dorothy parker (and then some)

“And sweet’s the air with curly smoke, From all my burning bridges.”

ooooooh, february has been HUGE. going into march with all this newness. my moods are five minute whirlwinds of euphoria turning to rage turning to despair turning to gratefulness turning to exasperation turning to overwhelmed turning to calm contentedness turning back to euphoria..

cutting a lot of fat from my life. by fat i mean people. i’m tired of humouring everyone. i’m not turning MEAN -as opposed to being mean, i am simply cutting ties and eliminating  room for complication and anger.

it feels good. 

today was eric’s first day back at his new job (sounds funny but it’s true). his forehead is so smooth as compared to 3 months ago he looks botoxed. there will be some second shift but a longer lifespan so that i can live with..

Martin Rath’s “Of the Dead”will be all over the German comicons this year, and my name is on that. in some small way i helped put that together, or at least, you know, helped dig up the acorn (substitute whatever analogy you like for that one). more info on that one as i get it, i’m gonna pimp the hell outta that zombie movie. it’s fucking awesome. oh, laverne, you make such a pretty corpse….

took my own author photo for the Book. set up the tripod outside the barn and clicked away with the timer. it makes it feel real.

tomorrow thundadome.com goes live with The Ides – i’ll post that link tomorrow, too!!

beth and i are talking with some others - The Others, that’s formal but personal, i like that – about putting together a zombie webzine. i think we can do it. more to come on that later, too…

this feels boastful and emotionally inadequate, i think it’s because i have green popsicle on the back of my left hand and am mainly calculating how long it will take for it to drip bewteen my fingers, and if i can finish this before it does – mainly i wanted to type this up fast to say hell yeah, 2011. i will work harder to deserve you.

it’s almost spring….

onward!!!

zombie stomper

i have danced many a dance and texted many a midnight text this week – i think 2011 is becoming just a bang-up year.

there’s this thing that makes me dance, and this other thing that makes me dance, and then there are people that make me dance, and then there’s that familiar foot-jiggle that’s beginning, the first sure sign of a writing jag. the jiggling foot makes me dance.

i’ll elaborate on the dance reasons later. of course all the dancing is done to Gaga because that’s what the little man wants. and at this point i’ve got the volume cranked and am belting “GONNA LOVE YOU WITH MY HANDS TIED!’  all by myself in the car.

i should probably be doing more to spread this around. depending on the rain/ice situation in the morning, little man and i may head to guhl’s and buy up some fabric for zombie monkeys and other homemade gifts for the list and also just because i have a new list of people that i just want to do SOMETHING to make them smile. i think for some monkeys i’ll do stuffing brains, and for tamer versions there can be dangling button eyes. this should be fun. mail is fun.

i got to talk to my sister for like a half hour last night which is a wonderful miracle in itself – 2 hours of regular-people talk at top speed with over-lapping and sentence-finishing equals a half hour for us, and makes me feel very firmly rooted on the same planet as that girl.

eric starts his new job on monday – seriously things are crazy happy good. and i don’t have the cloud with this. there seems no reason to be peering at the sky constantly for the very vague edges of the jar. don’t think it’s close, anywhere close at all.

that’s what happens when spring is close enough to taste. the rain stops hurting and “cold” becomes “invigorating” and all the old skins start to flake, and out we shimmy.

oh, the title. the zombie stompers. i was really happy about certain developments involving a project that uses words like “cover,” paperback,”  “printing” etc. and we can blame my impulses on barbie, whatever, but i thought that a riduculous and fabulous pair of shoes that i would keep forever would be an excellent way to commemorate my name in connection with the word “print.” enter the Limited Edition Glow In the Dark Zombie Stomper … or at least the wait list. someday, someday.

and how better to say goodnight? the cheshire cat is mewing sleepy happy under the house, the rain is drumming, and i have lovely photos of my son(sun) dressed in a tissue paper lady Gaga costume, and a shoe that will one day be mine.

i love the world.

THE LIBRARY

it’s story time. it’s packed in here. my supershy son has a pink duck (and hells yeah for him, watching 4 boys in a row pick BLUE ducks and piping up “pink!” when asked) nametag around his neck on a piece of yarn and is in another room on a rug with 20 other preschool age heathens.

baptism by fire. he can be as shy as he wants as long as he has general functional skills (says the girl on the laptp typing away while the other mommies discuss… whatever other mommies discuss. so far it seems to be those carry-wrap baby things).

it’s snowing and there’s a super-hot mom here that i would totally be making conversation with if i hadn’t overheard her say she was moving to minnesota in 3 weeks. as piper laurie said “that wouldn’t leave us much time, would it?” she’s native american and has long, dark hair and no make-up, brown cords and a t-shirt. i would be measuring her for steamer trunk-size if she weren’t leaving the state.

i should be editing PVP (nice to see b– back, i had wondered what with his situational whatever and whatever if he had lost faith and was going to fade out). instead i’m looking at Miss Brown Corduroys and listening with one ear to hear if  little man is crying or yelling.

the birthday party on sunday was a fiasco, by the by. everyone had fun, especially adam. i scaled a rock wall and wore myslef out in the bouncy bounce thing. i hate birthday parties, but i ’m glad it went well. i’m forcefully scratching from my memory the 5 minute long fake-choking episode by a 10-yr-old that will not be invited to ANYTHING AGAIN EVER. mom, get her some acting lessons or teach her not to be a bitch. 

i think time is almost up. and there’s a redneck peeking over my shoulder, he saw the part about Miss Brown Corduroys, i think. gotsta go. god help my spelling and grammar on this one….

birds

there were nuthatches on the birdfeeder when we woke. that’s the best thing i’ve seen in a long time…

things are coming awake. i’m coming awake. eric is coming awake. adam is… well, poor thing is benefiting from the end of hibernation.

job change on the horizon for mi esposo very soon, his eyes are bluer and he sleeps better as a result. and i sleep better as a result. and adam sleeps better as a result of the bluer eyes – if daddy is happy, adam is happy.

yesterday was library storytime, there was a valentine’s day party. i had my first taste of primal animal protectiveness when i left him in an entirely different room on a rug with 15 strange children. he is large. he is grown up. he attends storygroups. he gets valentines from little girls, in a little paper sack covered with stickers and his name written on it in magic marker. he gets approached by little girls from the group in mcdonald’s. little girls with blond hair dart from unknown places to tell my son hello.

seriously, at one point he didn’t have teeth, i swear.

birthday party on sunday. i forgot to send the invitations, i’ve been frantically soliciting RSVPs via email. looks like i squeaked by again, everyone seems to be coming.  what a fiasco the party will be- i hate this sort of thing. oh well. not about me.  adam will have an awesome time – there’s a “bouncy bean” so it’s bound to be a success.

taken some rejections, they sting less and less. my confidence grows. got a non-answer from a lady whose opinion meant more than the story rejection that came moments after her email, and i was able to read the rejection with a huge smile and a “what the hell do you know?”  attitude.

SPRING IS IN THE AIR, MOTHAFUCKAS!!!!

and on the heels of that horrible language, here are some photos adam took this week on his playskool camera:

doom

i have a very cliche sense of  foreboding, accomanied by a very cliche lump in my throat (but that could just be sleeping sans cold pills and the difficulty in that). woke up all the way with eric this morning, had much conversation and um, yeah, so we talked for awhile and i told him i didn’t want him to go – i don’t know if it’s because i was awake with him and that caused a sense of gravity for the 5am time, or if i was awake because of the gravity of the sense of foreboding. i told him as much but he said he just had too much to do. it occurred to me that the delay of him could not only have offset the schedule of real/imagined doom, but may have in fact SET OFF the schedule of real/imagined doom.

i fell back to sleep hearing him taking out the trash and thinking what an awful last thing that would’ve been to do at your home if you never came back, and wondering if he’d looked in on adam before he left.

then dreamed. dreamed i was scully, and mulder and i were investigating murders at a trailer camp rental motel type place – we got there at night and got seperate trailers (seriously rancid little boxes with no water or bathrooms) in the mulder and scully style, and i inspected the whole place – dark blue dirty curtains in a square sort of habitat, with a kitchen-like area to one side with gold/yellow dirty linleum counters and an unconnected sink, empty cabinets, and a living room area to the other side, with a foot wide strip of brown shag and yellowed curtains above a tv that didn’t work, the kind with rabbit ears on a tray. but it was all just indications of seperate rooms to give the illusion of an actual suite – it was really just an unmade bed in the center of the small place with the purely decorative “other room” areas flanking the unmade bed in the couple feet of space on each side of the bed. the door to the bathroom opened to outside, to a field behind the trailer park.

i undressed and got into bed (with my gun on my chest) – the sheets were green flannel and the pillowcases were faded pink flowers – it occurred to me after i was already in that the sheets were probably dirty and i wondered what in hell had made me get down to my skivvies and into the damned bed in the first place, but a lucid me-voice inside my scully-head reminded me that i was in the x-files and mulder was in the next trailer and the episode was probably constructed in a way that mulder would see me in my white undies at some point. i was lying there on the dirty pillow contemplating the pros and cons of getting back up to dress (i had already touched the sheets) and trying to remember if i’d deadbolted the door, and was thinking the door should have a chainlock instead of a deadbolt, when i started hearing noises under the trailer. i got up and dressed quickly, pointing my gun at the floor and doing other scully-like things, and there was pouding on the door and i yelled asking who but couldn’t hear through the door, was afraid to open it with no chain lock, more pounding under the floor, and at the door, i finally opened the door and it was mulder, and we immediately began yelling at each other about the ridiculousness of no chain locks being on the doors.

there was some sort of transition that was very spooky, walking across the field and there was fog, a few fireflies scattered, and a big house. it was unlocked and sort of hotel-like, very modern functional, browns and tans that don’t show dirt. we immediately became seperated.

i ended up at the top of a long staircase and knocked on a door, and when it opened it was billy c– and i was me again, but still had a gun. he was surprised to see me, but told me about some sort of event going on that i don’t remember now that made it not THAT odd to run into each other.  he was playing a game on a huge flatscreen and had an open suitcase. there were photos in it, and he said he’d brought them to have copies made and wanted to know if i wanted copies as i was in all of them. they were candid group shots, and i didn’t recognize anyone in the photos, and didn’t see myself OR him in any of them, until he pointed me out in the corners or between people or behind people, just a shadow or fraction of me, like in every movie that the killer is discovered in a stack of photos. above his bed was a row of photos, all of girls we went to highschool with, all in the same position, stretched on their backs with their ankles folded and one arm up by their heads, face toward the camera. all the pictures were of the bed and sheets in my trailer (i know- dunh dunh DUNH!), and i asked billy where they came from and he said they were up when he got there, and i became immediately certain all the girls were dead (and not necessarily SAD about that, there wasn’t a lot to lose in those photos, just to be perfectly honest about my internal shrug in the dream about the deaths themselves) but i was already changing back into scully, and i turned to billy very dramatically and yelled “WHERE’S MULDER?” and he cracked up.  i ran into the hallway and was pointing my gun left then right down the hall when i heard adam say “mommy, it’s time to wake up.”

still the lump in my throat, and no email back from eric but that’s not odd if he is where i think he is and there are no computers or time to check them.

i blame jane s– for the dream but not the foreboding. the dream was just a very interesting and layered manifestion of dread feelings and many X-files conversations over the last few days.

i wish eric had stayed home. i’m off to make more coffee.

Iris DeMent

 

THREE YEARS OLD!!!

groundhog day

today is the other side of the coin from yesterday. yesterday was exuberance. today is…. well, grey, with high winds and snow flurries. catatonia. veins filling with glucose, slack jaw, auto pilot, unplugged, other words like that.

yesterday i spammed by email and facebook about the thundadome story. that was fun (for me, maybe not so much for acquaintances). the sun was out. adam was in a fabulous mood. eric was high on the possibility of a job change (and possibly ether exposure).

the newest groundhog says winter is over, and i say that groundhog is a liar.

in other news, why i love andrea zito:

dead crab vs. dead crab by ARZ

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