Keep Talking: #97 Yellow Vomit

Keep Talking: #97 Yellow Vomit: I haven't been writing my blog because I have attempted to write a longer format story and was unsuccessful. It was about a girl named S...

#97 Yellow Vomit

I haven't been writing my blog because I have attempted to write a longer format story and was unsuccessful. It was about a girl named Susan who went to middle school with me and she had a prosthetic arm. Let's just say that I hit a wall.

I started a small writing group. It was me and one other person who had very limited experience writing but produced much more than I did. I was jealous of her, because she could have her work published and I am merely taking teeny weenie baby steps. So, I'm embracing my limitations and, like cool with being perpetually mediocre.

I had a dream that someone I was following on Instagram, who was making the most incredible protest signs, invited me to their home in Brooklyn. Like the Susan story, which maybe I will finish someday, I was a misfit. I fell asleep in her house and when I woke up (in the dream) I had a sore throat and had to find a cab back to Manhattan. She told me that she didn't know where the Williamsburg Bridge was, or how to get a cab back to Manhattan. I knew that she was lying to me because she had lived in Williamsburg almost 30 years and I wasn't sure why she was messing with me. What did I do? I liked her signs. Needless to say, the dream was a nightmare, yet when I left her home I found my way to a main artery with many cabs willing to get me back to Manhattan.

I had a credit card, so I would be okay.

My nephew was wearing a beautiful, tailored shirt. He was sitting in the back seat of a car and he warned us all that he might be carsick. We pulled over and he got out and threw up a pond of yellow vomit. If it was freezing, there was so much of it we could've gone skating on the vomit. It was golden and swirly. He felt better after he threw up and I was glad because I love him.

Don't think that the dream didn't hold any significance. It did. This new president is like a stomach virus that doesn't give you a break. I don't care what your politics are- face it- we are on the Hell Hole at Coney Island and this ride won't stop. I would never ride the Hell Hole because I am preternaturally frightened of rides, but can really go on the ride in my imagination, which sucks.

I love my country and wish you all well. I hope that democracy prevails. I'm not interested in WWIII.

Keep Talking: #96 Out Of Control Outsider (Beginning of new stor...

Keep Talking: #96 Out Of Control Outsider (Beginning of new stor...: When did I start losing control? I think it all started when I began to wonder if I had control of anything at all. I deci...

#96 Out Of Control Outsider (Beginning of new story)

When did I start losing control? I think it all started when I began to wonder if I had control of anything at all. I decided that it all could fit together, all the pieces of my life as kid. The pieces inside my head like a jigsaw puzzle without a rubric of consciousness or awareness. Then rules became a “thing”; Right, wrong, bad, good, pretty, ugly, smart, dumb, funny, tragic.  Binaries started to pervade my little life and pushed me around my childhood playpen until it broke open. The playpen became an open field with no boundaries or edges to contain my feelings, which were adolescent fierce and powerful. Maybe it began in 1972 when my family moved for the first time. I was in fifth grade and it sucked. Yet, I made friends after I freaked out over leaving New Jersey. Herbert Hoover Elementary School in Harrisburg, PA.was more diverse than Walter Stillman Elementary in Tenafly, NJ. It was ok moving into a giant brand new house with balconies and uninhabited fields on all sides of our property. I wandered around alone, next to a babbling brook and various sites where more houses were under construction in the subdivision. Dug up trenches, pipes to crawl through, wheat fields with dirt bike paths engraved and flattened to follow without any idea where they led. I walked and wandered.

When my kid started middle school in the city, I couldn’t compare what my life was to hers. No fields, paths, pipes or places to be completely alone. No strange transitions from school to school with new kids. Middle school funneled the old elementary kids and new kids into a giant building on 76^th Street. She fit into her classes, well, good enough. No tantrums set off by feeling uprooted and displaced by her parents. Yet, I cannot detach from my teen years. They are in my bones, my dreams and fears. I don’t want to lay them onto her, but the haunting remnants of shards of glass, dirty sidewalks and misfits lurk. I always spot the misfits and see myself in them.  Identifying pieces missing are my way of looking to become complete. It isn’t possible, but maybe that’s where this story began when it was, in fact, the recognition that things were not in my control. I've heard that adolescence is a time when abstract thinking becomes possible. Perhaps, it is the advent of this that also makes questioning becomes interminable and, well, impossible.

Everywhere I looks are triggers which lead me down paths of exploration and instead of discovering something the definitive, I find the infinite: no control.

#95 Car Wreck

I've been thinking a lot about ice skating on oil. Not just any oil, but a very high quality deep grassy green olive oil. It will cover an entire skating rink and will smell fantastic. Of course, it will be incredibly slippery. Given the fact that I cannot ice skate, this activity will be especially innervating and dangerous. I will be able to stand up and slide elegantly with foot over foot steps which will allow me to experience something I have never done before. When I have skated in the past it was not fun. It was humiliating and exhausting. I repeatedly fell on my ass and it hurt. Everyone else dancing effortlessly around me suspended in midair with placid smiling faces.

So, I will join them and it will be fantastic. I will not fall on my ass and will master olive oil skating.

Today my elderly parents got into a car wreck. The sun blocked both their eyes and they ran a stop sign. When the EMT came to extract the elderly woman from the vehicle they hit he told them this:
"It's okay. Everyone has accidents."
This was, of course, utter bullshit. Not everyone has accidents and minimizing a car crash, even one when nobody gets killed, isn't a good idea. Especially when delivered by a well meaning EMT to an old couple: a couple who should no longer be driving.

My father never calls me Lizzy. When he minimized the crash over the phone he called me Lizzy twice. What the fuck. Sorry, that is mighty adorable but won't distract me from the fact at hand.

I never want you to drive a car again.

I don't know exactly how to tell you this, but someone has to do it. The car is wrecked and you will have to cab home or to your concert or dinner date or whatever it is. Boo hoo. Fucking boo hoo and excuse me while I go for a skate on my ultra premium olive oil ice skating rink so I can think about what I will say to you to break your hearts with the truth. The truth is, it's over. The car is in the shop and when it's fixed it goes back to the volkswagen dealership and you will get rid of the lease and open an uber account.

If I sound mad, it's because I am. I hate having to be the one to tell you the facts of late life and burst your Golden Years balloon. It disgusts me to have to pull the plug on one aspect of your independence so you don't risk killing yourself or anyone else, again.
Frankly, it sucks to be here.

So, even if I cannot ice-skate I will think about it a lot. I will be out there with my smile and close my eyes and ease into the wind with the music playing. I will be lost and you can watch me fly, because I've never done it ever before and it will be really great.

I'll call you tomorrow.

#95 Car Wreck

I've been thinking a lot about ice skating on oil. Not just any oil, but a very high quality deep grassy green olive oil. It will cover an entire skating rink and will smell fantastic. Of course, it will be incredibly slippery. Given the fact that I cannot ice skate, this activity will be especially innervating and dangerous. I will be able to stand up and slide elegantly with foot over foot steps which will allow me to experience something I have never done before. When I have skated in the past it was not fun. It was humiliating and exhausting. I repeatedly fell on my ass and it hurt. Everyone else dancing effortlessly around me suspended in midair with placid smiling faces.

So, I will join them and it will be fantastic. I will not fall on my ass and will master olive oil skating.

Today my elderly parents got into a car wreck. The sun blocked both their eyes and they ran a stop sign. When the EMT came to extract the elderly woman from the vehicle they hit he told them this:
"It's okay. Everyone has accidents."
This was, of course, utter bullshit. Not everyone has accidents and minimizing a car crash, even one when nobody gets killed, isn't a good idea. Especially when delivered by a well meaning EMT to an old couple: a couple who should no longer be driving.

My father never calls me Lizzy. When he minimized the crash over the phone he called me Lizzy twice. What the fuck. Sorry, that is mighty adorable but won't distract me from the fact at hand.
I never want you to drive a car again.

I don't know exactly how to tell you this, but someone has to do it. The car is wrecked and you will have to cab home or to your concern or dinner date or whatever it is. Boo hoo. Fucking boo hoo and excuse me while I go for a skate on my ultra premium olive oil ice skating rink so I can think about what I will say to you to break your hearts with the truth. The truth is, it's over. The car is in the shop and when it's fixed it goes back to the volkswagen dealership and you will get rid of the lease and open an uber account.

If I sound mad, it's because I am. I hate having to be the one to tell you the facts of late life and burst your Golden Years balloon. It disgusts me to have to pull the plug on one aspect of your independence so you don't risk killing yourself or anyone else, again.
Frankly, it sucks to be here.

So, even if I cannot ice-skate I will think about it a lot. I will be out there with my smile and close my eyes and ease into the wind with the music playing. I will be lost and you can watch me fly, because I've never done it ever before and it will be really great.

I'll call you tomorrow.

#94 Christmas Ornaments and Summer Dreams

I remember opening a box of old ornaments. They were aligned perfectly: glass ball globes reflecting everything like tiny fun house mirrors. My face is bent in green, pink and red with tiny fish hooks coming from the top of my head. Some are broken like a tiny shark's mouth open and able to cut if handled wrong. They are from the 1960's and not valuable probably. There is a glued saying on some of them in script: "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" slanted across the center of the ball with a cute sled or ice skate underneath the cursive words. The words are white and resemble old calcified snow.

Some just have evergreen trees and dust.  About a half dozen boxes are stored in Gramm's basement filled with other holiday ornaments made by the boys, like a felt elf or a twisted candy cane made of pipe cleaners. They will be placed on the branches of the tree and I can't decide if I should throw out the old storage boxes which have classic vodka and whisky logos decorating the sides. Duct tape and masking tape has been reused over and over and no longer stick to the cardboard. It's time to consolidate the ornaments: the old and new in one box.

It's summer and I enter a pet food store and a large man is speaking loud, excited and fast. I glance over and see he has a wide band aide with cotton wedged underneath sticking out like fake snow. Recent blood work and a quick patch up job after it was done, I figure. I get on line with some cat treats and catch the tail end of his animated conversation with someone who exits. I realize that I want to block him out.

"Have a great day!" He says after them in a manic joyful tone.
He looks me over.
"You're a doctor!" (I'm wearing greenish baggy pants like scrubs).
"Nope!"
"You're a lawyer!"
"Nope!" I'm perplexed now. Where did that assessment come from.
I see he needs something from me.
"I'm in mental health."
I pray this is enough for him.

He has checked out and I put the cat treats on the counter and pull out cash to pay.

"There are a lot of people who need you!" He jokes.
I've heard this many times before and wonder, again, if he was recently hospitalized.
I smile.

"I was diagnosed with kidney cancer 2 years ago and today I had my most recent blood work and I am CANCER FREE!"
He is bursting with life. Bursting with panic joy exultation desire freedom. A gift for a boy on Christmas morning. He won the lottery today.
He will live.

"I'm so happy for you! Have a fantastic day!"
Inside my head I want to say more about myself and my life and my family and I don't. He floats out the door smiling ear to ear. I feel touched by a magical ornament that might break but is suspended like a fragile star giving off and reflecting life.