge Omni coffin car that I drove, (yes I even drove then) and cried.

Being laid-off that time unleashed a shitstorm of events that were impressive only in their combined determination to punish.

Because I was always contract freelance and never considered a full-time employee, I was unable to collect unemployment. So right out of the gate, Jim and I were screwed, living from shitty paycheck to shitty paycheck, we had maybe twenty dollars in our checking account. Oddly enough on the day I was laid-off, in the mail arrived a brand new MasterCard with a $3,000 limit in Jim's name. Our grocery store just started taking credit cards, and so there you go.

Three days after I was let go, I was pulled over for going 45 in a school zone. I started crying as the female cop gave me a ticket. She was unmoved. After I got home from that horseshit, Jasmine's pre-school called me to inform me that they had had a Chicken Pox outbreak at the school and were sending all the children home for two-weeks, could I please come get my kid. I called the doctor and he said that there isn't too much that can be done at this point but to watch Jazz and if nothing happens by 'Day 10' then all should be clear.

'Day Ten' Jasmine woke up with a pox on her back. Three days later, I woke up with a pox on my shoulder. I'd never had chicken pox as a child and had no idea what I was in for. The first few days I felt weird but was able to take care of Jasmine. She was covered with Chicken Pox and I covered her in Calamine Lotion. She looked like a three-year old chalk child. Jasmine kept scratching at herself so I duct taped mismatched oven mitts to her arms. She was covered from her fingers to just under her armpits. She looked like a floral and plaid penguin. Yeah, I know, ok but you weren't there. In the end, this is why she doesn't have scars all over her face.

Just about the time that Jasmine was due to go back to school, I started to get really, really sick. I had pox all over every part of my body and could not stop throwing up. I was so sick that I was puking up bile. I spent all day for several days in the bathtub filled to the top with Aveeno oatmeal bath. The last day Jasmine was home with me, I had set up two child gates at each end of the hall so she could only be either in her room or in the bathroom with me. Those were some good times.

The toilet was next to the tub and every few hours I'd wake up in cold water, the parts of my body that had been in the air completely dry, sit straight up and throw up in the toilet. Jasmine would hear this, knowing I was awake and come running in asking "Do you feel better, mommy?" and "Can I have some juice?" Then she would then run back into her room where I'd hear her playing with her toys singing "Mommy is sick. Mommy is sick. Sick, sick, sick." over and over again.

At this point, I had been unemployed for about three-weeks with no hope of even getting close to any interview of any kind soon. I had over eighty-seven crusty chicken pox on my face. I know this because one day, when I was able to sit on the couch for hours on end, I counted them. It was around this time that two other things happened.

I'd been sleeping on the foldout couch for days, coughing up phlegm and running a mean fever. One night, as Jim sat in the chair beside me doing bong hits and watching The Outlaw Josey Wales together, I seemed to have stopped breathing and had he not been there to bring me back, I'm not so sure I'd be around today.

It was about this time that my mother called to let me know that they were coming to visit. Now, I can count on one hand, (and still have three fingers left) the number of times they had visited us over our then, five-year marriage. In fact, if I count the total number of times that my parents have ever come to visit me anywhere, I still don't think I would use up all the fingers. Even more disturbing is when I really think about it, that visit, was the third to the last time that I would ever see both of them alive together in the same room.

So let's review. I'm unemployed and feel totally betrayed. Jim and I are charging food on a credit card that we will never be able to pay back. While I had stopped throwing up, I look like I've had acid thrown in my face and simply cannot be seen in public. My parents are coming and I have a $100 speeding ticket that we need to pay, in cash or they are going to put a warrant out for my arrest.

Yet, somehow, we moved through it all. Jasmine went back to school. I got another job, be it a sucky one but at least I was working. We paid the speeding ticket and soon after, I caused a multi-car accident during rush hour on University Blvd while on my way to an interview. Boy did that end my desire to drive. My parents came and went (literally) and Jim's parents ended up begrudgingly paying our MasterCard bill.

All this memory stuff has come up because of two things. My time at the Voice is coming to an end, (something I've been out in front of for sometime now), and that makes me sad, scared and unusually hopeful. The other thing is when I was putting on makeup the other day, I noticed a chicken pox scar on my face and surprisingly, it made me smile. "Mommy is sick. Mommy is sick. Sick, sick, sick." Indeed.

Sometimes, I just can't seem to get into the rhythm of New York City. It happens. Things are just slightly off and you know it. You can feel it before it even really lets you know just how off it's going to get.

Walking to work last week, I came upon a construction area where the sidewalk was gone and a section of the street was being used as the pedestrian walkway. A little cement barrier was set up so that traffic could not just mow people down. At the entrance to the walkway I had to step out into the street because a delivery truck was parked at the opening. Two guys were unloading stuff from the truck. I looped around the one guy just as the M8 cross-town bus skimmed by me lightly touching my right hand. I shifted over just a little so as not to be run over and as I moved to the left, the guy who is unloading the truck grabs a big ice chest full of clear liquid, turns slightly to the right and dumps it all over my legs. I totally stepped into it. I am wearing shorts and flip-flops and that shit was ice cold. I freaked out, ripping my headphones out of my ears while screaming "WHAT THE FUCK?!"

He didn't see me, I know this, it was totally an accident so I'm not really bitching at him, and he's apologizing like crazy.

"What is it?" I questioned, looking directly into his eyes, my face mere inches from his face.
"What is what?" he looked at me, confused.
"What'd you mean what is what? What is the water? Is it fish water?" I said.
"No, just ice, see." He says as he pulls me over to the curb where there are big bags of ice already pulled off the truck and lying on the sidewalk.
"It's all good. Just water, I promise, feel good eh? Nice and cold. Nice and cold. Hot hot day, right? Just water, no worry."

I rolled my eyes and walked away. Yes, it did feel good except that my brain was convinced that it was acid water and I was going to end up with a weird rash or something. I get to work and wash my legs and feet with anti-bacterial hand soap in the sink. My shorts however will have to wait.

At lunch, while out shooting and walking down St. Marks I see a homeless guy a good half a block away from me. We are headed towards each other and I don't think to much about it except that I notice he is wearing a heavily stained light blue overcoat, he happens to be barefoot and he has eight inch drinking straws sticking out of both of his ears. Somehow, and I'm not really sure how this fucking happened, he walks right into me, or I walk right on into him, it doesn't really matter. We both misjudged and the end result is that we touched. Like touch touch. Like my hand touched his chest and I gently pushed off of him. My face was inches from the bits of NYC that were stuck in his beard.

I pulled away from straw man and immediately turned around, and walked directly back to work. Shooting is over, more anti-bacterial soap, water and hand sanitizer are in my immediate future. I am trying to cross 3rd avenue but while in the middle of the crosswalk, where there is plenty of room to move around, a Cooper Union student manages to get her pen caught in my hair as she passes by me. It flips out of her hand, (at least she let go of it) and around my head to my face, lightly smacking me in the nose. And again, I'm like "WHAT THE FUCK?!"

"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry." She cried.

I just stand there in the middle of the street, pull the pen out of my head, hand it to her and walk away.

Like I said, sometimes the rhythm is just a little off.

Prick Me, You Prick
You know what's funny? Not funny, funny but odd funny? When I was a kid, my mom use to take me to the doctor's office on a pretty regular basis. In my head, it seemed like a monthly thing but in hindsight, it was probably every six-months or so. But the general reason she would take me was to get a shot. Almost always Dr. Goodman would inject me with something, usually penicillin. Penicillin in the 60s was given out at alarming rates, at least by Dr. Goodman, and that's why I am now allergic to all cillins and sulfas. Much like Zoë's booster-induced seizures, I have booster-induced allergies and my guess is that a good chunk of the kids who grew up in Meadville do too.

From the age of around three up until around seven, whenever my mom would take me to the doctor I would ultimately flip out on her. I hated shots. I always ended up getting a shot and I fucking hated them. The minute I'd figure out we were going to the doctor I would start planning my escape. I can it trace back to this precise moment of my childhood as to where the fantasy of me jumping out of a moving car began. So easy to do then with no child locks, car seats or sober mothers. Hell, I wasn't even wearing a seatbelt. It is a fantasy that became a solid staple in my playbook until I left home. Jumping out of a moving car just to get away from my family. Tuck and roll.

Dr. Goodman had a home office. He lived in a very nice ranch house where the bottom part of the home was his office. The waiting room was always filled with a thick layer of stagnate cigarette smoke that would come to life whenever the door opened. Everyone smoked. My mom smoked, Dr. Goodman smoked and his wife (the nurse) she too would be smoking. Off of the waiting room were two or three exam rooms equip with metal tables, wooden tongue suppressers and plaid beanbag ashtrays.

When I was four I got the measles. According to my mom, I was very sick for days and days. My memory of this has always been condensed into those few moments when I was conscious. I remember the ice bath she gave me because my fever soared to 105 degrees and she was out of her mind with worry. I remember puking up ginger ale and saltines off the side of my twin princess bed and into the blue bucket that she usually used to mop the kitchen floor with. And I remember Dr. Goodman examined me from head to toe in my bedroom, just before he gave me a shot in the ass.

I was never safe, at any moment Dr. Goodman could show up with his little black bag full of needles.

After about a week of that shit, I was finally able to go to the doctor's office instead of him having to come to the house. My mom drove me down the street to his office and once inside I made a run for it. I ran all around their house, upstairs into the kitchen, around the dining room and into the master bedroom. It was freaky weird, with my mom and the nurse chasing me. My mom body slammed me by the doctor's double bed, shoving my head under the bed frame, where I saw the doctor's scared to death white poodle barking at me. Just as I looked into the little dog's eyes, the nurse came up from behind and jammed a needle into my ass.

Ah yes, memories. What has me thinking about all this is the current state of my back and the direction that treatment has taken.

I just had three shots in my back muscles. That's right, three of them. It fucking hurt and I had to sit there and take it. There was no running away because at this point in my life, no one would chase me. Only the pain would follow and I'm sick of the pain. I want to break-up with the pain. But sitting there, all bent over while two-inch long needles were slid into my back and buried into the tesre minor and trapezius muscles, I thought of Dr. Goodman, my mom and how I really, really wanted a cigarette.

I'm not sure what the official snow total for Hudson was but in our driveway there was easily two-feet of it. Martha wouldn't let me shovel because of my neck and what happened the last time. The only problem was that she had left her snow boots at work and my feet are about two and a half sizes smaller then hers are. So with her feet wrapped in extra large freezer bags she punched through to the garage to get the shovel and then made a single shoveled line to the walkway. It was then that a nice neighbor named Jack took pity on us and with his massive snow blower saved the day. Without that happening, it would have taken Martha all weekend to dig us out. Her back would be broken.

Yep, this is crazy stuff. I've haven't seen so much snow since I lived in Meadville. I think it snowed more in Meadville because of the proximity to Lake Erie but also why I might think that it snowed more was because I was never more then four-feet tall when we lived there. If it snowed a foot well, twelve inches was a big deal back then.

I do remember the neighborhood kids sledding down the back nine of the Hailwood Golf Club that we lived next to. Right at the edge of the green was the woods, and if you got up enough speed, you could fly across the creek at the bottom. Some kids didn't make it across and they would get wet and have to go home. Only once did that happen to me. I got a shitload of creek water down my snow pants. It was cold and gross. Because I was a pussy little redheaded five-year-old, I cried all the way home. I was also the same child that would make so many snow angles in my back yard that from the dining room window the yard looked like Escher's Angels and Devils drawing.

I guess you could say my head is currently in a strange place. My dreams have been running on these three themes:

1. Being laid off and becoming embarrassed about it. (The embarrassment part has me puzzled.)
2. The roof leaking in the kitchen. (It's not but I guess I think it's going to, or this is a bigger thing having to do with water)
3. My dead parents. Now Glamour Magazine says:
A dream of your mother signifies happiness in love or personal affairs, and a dream of your father forecasts progress in business, professional or career matters.

But the folks over at Dream Moods have a totally different spin on the dead parent thing.
To see and talk with your dead father in your dream, signifies that you are about to enter into an unlucky transaction or rotten deal. Thoroughly think through your decisions before entering into them. To see your dead mother in your dream, signifies your wretched and mean-hearted nature towards others around you.

Nice.

So in keeping with my wretched and mean-hearted nature I made one of my fantastic chocolate cakes for Jack, the neighbor who shoveled us out. We tried to give it to him on Saturday. Martha and I put our winter coats on, slid into our shoes and walked next door with a big ole cake on a plate. Martha rang the bell, knocked on the door and... nothing. We went back home, ate dinner then put our winter coats on again, slid into our shoes and went back over. The lights were on so Martha rang that bell, knocked on the door. After a few minutes and very, very slowly, an elderly man pries open the front door but can't seem to unlock the storm windowed screen door. Martha and I stand there watching him fuck around with the small lock until finally, Martha gets his attention and tells him its okay, nevermind. But he can't really hear us through the door.

Is Jack here?
What?
Does a Jack live here?
Yes. He's my nephew.
He was nice enough to plow our driveway and Holly baked him a cake.
Who? What? Oh? Well, he's sleeping. You're going to have to come back tomorrow.

If he could just open the door, I could have given him the cake but that kind of deduction and the whole logistics of it all was impossible.

The next day right before we left to try to deliver it a third time Martha says, "Here me now, if they aren't home, we're coming back here and I'm having a big piece of cake. Okay? Okay."

They were home and they now have the cake.

Maybe He's Caught in the Legend
I have to admit that the whole Van Halen, R.E.M and Patti Smith thing is what had me hooked. Sad to say I spent my Saturday night watching the VH1 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2007 ceremony. Grandmaster Flash, R.E.M, The Ronettes, Patti Smith and Van Halen.

As far as Van Halen goes, I was always on the David side of that crazy train. Didn't matter one bit what a jackass David Lee Roth was, Sammy Hagar was and is a tool. I saw Van Halen in the summer of 1979, when Runnin' with the Devil was everywhere but this was one of my favorite songs and this lead in to You Really Got Me, (I was already a total Kinks nut to begin with) could be heard coming from my bedroom from half a mile away. No wonder my mother was just out of her mind with me. The only reason she never killed me in my sleep was because I was an insomniac and she was older. She was out by 10:30 on nights where I would go the distance and watch the sunrise.

Just a few short but jam pack years later, I was living in Denver, pregnant with Jasmine and totally nuts about REM. Pretty Persuasion; Talk about the Passion; Sitting Still and Perfect Circle.

Oh but Chronic Town was the total shit, 1,000,000; Stumble; Wolves, Lower; Gardening at Night and Carnival of Sorts, (Boxcars) which I actually think I put on a tape for someone just a few years ago, or I wanted to because I remember it being a really good fit. R.E.M was huge in my world but so was Camper Van Beethoven, X and Husker du. The Cramps and Sonic Youth rounded out tapes with Patti Smith on one side and Nova Mob on the other. And in thinking about this further, I was totally into Hot for Teacher at the same time that I could not stop listening to Little America.

So as REM took to the stage and Stipe started yakking, which always makes my eyes roll. I laughed to myself because years ago, he never made a lick of sense seeing how he was a mumbler, now he speaks clearly but he seems like such a big drag. As I tuned him out, I started thinking about what a huge disappointment they became after about four albums in.

The last time I saw them was at the Coliseum at Richfield in Cleveland. My best friend and I had waited out all night in the freezing cold so we could be one of the first in line to buy tickets. (What can I say, no one had a credit card and life was a little more fucked up then it is now.) By the time the show came around, it was warmer outside and I'd already heard the new album, (Green) and I only liked one song on it. Turn You Inside Out. That was it. That night the Coliseum was packed and the police were everywhere. I couldn't understand it. I wasn't allowed to move from my seat and no one was smoking ANYTHING. The show was horrible but the band looked totally into it. R.E.M. started to play Perfect Circle and I thought I was going to vomit. After thirty minutes, we left and drove back to Pittsburgh.

As I lay in bed the other night, watching them sing Begin the Begin, I started to feel a little better. Sounded good and I always did like that particular song and dammed if I'm not still totally swayed by that fuckers voice. But then they did Gardening at Night and not just phoning it either. The whole thing actually made me sit up, put the bowl down and listen. I haven't seen it done that nicely in decades. The whole performance made my eyes well up. Sad but true, good music does that to me sometimes. Sometimes, it makes me cry. Of course, I was already weepy from when Patti Smith was on talking about her dead husband, Fred. (Boy, is she really starting to look like Joey Romone or what?) She is sixty for god sake and she is still something to see. Strong woman. Even Jasmine is so moved by her. I can't wait for the new covers album. I saw her do Jimi Hendrix's Are you Experienced? at BAM last year and I about lost my shit right there in the 25th row. But as you can see, it doesn't take much for me to act like I'm fourteen.

Martha is in North Carolina with her father, who is in the final days of his life. We got a call last week from her dad indicating that he thought it was time. This was right before a massive snowstorm dumped two feet of snow on us. It took Martha two days of horseshit to get a flight out and she had to drive to Connecticut to do it.

The roofers finished the last shingle six hours before the first snowflake fell. Our brand new roof is covered in some areas with almost twelve inches of snow. I shoveled our driveway four times on Wednesday, just to keep it to a level that I might be able to handle for Thursday morning, when Martha was going to need to get the car out of the garage and drive to the airport.

Thursday morning I woke up before the sun and was outside shoveling snow by 7am. I had only two and a half hours to dig out the ice covered two-foot high drifts that our driveway had become overnight. By 9am, I was physically finished but the driveway still had major ice drifts. Martha came out to relieve me and dug out the remaining blocks. After that, she traveled for over twelve hours before she was finally at her hotel room in Winston-Salem.

She wanted me to stay home, deal with the cats and to just be here so she won't have to worry. I am home alone, with nothing but my crazy head. I'm not even working, they can kiss my ass as I have taken some time off. Her last words to me before she left were, "Can you wait till I get back to completely flip out? I don't want to have to worry about you while I'm down there. Just wait until I get home."

"Okay babe, no problem." I smiled.

The whole shoveling two feet of ice balls thing was fucking awesome. Martha promised me that she was going to buy me a snow blower. Three days later my back is still fucked up and now, I have no way to the chiropractor. Whatever, out of sheer desperation I've made a 'homemade' traction device that as long as I don't 'accidentally hang myself', seems to be providing some relief.

Being home alone and thinking about death is always a good place for my head to be. After thinking about Mr. Harvey and all the wonderful years of knowing him, my head starts rattling around all the other kinds of death and weirdness that I've seen. There is my dad and the whole bat filled funeral. And then of course my mom and not only not knowing exactly what she died from but why on her deathbed she requested that I not be told she was dying. Or how both of my parents deaths involved my ex-husband. I am still at a loss as to why the fuck that happened. My thoughts bounce around to when Jasmine had cancer, and how I was so frightened that she was going to die. That constant stomach filled fear that has permanently scarred my innards to the point of chronic nervousness. I don't even know that if she was healthier, and suddenly became obsessed about her wellbeing, if that would make me feel any better.

I think about people that I've know that are now dead. Friends, distant relatives or bizarre friends of my parents, float in and out of my brain. I spent a good half-hour Saturday while scrubbing the floors remembering a neighbor friend of my moms'. Actually, there were two, the Robbins; they were a mother and daughter duo. Mrs. Robbins, who was roughly ten years older then my mom, would come down to the house at least once a week and hang out at our kitchen table, drinking, "coffee" and clear drinks with ice cubes in them. The Robbins lived on the corner and Mrs. Robbins was the atypical sixty-year old Jewish wife of an atypical sixty-year-old Jewish husband. Mr. Robbins had hurt himself years prior and was mostly wheelchair bound. He was a survivor and had the number tattoo on his arm. He seemed nice enough, very quiet almost invisible even though he was in a rather large metal chair. As a family, they were rich and traveled all over the world several times a year. The oddest thing about the Robbins was the fact that their only daughter, Sheila, who in her mid-thirties, still lived at home. There was a rumor that Sheila had been briefly married once but now things were very, very different.

When Mrs. Robbins was over, she would end up sitting in my chair at the table, directly across from my mom, going on and on about all of her jewelry, (she had big gold rings on every finger), and hand blown glass that she bought while they were vacationing on some tropical island. She had a tan that was so bronze that she almost blended in with the antique walnut table that my parents bought while we were on our vacation in Michigan.

When Mrs. Robbins wasn't going over a recent trip tally, she gossiped nonstop about all of the neighbors. Neighbors I didn't even know we had. She knew everyone's comings and goings and wondered aloud about their lifestyles and drama. The family from India who lived behind us and whether the dot on the mothers head was a real ruby; the folks at the end of the street who's son was killed in Vietnam and how sad it must be to be in the house and how she just can't bring herself to visit them. And then there were the kids who were caught drag racing in front of her house, she just happened to notice one kid in particular was a kid she had seen me with before. She had seen me 'climbing' (her word) out of his car. What a great thing to tell a parent.

"Hey, yeah I saw your fifteen year old daughter climbing out of a dark green Nova the other night. That boy was arrested for drag racing right in front of my house. He looked like trouble." Doesn't really sit too well no matter what kind of family love you've got going on.

My house was already a war zone without any help from Mrs. Robbins. I must say I hated to see her around the house because it usually meant that a handful of shit was going to be flung my way before the visit was over.

She was an insentient neb and I have always believed that she is the one that told my dad she saw me sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night and even more menacing, she was the one who anonymously called my folks and told them I was pregnant when I was thirteen. The result of that particular phone call caused me to run away for weeks on end to avoid being smacked into a pulp on the vinyl kitchen floor. Mrs. Robbins was so vocal about everything and felt that she was well within her right to say whatever entered her mind, no matter what.

One hot summer day while I was lying on the couch watching Gilligan's Island, Mrs. Robbins was over, yakking with my mom about being discriminated against at Krogers. Something about how the bag boy would not help her wheel her groceries out to the car. As I was lying there listening to her, I wondered to myself how that panned out to discrimination, when suddenly the conversation switched up and she turned towards me and shouted over the banister that separated the kitchen from the family room;

"She is never going to amount to anything." She snorted while pointing in my direction. "I can tell to look at her."

My mom just stared at me. I rolled my eyes, crawled off the couch and went up to my room to smoke a bowl. Ah yes, memories, like the cracks of my mind, dirty water memories of the way it was.

But the real story with the Robbins has more to do about their own hidden family dynamics then I could ever realize. Even though my mom was as nutty as they come, I knew then that I was glad that Mrs. Robbins wasn't my mom. Even at my pathetic self-absorbed teenage age worst, I still pitied her daughter, Sheila who lived at home. Sometimes Sheila would also come down to visit with mom too, not nearly as much as Mrs. Robbins but at least once a month. Mom didn't like Sheila too much because she felt that she was too depressing. (I find this very amusing, and still do.) She would rather spend time with Mrs. Robbins then listen to Sheila talk about her mother.

Mrs. Robbins was driving Sheila bat shit and given what I had seen up till then, I was totally on Sheila's side. Sheila was roughly eight ways of fucked. She was in her mid-thirties, questionably married, (in hindsight I think she was gay) She did go to college and had some kind of liberal arts degree but was never able to really find a job or move out of the house. Her mom always insisted that she help with her father, who was partially paralyzed and needed a full time nurse, not his daughter wiping his ass full time. What Sheila was doing, and she was only doing it with my mother, was reaching out. She had no friends, and never went anywhere, except to my house about once a month.

Sheila's miserable life went on this way all thorough the 70's and sometime in the early 80's she decided that she had had enough. The details are sketchy but the gist was that one morning Sheila snapped and killed her mother, stabbing her several hundred times all around the kill zones. She then turned around and stabbed her father, who was unable to do anything but sit there and watch his daughter kill his wife. She only stabbed her father a few times but just enough to kill him too. Then, Sheila went upstairs and hung herself in her bathroom. They didn't find the bodies for over two-weeks when finally a neighbor, not my mother, called the police because their mail and newspapers had been littering their yard.

I remember the day that mom told me of the murder/suicide. She was shocked, as was the whole neighborhood I sure. I was living far away from Shadowcrest Court and hadn't been home in years but as mom was going over the details of the murder I kind of understood. Sheila's buttons had been pushed. All those years growing up there, I just figured my house was, you know, 'That House. The police were always there, you could constantly hear my mom screaming at me over the Rolling Stones and there was that nasty time my dad beat the shit out of me in the front yard in plain sight of Mr. Pishotti, who was walking his two full sized poodles. You know, we were 'That House'. But clearly the winner here was the Robbins family for the murder/suicide at the corner house. I think we came in second place.

I think I need to start having the same expectations for The L Word that I used to have when I was in high school and watched General Hospital everyday after school with my best friend Sherry. The only thing that was expected from that soap opera was for it to be on. Plot was not an issue and believability was never a consideration. If we skipped school, then the whole run from All My Children, One Life to Live and on into General Hospital was room ambiance to our pathetic southern Ohio lives. That and Lynard Skynard [Leh'-nerd Skin'-nerd].

But the point is, nothing groundbreaking was expected from these shows and we were never mentally challenged, except for when Luke raped Laura on the floor of a disco and then they ran away together to Ice Princess Island. While on the run, Luke and Laura fell in love but she was already married to a guy named Scotty, who went nuts when she ran away. Somehow, Scotty and Laura divorced and she then turned around and married Luke, (the guy who had just months before raped her on the floor of a disco) but not before he managed to save the town of Port Charles from being frozen from Cassadine's weather machine.

As far as I can tell it's every woman's fantasy, to not only fall in love with your rapist but to run away to exotic locations with him. While "on location" together, you can help save the planet. Then, with nobody in the way of a complete 180, nothing else says submissive-punching-bag better than "I do". I mean, if he rapes you before you marry him, just what is to be expected when you lay down the "till death do us part" line?

Anyway, The L Word isn't even as believable as anything that was ever on General Hospital. I now realize that I extremely dislike just about every character on the program because every single cliché within the lesbian community is in use. I can almost see the conference room white board with the all the characters names across the top and little boxes below, each one filled in with a predictable behavior or affliction. Some characters have several clichés running in rotation so all that they do is hop from one superficial event to the next. The writers of The L Word are really bad soap opera writers. This shit would never fly in the straight daytime land of soaps and that stuff is total crap. I expect at least the same level of hogwash as General Hospital. Come on girls the bar is already low enough.

WOMAN'S WORK
More health scares with Jasmine this week. For the moment, things seem to be in a small holding pattern. I can't tell if it is just Jasmine's natural hypochondriac abilities at work or if there is something more sinister below the surface. Telling me to relax is really something that just doesn't work much anymore.

She is coming home for spring break to meet with her main doctor here about a new thing. Heredity might be at play, so we aren't as concerned but then some days we are. It flips every other day and I am slowly losing what is left of fucking senses. This Friday Martha and I will be in Pennsylvania. I hope we can get there in time for her appointment with the eye guy. This is all for the second opinion about the spinal tap. Her doctor here wants to make sure she needs a tap and not drugs first.

I, true to form, buried my head in my photography. Green-wood Cemetery is up. It took me five days to scan all the negatives. Not five solid days, I did have to work and talk endlessly on the phone with Jasmine about health issues. Anyway, the gallery here is up and I will be putting a smaller one on Toycamera later on in the week. I'm also going to see if the Voice will run it. They were interested a few weeks ago but now, things might be different. Everything else about work is.

Regardless, it is good work and I am very proud of it. I think I managed to catch the feeling that was with me on the one rainy day. It is a strange sensation to walk alone among the dead with nothing but a camera. I've always enjoyed it, but I'm funny like that. Martha went with me but we would separate the minute we left the car. She traveled over one hill and I over the other. She managed to shoot a pretty funny little video clip of the two of us but outside of warming up and drying off in the car the shoot was a solitary event. She shot some very good photos as well.

SUNBEAMS ON GOLD CARPET
Lately, I have had to think about my mother more than I normally would and more then I am comfortable with. All this aging stuff has me trying to guess about her health issues so as to gauge my own demise. Heredity is a funny thing. I can't remember how old my mom was when she went through the change but if I had to guess, it probably started before the age of fifty but really hit peek levels by the time she was fifty-three, and those where some good ole days I'll tell you. I was thirteen and she was fucking crazy as a loon. It was somewhere around the age of fifty-eight that she developed uterine cancer and had a hysterectomy. She then went on to live another twenty-two years with varying degrees of health problems. I have yet to find out what she actually did die from although I know she had just undergone her first round of chemotherapy when she died two years ago. But what kind of cancer is a mystery to me. All of my doctors are interested in my family's, (particularly the females) medical history but that is so hard to give when everyone is dead. Yes, I could find out if I really wanted to and I will probably have to but not just yet.

So for now they'll get this list. Breast and Uterine cancers; extremely high blood pressure; hypertension; mental illness, specifically manic depression with panic attacks and high anxiety; alcoholism combined with prescription drug abuse; cigarette smoker for fifty years, osteoporosis and cataracts. Yep, that was my mom as defined by illness. The sum of all that's wrong, well at least what I knew about.

I think that I just might be stronger then my mother ever was. Now that is a bold sentence and I'm still working on processing that thought but if I line up both of our lives, well... I'm thinking that an idea of that caliber just might have some weight to it. I mean honestly, once she married my dad she had thirteen years of VP bank wife, country club loving, republican voting living before I came along and created half of what was wrong with her. By the 70's all she had in her life was a fucked up teenager who did normal fucked up 1970s type stuff. There was only ONE of me so other than that, she pretty much had the run of her life if she wanted it. Instead, she cleaned the house, grew zucchini in the backyard, sat at the kitchen table, and stared out the window for hours on end while drinking Black Label beer and chain-smoking Salem cigarettes. Maybe, that's the way she wanted it. The only probe into my mother's brain during those dark years was kept on a pad of paper by the phone. In that pad of Provident Bank notepaper, my mom would write these wacky sentences; nothing that I can recall now and not anything I could have begun to understand then. I left home a seventeen and while she did seem to calm down a tad bit, that woman was as high-strung as they come. And why yes, the apple didn't fall very far from that tree.

I don't think my mom could have handled working full-time in the fantastic mans' world of publishing, or faired well with any kind of artistic talent, moonlighting the self-indulgent process of creation. Or nurtured a shaky child through college, with the constant health scares and the ever looming fear of the cancer coming back. She could have never walked away from a marriage, even though I know that for many years she was painfully unhappy with my father. She could have never ever handled moving to Denver, DC or NYC and none of this could she have done before the age of forty.

I have no real point here other then I've been thinking about my mother and as I mentioned before, I'm thinking about her a little bit more then I am comfortable with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to be frightened of water before the summer of 1973. I never learned to swim as a small child despite my family's Country Club membership and the few cracks the local swimming instructor had at me. He scared me and nothing ever works if you yell at me. I dig in and will not give it up. My parents yelled at me all the time to no avail so who the fuck are you in your weirdo Speedo?

We moved to Cincinnati when I was ten and while there is a wealth of horror stories revolving around that whole event, the swimming one is what I'm going with here.

My mom loved to go to Kenwood Mall. The Kenwood Mall was about a twenty-minute drive from the house and she did this at least four times a week, Monday through Friday. I believe it was around her hundredth time driving up and down Montgomery Road that she noticed a swimming pool off to the side and before I knew it, she was dropping me off at the pool three or four times a week, weather permitting. Not only did I not know one single kid at the pool, seeing how we were two school districts over from mine and we had only lived in Ohio for 6 months, I also did not know how to swim - at all.

Odd? Why yes it was odd behavior and I have no idea why she did it. She used the swimming pool as a baby sitter and probably had a small bit of hope that I might drown. She would lather me up with sun block and then shove me in the car with a beach towel, a bottle of Coppertone and a laminated membership card. We'd drive down Montgomery road to the a hotel where she would U-turn that big brown Buick around and drop me off. Then she would drive away with no real indication as to when she would pick me up. After a few weeks of this it seemed to average out to where I was spending seven hours a day by myself at the pool. I was 10.

The first day she did this I stood in the parking lot for a minute and watched her drive away. Then, I turned around and walked through the rickety metal gate and over to the lifeguard, who was all of 18 and wearing a yellow string bikini with a big white daisy on each breast. She was leaning over the counter at the concession stand, laughing and smoking a joint with the boy who ran the place. I told her that I did not know how to swim and could she make sure I didn't drown. She asked me where my membership card and my mother were. I handed her my card and said I didn't know where my mom was. She looked at my card, then at me and told me to stay at the other end of the pool.

At first, I stayed in the kiddy end where I just sat in the water and watched the mothers with their infants. Over those weeks of being the redheaded looser at the pool, I noticed that the real action was the deep end of the pool where the cool kids were, laughing jumping off the diving board and playing Marco Polo. At first, I thought the game was called Marco Polio but anyway, slowly over several weeks, I would inch my way into deeper and deeper water. Once I figured out how to tread water, I was dog paddling all over the place and I was constantly getting in the way of their water games. No one helped me and the stoner lifeguard never even noticed me or the few time I hacked up a lung when I got in over my head.

When mom dropped me off she never gave me any money. "What the hell do you need money for? I paid for the summer membership." She'd bark at me. I'd tell her that I'd get hungry after about four hours dog paddling around an Olympic size swimming pool and maybe if I could have some potato chips or something to help break up the day. No, was the answer to that. So I started taking nickels, dimes and quarters out of my coin collection to the pool with me. I only needed a dollar a day for a bag of Andy Capp's Hot Fries and a Mountain Dew.

After twelve weeks of robbing my own coin collection, the money was almost gone, but by that point, I was diving off the diving board and swimming on the bottom of the pool like a true bottom feeder. In three months, I made not one friend but managed to teach myself to swim without parental or adult supervision of any kind. One of the last days that I was at the pool my mom came a little early to pick me up and she saw me jump off the diving board. She had no idea that I even knew how to swim at all let alone that I was jumping off shit.

When I came up for air, I saw her standing at the edge of the pool, staring down at me. I climbed out, grabbed my towel and walked barefoot across the black tar parking lot to the car without saying a word. I stood there dripping wet and hopping from one foot to the other while mom laid out a black plastic garbage bag for me to sit on so I wouldn't get the seat wet. She was pissed because I was supposed to be air dried by the time she picked me up, when ever that was. The rule was I had to get out of the water an hour before she came but I never knew where the hell she was at let alone when she was coming, so I was doomed to fail daily. But that was the nature our relationship. She'd set them up and I'd knock 'em down. It was a system that worked until the bitter end.

—Excerpt from Learning to Swim