I Can Has Cheezburger

But let me say this: whether it is McCain or Palin - de facto, de jure, (de la subida más alta es la caída más lastimosa, de haut en bas, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum, or de gustisbus non disputandum, or de la O, the great mixed-martial-arts trainer and fighter) - who ends their arranged marriage, and no matter what I think of Mrs. Palin's political views, historical knowledge, or geopolitical vision, and regardless of how dirtydirtydirty I think it is to just plunk AWomanAnyWoman into a vacant hole,

Because I am a dork, and because I am a woman, and because I think that, whatever her weaknesses, she was used callously and nastily, and then left to the wolves like an overeager bush pilot in a moribund and cranky Land-O-Matic,

I do hope her exit or concession speech consists of this and nothing more:

All Your Bases Are Belong To Us.

[BTW: Fail.]

(As though 'women' were indeed the monolithic voting block some chucklehead McCain Campaign Advisor advised McCain.) (Or maybe one didn't; maybe these people do not consult the candidate but act unilaterally, in 'the best interests of the Party.' I really have no idea. I no longer understand any of this. Ever.) (Although I did make venison pizza the other day at the soup kitchen, which seems somehow postmodernly ironic.)

(And then, okay, that from that solipsistic defiance emerges someone on the conservative side who isn't totally ill-equipped to convince those legendary 'Bases' that it doesn't totally suck, or prove cowardice or a moral lack, occasionally to recall that the U.S. is situated on the same globe as {what should be} a rather cautionary amount of other more-or-less confirmedly sovereign political entities.)

(That would so rock.)

(And then we can forget that whole Paraguay thing. K?)

Seattle Heatwave Sees Temps Above 65!

Today, which is really still Sunday, despite the timestamp, is the end of our 'heat wave' in Seattle. There were 'heat advisories' in effect for a couple days, to help people cope emotionally with the fact that they were perspiring in the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle may not have good weather, but it has fairly consistent weather. It is usually mild, and it is usually grey. After two years of living here, the new resident develops a 20-to-30-degrees-F comfort range, temperatures on either side of which routinely cause physical symptoms and spiritual crises. Here, the ideal is around 60 degrees, but most citizens can bear without great difficulty temperatures dipping to as low as 50 or soaring into the slightly-above-70 range. Below 45 is Positively Arctic; anything above 72 is Paralyzingly Torporific.

When it snows here, the Boy Scouts can't meet, the seniors can't get transportation to cribbage, the Lutherans can't have pancake breakfasts, no one goes to the Nordstrom Blowout Shoe Sale, everybody's Christmas bazaar gets put off till May, and people abandon their cars by the side of the road. Those who don't give up drive one mile an hour up steep inclines and then slide back down backwards, taking out all the other intrepid SUV-driving explorers with them.

But they very, very rarely have 'snow days' in Valdez, and people living in Phoenix or Fresno somehow manage to eat tomatoes, get haircuts, and read books even if the temperatures are routinely above a punishing 75 degrees. Here, we complain when the weather is monotonous, and then we complain more loudly when it deviates. What an odd little town. I will admit that I, too, perspired yesterday and was perplexed for a second, but I was reading in bed under two down comforters at the time, so my confusion was quickly put to right.

Cube-ism, and Where I Went Wrong

The Jeu de Marienbad, or Nim, or Fantan, or Tiuktiuk, or Tiouk-tiouk, is like a short, crappy game of chess. I can't play chess, since I can't accomplish drivings, or pool, or finding a parking lot, or walking to a destination, or anything even obliquely involving geometry. But I like to think I'm smart enough to accomplish many short, crappy versions of many things.

So, my question to you is, why can't I win it? You can answer that here. (Hint: I can do simple [okay, very simple: chuckle smugly, think of me as 'cute,' and then calm yourself] arithmetic, so I count ahead and do what limited planning my mind is able to do, and it seems to me my mind is indeed able enough for this, if at the same time admittedly not for chess, so factor that in to your factoring.)

I think whoever goes first loses?

Or is there something I do wrong? Or is it just that, with a human partner and thus the opportunity for tactical application of my formidable Withering Glance, and vast knowledge of human and canid psychology, I might be able endlessly to vanquish non-virtual opponents in this realm?

(Or tomorrow at the tattooist's should I just get it engraved in the stone of my biceps that '2 + 2 = Something the Vague Idea of Which I at Times Begin to Comprehend Theoretically and then Lose Entirely the Gist thereof'?)

(Or perhaps just 'Ibn Sina, I'm sorry.')

'Even he,

to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.' - Douglas Adams (patently, no less!)

So, I had some fish and chips and beer with the exhusband the other night. The musician one, not the gay one. Not that that one isn't a musician, too; they both are, and they both even play winds, just to make it more confusing, and they both teach, and they were both born within twenty-four hours of the other one. One grew up on an island; one lives on an island now, and the one who grew up on one also lived on the island of Honshu, which is where my brother and his family live now, although, apart from some mad air-guitar, the brother is rather less a musician than my various exhusbands, making him, at least, easy to distinguish. They were also both brown-haired and the same height, unlike my brother, who is not the same height as anyone. So you see how it can get infernally confusing to distinguish between them.

Despite all that, the exhusband is, naturally, dismayed at the tone the blog appears to be taking. All I can say is, A) I tried to maintain the coyness as regards spirituality and belief as long as I could, turning to overt ethical stances stapled to implicit conclusions to guide readers gently, fluidly, and subtlely into an occasional New Thematic Realm. I still reserve the right to call down imprecations on Mobil stations disguised as El Greco paintings, forests, or Roman hippodromes, and I patently intend still (not only to continue to overuse 'patently,' 'unsurprisingly,' and 'manifestly' but also) to insert irrelevant photos of perfume bottles, typographical coups, Central Asian needlework, and obscenely adorable palm-sized animals. But the fact is that if my ethical preoccupations obtrude herein - and they do - then surely the basis for them should likewise. Still, I realize that there are very many sound and good people who can get behind this or that stance of mine, but not fully with what leads, in my heart, at any rate, up to it.



But then, for them, I think: read backward. Start and stop with the praxis, which many would argue is the meaty part anyway, and leave the θεωρία to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And, frankly, we end up at the same point, anyway, which is that if you are doing good, you're doing good, and if you're not - well, we both suspect you'll know it. The only difference is that I was pleased at some point to realize not only that there was an Urgrund behind all those values, choices, and yearnings, but that, conveniently felicitously, I already believed in it.

So, fine.

and B) I did contemplate, after a long-overdue recognition that having a multiply-segmented life was driving me a bit insane, the notion of having a post welcoming readers to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. But I didn't bother because I never tried hard enough to have it come out amusing. So I opted instead for the Invisible Awkward Segue. Of course that's never a good idea, even if you're not trying to be de Man or Derrida. And so I am sorry. It was obtrusive; it was steep, sudden, and unwarranted, and it was probably a lot like basking in the middle of an Elle article on comparative depilation and then at the turn of a page being caught unawares in the midst of the final, prescriptive chapter in the still-typo-ridden galley version of some hand-wringing dissertation on the loss of the second-person vocative particle amongst the last fourteen speakers of X.

So I do apologize. I thought sneaking in more farm workers and food banks would help pave the way for the occasional saint, particularly if I made mention of how hard it was becoming to maintain a consistent voice. Now, though, I think it might be more consistent as a whole by not excluding one or other topics for the sake of maintaining a particular posture. The fact is, my spirituality is a part of my life, so it stands to reason it would be a part of this blog, as well, even if I demand to retain my right also to lambast (using the alt. sp. helps keep images of dry turkey and high-hatted Puritans at bay) examples of bad design, poor taste, petty theft, and my own misdriving, misjudgment, and misnavigation when I please.

Therefore, children: Welcome to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. Except for all the parts that aren't. Including this pretty little display from Black and Spiro:

Coherent Narratives (in Life, friends, not here.)

Caution: This entry says nothing of consequence about anything of consequence. Things of substance, written somewhat coherently, are elsewhere; skip ahead or back if you want one of those. If you like your logic loose, loopy, and slapdash, read on.

...At any rate, Dominicans being everywhere does not mitigate the fact that the last place I would expect to find one in my blog is IN-in my blog, but it seems you can't escape them with anything near the sort of regularity and indeed predictability with which we routinely fail to bump into Cistercians at the Circle K (do Circle K's still exist? I used to buy my Now 'n' Laters there, and once got a Bit o' Honey with a mosquito half-embedded in the top), but Fr. Fones, of prudential-judgment-and-politics, whom/which you'll remember from a few posts back, left a lovely comment about one of my posts about poverty.

But that's not what I'm getting to. Although, if only more people would comment, that would be great. Although, 'more people commenting' does presuppose someone is reading, and I think that is where the whole idea sort of loses a bit of steam.

At any rate.

Unlike a journal entry or emails, I try to afford those nonexistent readers of my blog the courtesy not only of a concluding sentence, but often a good title, too, when something strikes me. This allows me to believe, by framing the post so nicely, that there is indeed a middle thus framed, leaving me free of guilt and able to carry on with outfit-coordination for another day.

However.

Dominicans were called sometimes, by some, in certain parts, the Black Friars, or the Blackfriars, due, unsurprisingly, to their wearing of a black outergarment. And Shakespeare's (well, partly Shakespeare's) Blackfriars Theatre in London is on the site of a 13th-century Dominican monastery which, after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in England, France, and Wales in the 16th century, had very few friars of any color left in it.

That fact notwithstanding.

I was trying to trying to come up with something vaguely amusing for the title here. Now, stepping up another century, the Black Robes were the Jesuits, the Sulpicians, and the Récollets in New France. But mostly the Jesuits. I could use 'black robe' if I gave it a twist. But I lacked a twist.

So at this point (in the naming of one stupid blog entry!) we have: Dominicans, Shakespeare, England, egomaniacal homicidal kings, Québec, Jesuits, and the color black. Which is a lot of things, but not much to work with. So I looked up stuff on the author of Black Robe, the Belfast native Brian Moore, who also wrote Judith Hearne, which became The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, which I did not see and have nothing funny to say about.

But Black Robe also became a movie about two centuries after bad King Henry, when in 1991 it was directed by Bruce Beresford, who had previously directed Driving Miss Daisy, which is about slow driving and a slow-building relationship. Black Robe happily retained in film form many of the difficult moral issues of the book. And it had Lothaire Bluteau, of Jesus of Montréal fame, in the lead as Fr. Laforgue, whose deep faith leads him to great courage. It's one of my favorite films, and is at times unbearably beautiful and at others unbearably disturbing.

Which of course has nothing to do with Dominicans. Inconveniently.

However, it turns out that that when he died in 1999 (in Malibu, which is far, far away from Shakespeare and the Algonquins of either 1600s-Québec or 1920s-New-York-City type), Moore was working on a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud, while in 1984 his screenplay for Simone de Beauvoir's (a thinky, ethical risking-her-life-for-the-good-of-others atheist if ever there were one) Le Sang des Autres, her novel about the French Resistance, was made into an American film by French director Claude Chabrol. And is said to be ungreat.

But to go back a century now, Arthur Rimbaud, while probably more anti-religion than either Mr. Moore or Mme. de Beauvoir, and not one to trouble himself overmuch with ethical problems - from gun-running (and some biographers say slave-running, as well) to stealing people's husbands - was, despite all that and his early death and even earlier renunciation of poetry-writing (at 20), one of the most influential poets in modern times.

Which brings us to me, as the stupid URL of this blog, oisive-vitesse (which only exists because I couldn't get vifargent) (who only has one post, by the way, from 2004), which is a very stupid pun on a very famous Rimbaud poem and also has to do with my driving style, which could very well be characterized (by a gentle person, charitable of heart and tolerant by nature) as 'relaxed,' or 'easy-going.'

The line I bastardized is from the poem 'La chanson de la plus haute tour,' and goes something like this:

'Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdue ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps viennent
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.'

And likewise something like this:

'Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
Through sensitivity
I have wasted my life.
Oh! Let the time come
When hearts open up.'

Which is ungraceful, but there you go. You get what you pay for. Anyway, 'oisive' means lazy, even though birds are anything but. Sort of like Canadian Smarties, which are no longer made by Rowntree and are basically sweeter M & M's, with nothing acidic or 'smarty' about them. And I'm not a lazy driver, but I'm sure it looks like either the car or I must be at times. Still, I have remembered this stanza always (I have no idea what the rest of the poem says) not just because I like the redemptive hope of the last line, not if such a time comes, but when (literally 'where,' but we'll not trouble ourselves excessively with that for now; the certainty holds either way), but also because it can seem sometimes that all our youthful passion for fifty thousand different things simultaneously could have been wasted.

I don't think it is. I think we take it with us. I think perhaps one has to reach a certain age to be able to look back and see just how shockingly coherent the narrative of our lives is. Maybe the aggregate of facts simply has to be large enough to let the pattern emerge. All my childhood obsessions I still have, if sometimes in mitigated form. All my tastes and predilections (except those for footed pjyamas and tea with sugar) remain about the same, with some accommodation for education and fine-tuning (I no longer want literally to live in a genie bottle; I'm content to hang a Moroccan lantern inside, and string some curtains around, my bateau ivre of a bed and call it done), and I'm most satisfied or content when I have some version of the things that made me happiest as a child and adolescent - down to the bottle full of buttons I spent countless hours sorting and resorting on my grandmother's floor. I don't think it's wasted; I think we just sometimes take too long to realize what it taught us about ourselves.

Gay Post #3 (Don't Worry Mom; I Still Only Love Michael Bywater. I Swear.)

Well, I couldn't be more excited. Headbang8 of the Deutschland űber Elvis (still here) blog blogrolled me after my lauding his witty recounting of an uncomfortable encounter with the Deutschlandisch police. I'm tickled, well, pink, I guess, not only because that's my only chromatic option in that cliche, but also because his blog is by turns very funny and well-thought-out, and he is as gay as my gay exhusband. Which I suppose means nothing other than that if I were gay, we'd have that in common, and that pink is somehow therefore apposite. A tenuous link, but one I'm more than happy to grasp at. Plus, even though he is a devout atheist,

he is not one of those stinky, unthinky kinds who are as dull as their religious-fundamentalist counterparts: he asks questions, as all good believers and non-believers alike should do. (As opposed to just the people in between, who seem to be the only ones consistently and reliably to have no problem doing that!) (Which makes the religion question different from, and in fact less prickly than, the musical theatre one, as there are no agnostics with regard to that particular cultural phenomenon.)

Anyway, I so routinely experience near-meltdowns while tackling technological issues (notice my sorry excuse for an umlauted u above and you'll get the picture; other than the MS Character Set, and pillaging them from other sites, I don't know how to get one up on Blogger) and forget what I am doing halfway through, that I at some point abandoned giving the descriptions of sites I like, or even separating the list into categories. Mr. 8, however, apparently encounters no such difficulties routinely, and therefore appended a brief description of me to his link.

What he put as his description was 'very, very well read,' so I put a different version of the Unamuno header up to substantiate that accusation. Of course, that required some mind-bending, positively deadly HTML, much hand-wringing, and forty-five minutes of crying into the neighbor's cat's fur, not to mention the fact that I destroyed my carefully-crafted color scheme and now have to put the blog name and rotating blog description in black in order that they be seen over the too-variable hues of the picture. I also tried black-and-whiting versions of the previous blue-and-red header so that I wouldn't wreck the color scheme, but it looked wrong with all the colored photos around.

Anyway #2, I don't really know what I think of a complete stranger encapsulating me as 'very well read.' Of course, he is gay, so 'gorgeously well read' is perhaps hoping for a bit much. After all, I look nothing like Celine Dion (I'm sorry, gay people; I know it's a cheap shot, but I can't help it any more than I can tolerate her mincing anorexic-motherhood persona), so what would he know? I am so much more, of course: poor driver, good cook, bad hairstylist, great decorator, inept photographer, skilled volunteer, terrible flyer, cloying writer.

---Nuts! I have to go! I feel a song coming on!

The Cheek of Day

A trip to traffic court is not unlike a trip to the airport before a flight. There is the careful selection of clothing for the event, the long drive early in the morning, the mental wrestling over which book to bring, and the inability to sleep the night before from nerves. Such was my morning this morning.

As for the outfit, my wardrobe is overrun by neutrals at the moment, so I did as I have been lately and went with Eight Layers of Beige. Even the silk long-john shirt underneath it all was beige, as were the wool tights. On the bottom, I opted for jeans, imagining that in Seattle anything more would seem overly calculating. And no one wants to seem overly calculating to a traffic judge. As for the book, it was an odd choice, since I would not normally bring a novel when the interruptions to its reading would not be of my own choosing but imposed from outside, but since this novel has its own built-in interruptions I think it was just as reasonable a choice as nonfiction: Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. And I wore slim brown tasseled loafers, since I seem to be having a difficult time keeping my balance in flats and can use the practice.

I had to be there, faraway, at 8:30. Obviously, the commute would involve rush-hour traffic, so I figured that doubling estimated driving time and adding .5 more on top would be the best idea, since no one wants to seem late, either, to a traffic judge. I don't actually know how long it would normally take me to get there, since I don't 'actually' 'normally' get there at all. I only have the ticket from driving to go look at a piece of furniture (which I had the strength not to buy, even though I felt awful for wasting the old lady's time) and getting so confused that I was driving very slowly and poorly on the same stretch of road more than once and not availing myself at all times of all available signaling devices as I tried to figure out where it was the GPS was trying to get me to go, and whether it was more correct this time than the last. I gave the trip 2 1/2 hours, since it seemed like it would normally take about one. This would allow for traffic, for getting to alternate routes if traffic were not moving at all, and for getting lost and righting myself at least once.

It wasn't hard to be ready at six since I had not been asleep yet. I wrote down the directions from Google and entered the address in the GPS, as well, my customary practice. If one fails, I still have the other, since my mind is of no help in such situations.

The traffic was not bad. In fact, it was hardly traffic. And all along the way I was accompanied by a truly astonishing sunrise on my left with views of the snowy Cascade Mountains and Mt. Rainier glowing pink. The whole experience was so lovely and refreshing and energizing I even got into the fast lane for a while. Then I thought, Who'm I kidding? and merged right. But even then, though, I was going over the speed limit and got where I was going with an awful lot of time to spare, especially considering the hour of the morning.

The court building was easy to find (well, with GPS it was easy to find) and was right in the middle of what seemed an enormous nine-pointed star of strip malls. It being seven AM, they were no more open than the courthouse was, and it was too cold to sit in the car and read. The only place open seemed to be the Denny's back by the highway, but I hate pancakes as well as beef-barley soup. My only salvation for wasting time seemed to be the 24-hour Walgreen's drugstore. Since I need to find a new lipstick strategy, anyway, it was a welcome diversion.

My lipstick problem is thus: this summer I was very brown. In the past, I have kept a little bit of glow over winter by popping into a tanning salon sporadically. I started the practice on the advice of a friend who suggested it just as a way to get a blast of powerful heat and relayed that I could even put on a sunblock and use it for nothing other than raising my core (reptilian) temperature. That way I would have no need of difficult, tense, and accusatory conversations with myself over being vain.

I didn't bother with the sunblock, though, because I could never remember it. And, frankly, it was amusing to me to see me looking bronzed and rugged in January.

However.

This winter I have been warmer than usual. Maybe I have simply been more careful, or perhaps I have actually gained a bit of insulating fat; I don't know to what I should attribute this shocking and promising change. Quite separate from that issue, however, I have also wanted to see just how pallid I can get, how I look as a study in etiolated Victorian Yankeedom, and especially if the freckles on my cheeks will fade away. Toward the end of last summer they had sort-of, well, massed, in a terrifically unbecoming way, such that my cheeks tended to look darker than the other bits, and giving me a somewhat 'ruddy' character, even though they, and I, weren't actually red.

Well, now I am not ruddy, genuinely or merely apparently, thank God, but my lipsticks are either too red or too brown for this new, wan self. The pallor makes the brown ones appear too orange, and the gorgeous 1940s/50s reds look better in photos from the 1940s and 50s than they do on me, here, now. I have any number of taupe selections, too, which I think suit me fine, but between the beige outfit, the beige eyeshadow, the beige nails, the beige lipstick, and my incredibly small size, I would be nearly imperceptible and end up dying, unnoticed in a corner booth, of starvation waiting for service at some overpriced wine bar or noodle house.

So berry it is.

They have a slight jolt of color, signifying that I am, in fact, there, and that these are my lips - but not enough to overpower the other elements. I bought two lipsticks and their nail polishes, and I think they look quite nice, but I feel sad in swearing off red clothing until July, when I can again wear lipstick and nail color that don't clash with my complexion.

And, as a final note, I wasn't supposed to be in court at all. I am not sure what I did, and even less solid on what I failed to do, but whatever I thought I mailed in did not, it seems, get to where it might have under ideal circumstances.

I guess I'm paying that ticket after all.

And it still was a lovely, lovely drive. And had I not gone, I never would have, in all my life, seen a sign that said:

Auto Sheepskin
Shoe Repair
Mink Blankets

Blowin' in the Wind

I was finally brave enough to tackle the wine cabinet redo, and I don't know what to think. I do know I did as best I could. As you can see in the 'after' pictures, the cabinet is covered in nice marquetry veneers. I say 'nice' because it looks nice and took some time to do, but also because the piece is old so the depth of the veneer exceeds that of paper.

However.

I have a deep-seated and possibly pathological desire to be polite, commingled with a distaste for shopping. These two tendencies taken together (and so far, I haven't been able to take them apart) mean that I sometimes encounter great difficulties when trying to buy things. I don't go into stores to browse: I go in stores to get the one, or three, or six things I know in advance I want or need to get from the store. If it turns out they do not have the items, I leave. I am not, in other words, tempted to buy a bathtub because there are no more pruning shears, nor a new lampshade because the store ran out of my brand of stockings. I recently went to a lot of antique stores looking for a particular type of settee, and one with upholstery I would not have to change immediately, as well. The settee still eludes me, but I did not turn to dining sets or hall stands to anesthetize my feelings of setteelessness.

Still, though.

The situation is different when in response to an advertisement for an item I go to someone's house. I cannot contemplate the horror of a day spent going to several strangers' houses to look at various single items. If you place an ad and I call you, it means that I want to come your house, buy the item, and take it away, assuming the photos and description are more or less accurate. However, once I am there those conditions shift. I realize I am in your house and in that house I am passing judgment on an item you own. Yes, I am not a guest; yes, this is, despite the surroundings, a business transaction -- but I don't want to be mean. Rude. And I don't want to have got your hopes up for nothing.

Moreover.

By this point, as well, I have driven, at great risk to myself and other travelers, to wherever it is that you have your house and your possibly-unattractive-in-person piece of furniture. Perhaps, as was the case with the wine cabinet, I did so in the dark and was in the process nearly driven into a cow pasture at the urging of a less-than-inerrant GPS. At some point -- and almost four-wheeling in a farmyard is as solid a point as any other -- it is simply the case that I am 'all in': I am going to buy that hideous piece of Bombay Company MDF loathsomeness photographed through Vaseline and described as 'gorgeous settee 1880s Victorian Eastlake must see xlnt cond' no matter how much it hurts to do so, for to do otherwise would make me look like a fool for having driven so far for nothing. At least to myself it would make me look like a fool. And since, as you all know, I'm a) the only one who has to live with me and b) not one to suffer fools gladly, I can't afford that sort of rancor between me.

But still also I don't want to hurt your feelings.

So, prior to looking at the wine cabinet in person, I asked what were those 'designs' on the front in the two faraway photos, and what were they made of. The very nice lady said she thought one was a flower, and the other, well, she couldn't quite tell. She was happy enough to send me photos of them, but they were huge and I was as ignorant as her as to how to scale them down for viewing from within this solar system, at least on a then-dying computer with about three programs left on it. Fair enough, I thought, the rest of it looks quite sexy, and I've never been out to that village (but I bet they have livestock nearby!).

In short, the cabinet was unusable in its state at the time. The Seventies were a challenging period, I realize: so much change, tumult, and uncertainty, as though all the moorings were coming loose everywhere, equally, fully. Fashion, popular music, design, and graphic art reflected the confusion. By the middle of the decade, 'hippie look' design was mainstream in clothing as well as home decor. Housewives sewed granny dresses and quilted skirts, découpaged and scalloped-edged everything in sight, and stuck cork embellishments on anything not actively running away from them.

Such was my cabinet's fate.

This unlucky chump had been the victim of the Seventies hat trick of cork, scalloped edges, and the ubiquitous mushroom-as-decorative-motif. The mushroom, moreover, and the 'flower,' which turned out to be a leaf, appeared to be products of a Ladies' Intro to Metalwork class. Plucking the metallic flora merely solved the glare problem; there was still the issue of the incongruous texture, shape, depth and appearance of the cork appliqués, which were painted in shades ranging from black, brown, and 'natural' to metallic gold.

I first thought of taking the hacksaw to it, and getting the depth of the appliqués to a sliver, over which I would simply paste something more in line with the original lines and look of the piece. They would still protrude a bit, but not two inches and, more importantly, not hideously. Then, positioning the tool first one way and then another, I realized there was no way that attack would be possible as the plane of the front is interrupted by molding at the top and base. I could have someone else do it, of course, someone who knew about these things, someone with expertise, but that would be cheating.

Now, I don't receive much child support from my exhusband, so it is a good thing he came in handy on a Christmas visit when he stuck his penknife a bit under one of the cork bits and emboldened me terrifically by his revelation that the adhesive was loose and elastic, as well as by his prediction that removing the grisly duo would be simple and quick. Still, he is an exhusband, and it took me a few more weeks before I grew the confidence to begin to test what I still considered to be no more than a hypothesis about the state of my glue.

My glue, it turned out, was quite healthy.

Accordingly, I slathered both doors with copious amounts of oil in hopes of loosening it and the cork ovals without damaging the veneer unduly. The scheme largely succeeded, and no veneer ripped off, but once the cork was removed it turned out that the final embellishment to the ovals, the dark brown paint around the outermost edge, was applied after they had already been glued on. Additionally, although I hadn't damaged the veneer, there were in fact gouges in it which appeared to have been what precipitated the 1970s modifications. I sanded enough to even out most of the surface, but there would have been no way to get below the absorbed paint and the deeper gouges.


So, I decided on two-tone gold leaf under stain in a geometric pattern that echoed the existing geometric pattern. Yes, it is not original, but not much about this cabinet was by the point of making that decision. I know it is not more authentic, and I am not sure it is much better, but I am absolutely certain it is not as bad.

My Heel Broke in a Traffic Jam en Route to the DMV -- so I Killed Myself.

Sorry, children, about the long pause. I tried a couple times, but it was difficult to think of utterly content-free things to write. (I do realize I come close, very close, at times, but it is a talent that cannot be fully harnessed; it comes when it wills.) And that wouldn't have been the solution, anyway: people who wish to can read volumes from the selection of a semicolon over a period. It doesn't mean they are correct in doing so; nor, however, does this latter truth dissuade them from undertaking the exercise for their own reasons. Despite my silence in this venue, however, I remain very much alive, not to mention sentient and ambulatory. And having rather a good time of it over the holidays, circumscribed culinary choices notwithstanding.

'Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.' Much Ado, II, 1

That has nothing to do with it, though, actually. This does:

A former boyfriend succeeded in making me partially insane and fully uncomfortable by noting, taking to heart, and doing some long-range, possibly trigonometric, extrapolating from, aspects of this blog that in an ideal world would escape every reader's attention. I then wrote the Reader's Guide in hopes of making my intentions for this encyclopedic rant clear as an unmuddied lake.

But allow me to backtrack.

Since the demise of this relationship, I have had little (very little) contact with this person. He writes the occasional ingratiating, or condescending, or cloyingly/disturbingly reminiscent email, and I respond politely yet tersely. I answer his questions (that's the polite bit), but I answer them in as brief a manner as possible (so as not to engage him further). I strive to be ladylike, in other words, whilst neither providing details, meeting his nostalgia with some of my (depleted, frankly) own in return, nor asking him any questions. The letters end with 'Hope you are well,' which I should think would be read as something quite distinct from 'Tell me all about your work,' or 'Who are you dating?' or 'What's new with you?'

But the State of Things being what it is.

Politeness, it seems, can, in its rarity, be mistaken for Friendliness or, perhaps, as it seems in this case, a Desperate Plea for Help. A cri du coeur the nature of which I am still at a loss to discern. Had I wished for reengagement with this party I assuredly would have supplemented his proffered reminiscences with a few breathless sighs of 'Ah, yes, those were indeed the salad days' of my own and some rose-hued specifics to make my argument. But I would not likely have answered his (misty, watercolored) Memories with silence.

But One Cannot Wear Kid Gloves in the Ring.

And although my amateur pugilist days are well behind me, a friend convinced me that however little I was saying I was clearly saying it wrong, even if 'saying it wrong' meant I was merely saying it politely. And that this drain on my psyche was draining my blog, and that that was wrong.

And while I agree, I thought I had sounded rather more austere than previously in my last return email. On the other hand, I still couldn't think of things to write, other than merely reprinting the Gettysburg Address or the Creation Story a few times -- things of my own, that is, into which nothing at all could be read that wasn't solely of a cheery and uplifting nature. Nothing, in other words, to indicate that we live in a world in which we sometimes stub our toes, eat mediocre food, get stuck in traffic, wake up too late, wake up too early -- or kill our cousins, or kill our brothers, now that I come to reconsider my arbitrary choices above.

Moreover, I couldn't even figure out when I was supposed to 'publish' these cheery entries, as a recent missive from this individual indicated that he was paying close heed to the (again, arbitrary, but no matter) timestamp and reckoning from it the course of my days. (And not in the most flattering of lights, I assure you, but more of the sort of thing about which scores of country singers have had much to say through the decades. Except for the latenight online Scrabble dig, which, to my knowledge, has yet to feature in the lyrics even of Dwight Yoakum, literate, postmodern, and good with words though he may be.)

'Certainly a woman's thought runs before her actions.' As You Like It, IV, 1

So I thought about it a bit but remained stuck. I would like this blog to be a way to keep in touch with people, to entertain them a bit, and to be a place where I can, if I wish, vent my spleen. I like puppydogs and minigoats. Tremendously, in fact, and puffy clouds, and saltwater taffy, and veiled chameleons, and broderie anglaise, and maribou slippers, and birdsong in the summer in a field under the sun amongst frolicking animals and wildflowers by a waterfall, too. I like painting my nails, and going to the ballet, and eating Drumsticks, and making perfumes. But I also get stuck in traffic, I also get lost in parking garages, I abhor going to the DMV, I put off the Post Office and UPS for as many months as I can, and I sometimes sit around reading and writing by myself and letting my nail polish dry. And why any of it, or the writing of it, or the patent exaggeration of my angst surrounding it should cause someone to pity me eludes me.

So I thought about it a bit more, but just a bit, because short on the heels of the above conversation came the New Year's Wishes missive. And I couldn't take it. Relative to the others it was, frankly, innocuous, save for a rhetorical device I can't be bothered to go into here. But it was enough, if due only to the cumulative effect of the whole series and of my frustrated, impuissant, polite and indirect efforts to discourage further contact.

Thus was I impolite in my response. And thus one hopes was he disabused of the misguided impression that we are, owing to the persistence of the aforementioned watercolored memories, Friends. It's a shame, though, that it had to come to that; except maybe for Kant, reading is only as hard as you make it.

A Reader's Guide to the Personal Weblog

Since people appear to be reading this, as well as writing to me about what they read, the following are intended to be helpful tips to prevent those people from having difficulty with making either heads or tails - or heads along with tails, if that is their preference - of the contents.

I'd Have to Use Even More Liner. (And driving would be yet more difficult.)

Firstly, take it all with a hearty helping of coarse-grain Himalayan Pink. I have never once, for example, taken an oyster knife, grapefruit spoon, or hydraulic corkscrew to my (gorgeous, seagreen) eyeballs over the sight of Dockers at dinner, despite what might seem to be (glaring and repeated) indications to the contrary.

I'm Not Reuters.

Secondly, the foregoing derives from the fact that this blog is neither a news wire nor a diary. It is not true, in other words, nor does it purport to be. There is truth in it, surely, but that truth, where one can find it, is snuggled up tight with with all kinds of tricks, like exaggeration, sleazy argumentation, grasping at straws to make a point, and lazy recourse to such creatures as litotes, anaphora, paranomasia, syllepsis, paraleipsis, and their wicked, wicked chums, to lend, at times, the sense that I truly do accord the selection of the evening's shoes the same weight as I do truly weighty things. --Or to make things sound more pleasant, or less pleasant, or funnier, than they really are.

I'm Lying.

Thirdly, the same foregoing can be interpreted to mean that some of the details are factually inaccurate. I might say 'Dockers,' for instance, when in fact I was at no point anything like close enough to read the tag inside the pants of the individual in question. In that case, I am extrapolating from: 'chinos of some sort' plus probability, as I learned a few years ago in Harper's Index that about 80 percent of American men own Dockers. Thus, they are indeed likely to be Dockers -- but, again, they might not be. And if it is the case that there was an initial 'd' in the vicinity looking lost and hapless and unbecomingly unadorned, I might say 'Dockers,' anyway, even if the benighted boob under scrutiny was -- as unmistakably as he was inexcusably -- wearing corduroy. The ratio might be close to the following: 15 percent true, 80 percent fic-trutional, and 5 percent abandonedly, recklessly, from-the-gut brutally honest.

Why, Just the Other Day I Ate a Whole Half Rosemary-Roasted Brandywine.

Fourthly, if not all admissions are entirely accurate, so, too, must one be wary of reading too much into omissions. We might take bathing and eating as two obvious examples: I do both so frequently that one could almost consider them 'daily activities,' and yet there is scant mention of either. I have neither the time nor the inclination to make this a minute-by-minute accounting of the day's every activity. I would like to keep work, for example, out of it almost entirely, confining it, if I can manage, to the occasional snarky and quite general aside. Dating, for its part, is poked at only when it can be used to serve as a convenient portal into disquisitions on some of my more general Concerns with Our Decaying Society, or 'make a point' in some way I misguidedly think might be amusing, or open the way for a large-scale rant on a marginally related topic for which I lacked a segue. The blog also features a great many lacunae -- including around dating -- the (non-?) existence of which gaps being attributable in part to a sense of decency and concern for others. I am more than happy, in other words, to prate on at obscene, contrived length about the recurring failures of my structurally-unsound would-be 'hairstyles' and my inability to give a one-word answer to such questions as 'Do you like tomatoes?' while I would hope that I am possessed of sufficient restraint not to catalogue the conversational and sartorial failings of anyone misguided enough to go on a date, or enter into a relationship, with me. This latter is of course true only of the present: my gay exhusband is still gay, and my other exhusband is still welcome to help me find pants whenever he's in town, and anyone base enough to have offended the sensibilities of the Only Perfect Girlfriend in the Free World (TM) may likewise find mention (if little quarter) herein.

I Left My Heart in Ouagadougou.

Which, having covered factuality, intent, scope, omissions, and timbre, leads us to Sixthly, which is the timestamp. And sometimes the date, too, if I, let's say, neglected finishing my birthday greetings to M. Saussure until the day after, in which case I can retroactively date it appropriately and thus save face with the dead. Neither, then, is an entirely accurate gauge of my doings. Six o'clock is six o'clock in Vanuatu, or Yerevan, or the Marianas Trench. Whichever one I had it set to then. Or a different one, as that list above was arbitrary. For the sake of clarity: I am not certain that I have ever set it to any one of those three. Just as geographically savvy alcoholics can always reassure themselves with the fact that the sun's always past the yardarm somewhere and start the day thus with a G & T rather than regret and misgiving, so, too, is it the case that it is frequently oh-six-hundred-hours somewhere -- just not always precisely where I am. Sometimes, frankly, the thing's all written, and I just want to look over it once before work, or upon returning home, which would mean I had 'really' written it before, even though I am pushing send now.

This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.

Said Keats regarding indolence, and while I to this day hate that Ode, I still love Keats and admire as always his respect for indolence. We devalue it tremendously, of course, the sitting, being, the taking in, and allowing...

We are no doubt fearful that passivity or unalloyed receptivity in one area will leech out and become some overarching guiding principle in our psyche, or life. That we'll wake up one day and find we've unwittingly morphed into swarthy, layabout Mediterraneans who say 'five' when they mean 'six-thirty' or worse. This is one reason, amidst poor taste, uninventiveness, ignorance, xenophobia, and fear of solitude, that we spend our vacations righteously doing things, ticking off Chartres and Epidavros on our lists, snapping the requisite few hurried shots of St. Basil's and St. Peter's before making our way to consuming the Great Wall and Kyoto's daibutsu.

I have no such fears, myself, but certainly if you are the sort of person who needs to, you can check my resume and see that I have worked hard enough, and worked long enough, to have 'earned' the right to spend the day doing nothing but making melon balls I never intend to eat or sitting around Montmartre doing nothing other than doing nothing and calling it a holiday all the same. And that's what I did. That was my vacation. I ate quite a bit of pastry, drank a lot of both coffee and wine, talked to my friend and my friend's friends, and bought a book hoping it would help me reproach one of them in German. It didn't, and anyway I expect his French and English were better than mine, so I stuck with those and reproached away and got a foot massage out of it so all was fine.

We did make it to Champagne, which is where the reproaching, the Teuton, and the feet come in, but it wasn't a 'goal' of mine, or even my idea. And we almost didn't make it (European gas mileage is a thing of beauty, but only when there is gas in one's tank to get mileage from), but we did, and we sat around there, too. This litttle sojourn to France was very nearly the only short trip I've ever taken except for ones close to where I happen to live right then, and I was very tempted to stay there, too, except that that would mean the loss of both my bed and a truly fabulous coat.

Maybe I'll move there next year. It couldn't possibly cost more to ship my bed than what I paid in overweight charges for books and shoes when I left Greece. And by then I could have conceivably winnowed my current supply of both to a manageable level, so that it would only be the 100-piece Chinese bed and the 50-pound coat with which I'd need concern myself. And since it will no doubt remain true in a year that the only German I know consists in a few cabaret songs and the occasional singspiel stanza, I won't have worn out my welcome with anyone.

Life Is Short, and So Is Money.

That's what Brecht says, and I believe both and accordingly despise 'shopping.' It is not a grand political stand, and I don't live in a treehouse: I freely acknowledge that sometimes there are things that one needs, and that some of those things must be bought, with money, rather than fashioned from twigs and pre-chewed gum saved up for the occasion. And the things I buy I want and/or need, so once I have them I am pleased that I do. For example, the car without a puddle on the rear floor was a much-appreciated replacement for the one with the puddle.


But I don't like the process of it, certainly, nor do I enjoy the near-Las-Vegas levels of visual and auditory stimulation I have to go through just to get the thing I need. I also am not usually thrilled that there are so many other people there doing the same thing I am attempting to, except doing it more loudly, more assertively, and far, far more happily, with an unmistakable air of being where they belong and where, indeed, they wish to be. Many, in fact, are patently there to savor precisely the process, rather than even obliquely striving to pursue, and succeed at, a goal-directed mission. Myself, I have a list (and yes, fine, sometimes it is one item, but I am likely to forget even that when confronted with Shrek on thirty different widescreens while still trying agitatedly to figure out if plant lightbulbs are by lamps or potting soil), and I want to use that list, find the things, pay for the things, and get home.

But today it didn't work like that. The goal of the mission was a new computer. This had been coming a long time, and the last couple of days had made it urgent. I had done all I could with the old one, but tweaks and external crutches can only get one so far when it is the machine inside the machine that is dying. There are many cars on the road with 300,000 miles on them, but few have the original engine or transmission, and none have the original tires. And if the car spent most of its lifespan being driven in Labrador, at some point it is reasonable to step back and rationally consider whether putting a new engine in that old shell is the best course of action. In this case, it was not.

So, having looked for weeks and months at various offers, and becoming slightly conversant with where it is people for the most part go to buy computers, I decided I felt safer buying a new one than a used, and that a cheap one was fine as long as it had ample memory. I also decided against buying one online, as the wait would be longer, it could arrive damaged, and there was no way of telling at what precise moment the old one would completely stop working. It is not easy using it as it is now, but it is handier than not having it at all, especially if a lot of what I am doing with it is researching my options for replacing it...

The story didn't start off terribly. I had heard on NPR that the Great Satan of discount shopping, Wal-Mart, offered (cheap, obviously) computers now. I drove to a Super Wal-Mart at about 3 AM after having looked at the Wal-Mart website and seeing that there were many options. The drive itself was very pleasant, about an hour each way in the calm dark of the early-morning freeway. And inside the store, although it was admittedly hideously bright, it was as deserted as the roads. Nice. Very nice. But what is on the website isn't what is in the stores, and there were only a couple laptops, and they were ghastly. Even by my standards. I did, however, locate some Diet Coke and Fiddle Faddle, even a bottle of the rare Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi, but I got confused trying to find nutrition bars, and gave up. Still, the Fiddle Faddle added immeasurably to the pleasantness of the ride home, and the BBC had a very idiosyncratic long reportage on Kazakhstan's burgeoning oil-fed Wild West.

It didn't solve the problem of the moribund Pavilion, though. The next morning I got serious about used ones. That stern resolution crumbled upon itself after the first (interminable) conversation with the first seller, who didn't really have what he said he had but who would be getting other ones soon, tomorrow, even, from his 'purveyors,' if I wanted to wait, although he could never be sure, of course, what exactly those 'purveyors' would purvey to him, nor how long it would take him to get the computers into working order, but he would be happy to et cetera and I could rest assured that.

Thus.

I went to the Best Buy. At that point, it was for me like shutting up and shutting down the GPS and taking the circuitous but well-known route, as I had looked at their website the most, once I heard of the Best Buy about a month ago. I even had a piece of paper I had written their specials on, but that was at home, next to the computer.

I found the Best Buy easy to navigate. They had large signs with large letters hanging from the ceiling, and I was relieved that I didn't have to walk through cramped aisles of fishing tackle and foundation garments to get to COMPUTERS. Likewise I enjoyed the approach of the salesmen, whose low-pressure tactics could easily be taken for apathy and boredom. I didn't have many questions, either, since most relevant facts were on cards below the display versions of the laptops. When I did ask one guy why this one with so much memory was the same price as a nastynasty Acer with a processor from 1972, he said it was on sale and a very good buy and I said I think I had that one written down and I'd take it. I figured I had the cat in the bag by that time. Certainly at least a very large bird in the hand. In this I was mistaken.

I have never had anyone 'set up' my computer for me before, but he said it was standard and free and quick. I figured it must be quick, if it is quick for me and I don't do it all day. Then, he said that for only $29.99 they would configure? orient? what was it? --oh, yes, Optimize and Personalize -- it for me and that that would be quick, too. I am an idiot, and I said yes.

I had no idea what was to be 'personalized' about it, since they didn't ask me any questions or, as it turned out, input any information about me into it, but at that point I just wanted him to stop talking. I did want to be home soon, but at that exact moment what I wanted more was for him to cease speaking. I felt that $29.99 was a reasonable price for that service.

However, it wasn't quite over, as he had to ask various people if they could call Bill so that Bill could count the money a second time. Once Bill arrived and counted the money again, it took a few minutes for the two to figure out my change ($9.21), as the change drawer had already opened on its own and thus not displayed the correct change to give back. My salesclerk confirmed with the technical people that my Optimization and Personalization would be done within forty-five minutes. Of course, had I opted out, within that time I would have already been home and online...

Nonetheless.

I had it, at least in a sense, and that was closer than I had been at 3 AM in the Wal-Mart by the Indian casino lost among the Little Debbies. While I was leaving the store, though, to begin my waiting, my phone rang. The noise from the parking structure was so loud that I said I would go to my car and call from inside. Except that I couldn't find my car. I was pretty sure that I was on Level Four, which is, except for the highest and as-yet uncompleted level, the top one. Thus, easy to remember, so I figured that if Level Four was sticking in my head, there was probably a pretty good reason.

I knew the area I had parked in. I was pretty sure, too, that I didn't just know the aisle but the space. But my car wasn't there, in either aisle or space, not on Level Four or Level Three. I called my friend back, and could barely hear, but said I had lost my car and was really going to call her back, just not quite yet. I went all the way down to the bottom level, figuring that perhaps 'extreme end' was what I was remembering, and just mistaking which extreme, but I was wrong about that, too. And the configuration of the floor was totally different, which was at least helpful, so that I knew I didn't have to walk the whole floor.

I did find it eventually, and detoxed a while inside, next to the vandalized BMW that had angered someone by taking up two spaces in a crowded parking lot. Once I felt a bit composed again, I decided against my better judgment to restore my blood glucose at the food part at the Target, the only source for food in the little mall. It really didn't help much, because, despite the presence of baby-changing stations inside the restrooms just a few paces from where we were sitting, a young Chinese couple saw fit to change their baby's soiled diapers in the cafe area as two teenagers ran around the tables chasing each other and yelling. When I had eaten as much cheese off my pizza as I could stomach, I left the food area, bought some nutrition bars, and went to spend the rest of my wait at Ross.

No one was changing diapers at Ross, which gladdened my heart. But now, I was officially shopping. Aimlessly wandering the aisles of a store I didn't want to be in, looking for nothing in particular and with no goal other than passing time. I picked up a brassiere that may or may not fit, found they did not have towels like mine or shoes in a 5 1/2 or little girls' pants size 10 with straight-cut legs, and did not like the shape of the Turkish wine glasses which I wanted to buy just because they were from Turkey and no one drinks wine out of stemware there except at American hotel bars. But I put the bra in one hand and some candlesticks for the bedroom in the other and waited behind the other twenty masochists for the lonely cashier to set me free.

After that I returned, diminished, enervated, soulless, to the Best Buy, to be reunited with my Optimized and Personalized laptop. I waited in the Service line for a long time. Ahead at the counter was a schizophrenic lady in earthy clothes gesticulating madly at every word. Also much of the time when there weren't words accompanying her gestures. I asked the two guys in front of me if they thought this was the right line to wait in if I was just picking up a computer I'd already paid for, and one just stared at me and the other very annoyedly said 'I DON'T KNOW.'

I didn't actually need Service. On the other hand, I also didn't need an Online Order Pickup or whatever the other line by that one was. So, I thought it prudent to ask an employee in Computers where I would stand to pick up a computer I had bought an hour and a half ago that had just been Optimized. He said, That line there - you'll be first.

And I was. For a very long time. And many employees went by me, around me, in front of me, behind me, and almost through me, but whatever duties they were assigned to did not include helping the person in the vanguard of my imaginary line. I waited a very, very, very long time. After a while there weren't so many people coming in and out by me, which intuitively felt as though my hitherto slim chances of being served were now circling Nil or NaN. Finally, I, the person who never sends back a scorched sauce Mornay, who lets every pedestrian cross and every car cut in front of me that cares to, said, rather loudly, Is there anyone anywhere who could possibly help me just pick up a computer I bought today?

The guy who had been standing in front of me on the other side of the counter for the last twenty minutes came up and told me I wasn't waiting in a line, that that's the line there, and I said I was told to wait here and that's the only reason I was waiting here and could I just please get my computer and go home, it should be done by now could I just please get it so I can leave now please thank you.

And he did get it, and it took about 4.5 seconds, and I made it to my car on Level 2A, and the banged-up Beemer was still unmoved, still unseen by its uptight owner, and by now the parking lot wasn't so crowded and I made it out quickly and easily and took the counterintuitive route home and found the neighbor's cat waiting for me and my monkey candlesticks at the door. Next time, I swear I will buy anything, everything I need online. Even if it requires replacing things before they are absolutely 100 per cent completely no question about it dead dead dead, even if it means I don't get to break out the baling wire, kebab skewers, and yards of Velcro tape, I will do it, because I can put on some Ella Fitzgerald and silk pants, I can eat sushi or a bowl of chili or Little Debbies or Fiddle Faddle if I feel like it, I can burn sandalwood or Livani or both at the same time, or I could be dyeing my hair or setting my fingernail polish -- and all this without screaming fluorescent lights, poopy diapers in the wrong place, pushing, shoving, stripped brakes echoing off concrete, lines that aren't lines, 'Personalization' that is anything but, and the wretched sense that I've been had in some vague yet disturbing way at the end of all of it.

Who is a hero? He who conquers his urges. -The Talmud.

White Knuckles and Sunny Mondays

I am not a good driver. This in no way means I am a bad driver, a far too encompassing and emotionally-laden term to be entirely apposite. In fact, I am a good driver at times, such as when I am going twenty-five miles an hour in a residential area with which I am well familiar. Particularly if there are stop signs, stop lights, or roundabouts at every intersection, no pedestrians or pets, no noticeable inclines, and provided that the sun is at an angle favorable to seeing forward.

But I am not bad. Per se. I am effusively, comprehensively polite, for example: I never go first at four-way stops, even when it is my right. (Largely because I can never figure out what is supposed to be right or left when it's all a circle, but that's beside the point.) I stop for pedestrians and children always. I likewise brake for dogs, cats, wayward ducks and geese, regardless of coloring, origin, or gender. I don't speed -- and not solely because my car lacks a usable fifth gear. I am circumspect; I check the side and rear mirrors constantly and, even though I can't actually see over the passenger side headrest, I do the right thing and at least attempt to check my blindspot prior to changing lanes. Which admittedly is seldom necessary, as I am sufficiently courteous as to remain in the slow-traffic lane whenever possible.

But all that circumspection, caution, and courtesy which would likely, in another driver, amount to boundless competence on the road, pale when matched against my utter and sheer lack of confidence. Sadly, while it may work for other things such as messy homes, body odor, and excess body weight, in this case 'knowing it is the first step to overcoming it' is a ponderously mistaken assertion. In this case, it is precisely KNOWING IT the makes the hands shake, the vision blur, the chain smoking fail to work, and the very balls of the feet and tip of the nose sweat. It is the foreknowledge that this can't possibly end well each and every time I have to get up to freeway speed or navigate a labyrinthine and wily Downtown Business Sector filled with greedy shoppers and angry, harried drivers. Being overwhelmed is not my problem: the problem is my awareness of being overwhelmed, which is insurmountable and irremediable. I have many pleasant, and even marginally utile, attributes. Urban navigation is not one of them.

There are so many places downtown that are appealing that i have just never gone to, since no one else suggested them when we were out and I can't drive myself downtown. I had a friend staying in one or other big hotel in the center last year, and I drove around in so many circles, and got stuck pointing upwards at what seemed to be 90 degree angles so many times, and stuck at lights even on the flat streets, and missing street signs, that I ended up parking about a half mile away, because I could never see the PARKING HERE signs until I was already passed them, or too close to pull in without getting rear-ended or shot....

By the time I got there, I looked as bad as I did last night at the end, except that the bald spots might even have been bigger, the pupils even more dilated and the skin yet more ashen and the voice still less audible or intelligible and the grammar far, far more tenuous, due to the fact that it was (cue funeral march) Sometime in the Afternoon that all this tragedy occurred, so there was about 8562 per cent more traffic than early in the night/late in the evening on a Monday.

The Parkgarage at the End of the Universe

Which is not to say that last night was not deeply traumatic in its own right. I was done with work, it was early and, better yet, it was a Monday. Monday, the day when if we can predict nothing else, we can predict that the art world is closed and the bridge and tunnel set stay safely ensconced in suburbia, Tivoing and chamomile tea-ing away the weekend's Home Depot and white sale excesses.

The sun was still out, the water was lovely, the air was softly moist, and I was brave and strong and filled with desire for a Douro. A wine bar was the thing to slake my wine lust and validate my courageousness. And, I had a book with me, so there would be no need to run up against any predatory alcohol-sodden flirtatious nonsense. I would park, I would swap the Driving Shoes for one of the pairs of nice ones just waiting in the passenger seat for such an opportunity to fulfill their destiny, and I would walk up the hill and have a nice glass of wine.

I found a parking garage that abutted the street I like to use to go home from downtown, in order to avoid the freeway and all thoughts of fifth gear. I changed the shoes, grabbed the (oddly heavy, even when empty) leather bag with the book and a notebook, fixed the lipstick, took the tiny purse, and headed for the exit.

Then I headed for the exit that way. Then I walked around in several concentric circles for thirty or forty minutes, coming upon nothing but private elevators which would have taken
me to the street, but only under condition that I were possessed of the secret code. Which, despite my good looks, keen attitude, and zest for the true, the blushful Hippocrene, I was not.

My back hurt. My feet hurt. The nailbeds in my fingertips hurt, and the membrane that handily keeps the brain away from the skull hurt, and I felt sad that I should have to live out my remaining decades stuck in a poorly-lit parking garage with the scent of kelpy air taunting me at every breath. I failed even to spot my own car save for once in all my increasingly hopeless wandering.

Then, finally, a street exit. I crouched under the gate and I was free! Free for Douro, or Barolo, or anything else my flagging whimsy fancied. I confidently marched up the hill, enthusiasm and bravery returning with each step of my buckle-embellished mules. I had nearly caught a joie de vivre when I had a vague feeling about keys. It wasn't anything more than that. Just 'keys.' Once I thought to think of what such a vague thought might mean, it became far less vague. I didn't remember doing anything with my keys. I remembered getting out of the car, and I certainly remembered getting lost, but I always immediately put my keys into whatever tiny purse I have that day, and I didn't remember doing that. Or even having uncharacteristically put them into the big bag, which would be the sort of thing that would stick in the mind for all its uncharacteristicality.

Just to confirm that, despite not recalling anything, I did indeed have them, I checked in both the tiny purse (hard to miss anything in there, most particularly a gigantic collection of largely orphan keys tied up together with a huge red carabiner) and in the mostly empty big bag. And they were in neither. Leaving all thoughts of dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth behind, I hurried back to the car. This in fact amounted to hurrying back to the parkgarage, which was easy enough to find, and then wandering for fifteen or so minutes in search of the car. When I found it, the keys weren't in it. They weren't on it, and they weren't under it. And while that would be more entertainingly put in Turkish, I wasn't thinking of that at the time, because I didn't have my keys, and I had no idea where they could possibly be. Certainly they were not at the counter in the wine bar next to the lecherous Rioja-swilling Hair-Club-for-Men member -- since I hadn't managed to get that far.

Now, clearly, the thing to do at such a point is to Retrace One's Steps. This becomes tricky, however, when the One whose Steps are to be Retraced has no idea either where she is now, how she got there, or where she was before. Which steps? I didn't know where I had gone or where I hadn't gone. But I did my best, and I left the heavy bag in the car that time, which was the smart thing I accomplished yesterday.

After giving up on the garage, I went upstairs to the concierge for the building. No one had turned in keys, but she assured me that hers was the desk where keys would be turned in, at least on those occasions in which such a turning-in took place. Now was not one of those occasions. Nor was it such at the parking office, either.

Now I was even sadder than before. Not only would I have to live in a parking garage because it was an unnavigable maze of a thing, but I would have to do so incommunicado, since my lack of keys would preclude charging my cell phone. I walked around a bit inside again and found the exit, and with no hope remaining in me but not wishing to dwell on the negative, I retraced my few outdoor steps again. At some point before the destroyed eye makeup obscured my vision entirely, I called The Boyfriend.

Not, I hasten to aver, to ask for help, nor even with the intention of admitting that anything of any sort other than the most dulcet of Douros had befallen me. I was already on the right street for a taxi, the appointment for the locksmith was set for 9 AM the next day, and I was going to go home and bang on a neighbor's door and beg for a bed. But, perceptive and not-hard-of-hearing as he is, he heard the cracks and chinks and quavers in what was left of the audible range of my voice. And, weak as I am when confronted with a direct question (and sometimes the hint of a question when I am completely at wits' end), I spilled it. He said he would come over and help me find them. I knew it was futile to look further, and he lives so horribly far away that it seemed inhumane because it was now not so early as it had been two hours previous or even forty-five minutes, and also I already had the appointment with the long-winded locksmith to get a key made.

I needed Closure, not solutions.

But he came, and we reexamined my car with the assistance of a flashlight. The keys remained obstinately unthere. After the search of car and environs and a feebly-uttered and marginally coherent brief recapitulation of my barely-remembered 'timeline,' we retraced my steps outside, which were easy as they were few. No keys. We went back to the garage and retraced any and all steps by any person capable of making steps on my level of the garage, since I was of no assistance in suggesting what steps I might or might not have made. I was unapologetically and tiresomely apologetic and made repeated vows to repay him in whatever way most pleasing to him, so long as it didn't involve money, because that was all going to the locksmith and the wine cellar I was going to start building next week so as to prevent this sort of thing happening in future. And my feet hurt. My feet, my shoulders, my back, and it was starting to become that horrible sort of tired where you walk like you've still got training wheels on your legs and they are likely at any moment to come out from under you and wouldn't it just be better anyway if I lay down right here and no it won't take but a couple hours they can drive around me no I'm sure the concrete will be more than comfortable.

And then, in a weird little alcove that only housed a few cars and in which I had been when I was on foot or at least one very similar to it in near uselessness and seeming unusually after-thoughtish for a parking garage, there they were right by a post and a little ugly wall. All ninety-seven of them and the red carabiner, as well. I would have been overjoyed, but that would have required being conscious or sensate, neither of which I have any reason to believe I was at that point. I did, however, manage many more profuse apologies and gratitudes, but the lack of muscle control precluded smiling.

I made it home. I drank a beer. I apologized and thanked in email and on phone forty-three more times and vowed to myself to have copies made of house and car keys, and stick them on the car and in the planters of dying flowers outside my door. And passed out and slept the sort of sleep you can only sleep when you imagined the end of the world but it was really only the end of the two-for-one sale on vegetarian items down at the Indian place.