Yep.
right around the corner from that terrible place I used to have a (very public) job and all these people keep recognizing me and asking after the dogs/husband and I have NO EFFING CLUE WHO ANY OF THEM ARE so I end up doing this awful Long Island lockjaw “hellohowareyou” like a character from a Dominick Dunne novel.
Yesterday, the husband went on the back porch to smoke and I went with him. The neighbors were out around their fire pit.
We waved.
Then our beagle shot out the door like he was being fired out of a cannon, with my favorite thong waving from his jaws like a neon pink banner of victory.
While waiting for more coffee, I noticed the dishwasher is completely full - top and bottom rack - with coffee mugs. Straight coffee mugs and like, one bowl.
Also, sign that I might not be a completely terrible mother if we ever have kids:
So in dread of this dinner party am I that I stood in the parlor wearing a face masque, over-sized sweater, and nothing else, while contemplating finishing off the last of the gin in our liquor cabinet.
But then I remembered that the dogs are completely out of dog food, even the hidden back-up emergency dog food, and that if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to drive to get them more before they need dinner.
What I will not do for myself, I will do for my dogs!
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I’ve been a smoker for ten years.
Two weeks ago, I went to see my best girlfriend from college, because she just had a baby, and I quit on a whim the first day I was out there. So instead of being helpful to a new mother, she’s the one who saved my ass.
When I’d start to get cranky, she’d walk by and plop a two-week-old baby in my arms, completely unconcerned with my uncontrollable withdrawal shaking. When I’d start to vapor-lock she’d skirt by the couch and say “open,” and then shove a piece of dark chocolate into my mouth.
We spent almost seven complete days (“Is it Wednesday?” “I dunno - want some pie?”) on the insanely comfortable couch in her sweet-ass new house watching a lot of shitty daytime television alternating between snuggling her 35-lb beagle and her 10-lb baby. We drank sweet tea by the gallon, and slept a lot.
It was the best possible way I can think of to have quit smoking.
But now that I’m home, the husband is dragging me to a dinner party tonight. I’m still a little hung over from having the smoker’s flu, and it’s a party being thrown by my least favorite couple. I haven’t showered in three days, and I haven’t shaved or exfoliated anything on my body in two weeks. I haven’t formally fixed my hair or had my nails done since New Years.
And my depth perception is still a little wonky from the copious amounts of NyQuil/coffee speedballs I keep ingesting in order to trick my brain into thinking it’s been a lot less time since I’ve had a cigarette than it actually has been.
So yeah. All that to say, I’m beginning the process of “getting ready” at 11:48am, even though this shindig isn’t until 6:00pm. And the only way I can do that is with this song cranked while I take a shower.
I thought that was important to share.
Fuck you for me thinking to myself “I wonder if anyone else writes haikus in their mind when they’re trying to sleep” and then giving up on sleep and logging onto Facebook to see that you’ve written a perfect fucking haiku because you can’t sleep.
I have about a dozen purses that I rotate through on a semi-regular basis, based on season and events. Three or four see regular action throughout the year, but others, like my grandmother’s gold sequined clutch, are specialists, and sometimes hang out in the back infantry for a year or two before they’re brought up to the front line.
Mostly they’re abandoned in a frenzied and careless state at various points and then retrieved with whimsy six months or a year later: when opera season begins anew, when it first starts to snow, when a funeral comes up, when the first real day of summer adventures begins, when a ladies’ luncheon or a garden party appears, when I go home to see my parents, when we travel.
Tonight, I combed through all of them looking for a lighter, and realized that they exist as perfectly preserved tombs of what I was doing previously, at that point in my life.
A green clutch, carried with my grandmother’s Halston, houses opera stubs from the first year we were married; our first opera, attended together, crushed into the highest, smallest balcony seats imaginable.
My white hobo style bag contains a bright red lipstick and sugar packets in a foreign language; ten days navigating a hot and hellish country we both knew we would love and then ended up hating.
A gigantic designer “weekend” purse holds a smidge of sand, a bottle of Excedrin, and my mother’s earrings (long thought lost) from a wild wedding on the East Coast last summer - when my husband and I realized we were officially too old to attend weddings where the groom hurls anarchosyndicalist insults to the police when they arrive.
My petite brown sling purse hides a travel sized bottle of face wash, a handful of Euros, and worn scraps from the metro from a sudden late-minute excursion that turned into one of the greatest times in our marriage.
An oversized gold “work day” bag reveals remnants from a company I loathed working for, a mass card and rosary, and a receipt from a gas station and restaurants down south: all left over from orchestrating a funeral of a loved one two years before.
It’s a strange thing, spilling out the luggage of your previous lives. Painful and sweet and true. It is good to see where you have been.
Many people, my husband included, read books in an active sort of way - seeking, seeking, deconstructing, gleaning. I suppose after years of philosophy, that’s the only way one can read.
I might have done that too in my youth, but I don’t think so, and I certainly don’t now. Now, I rotate through well-loved volumes based on season, integrating new things here and there when free time (rarely) exists, and in this way, I discover writers like Steven Millhauser and Jonathan Howard and Gillian Flynn.
But mostly, I stick to an agrarian sort of literary calendar, with Didion and Danielewski on rotation in the summer months, and things like Chabon and Robbins in the fall, and Dahl and Emerson in the winter when I am feeling low, and biographies in the spring for betterment.
I know so many of the passages so well that I scarcely read anymore; instead my mind uses the words as reference only, ice skating fearlessly over paragraphs and pages, reciting and smiling at my favorite phrases.
This is how I read now.
Chain-smoking, working, and listening to Incubus. Say what you want about it, but there was so much sex had to Morning View. That kind of frenetic and leisurely sex that just doesn’t happen past your 21st birthday.
