KAR Trouble

Cubs and Wolves and Sousas. Oh My

2009-08-21T12:31:00.004-04:00

I'm basically a little glad at this point that I've put off going back to school for a master's degree right now. My daughter is a sousaphone-carrying band geek. Then heathen number 2 just joined the school chorus and the math team. Also, my new job (which is pretty cool if I can ever get the hang of how to, uh, count) has rearranged the basic schedule I'd worked my life around the past five or so years so now I'm not available to pick the boys up from school and be home when Tubagirl gets off the bus.

My mommy has been a wonderful help in that she picks the boys up for me.

But on to other ramblings about my mundane life. Being a band mom is very hard work. Whenever I pick her up from practice, there are always parent volunteers there who have obviously been there the whole time. Who are these people? Where in god's name do they find the time? Are their band geek kids their only children? Are they living on residual incomes that don't require day to day work? Do they make their living selling band discount cards on the black market? Do they sleep? I'm not sure they do. Indoctrinated band parents must obviously have some vampiracle (I think I made that word up) qualities about them that the rest of us do not possess.

But the basic point is this: my oldest child has an extra curricular activity. (Not to mention that she has already joined the school chorus for spring semester and is considering going out for soccer.) My middle son has taken on two activities. My youngest son is out free floating because the one activity I'd signed him up for last year is no longer possible with my work schedule.

We're taking on boy scouts. With both the boy heathens. I put an add on facebook a couple of days ago for a wife, but it seems no one wants to be my wife. So it looks like I'm going to have to continue being my own wife and I don't make a very good wife. I'm good at thinking about things. I wish I could get a job thinking. Then I could just think about boy scouts and math teams and band cards in the comfort of my own private little think tank office.

I'm whining and I want chocolate. Shut up and hand me that bacon so I can dip it in some candiquick.

Stop! A head!

2009-05-01T19:58:00.011-04:00

Life, at times, can be quite fortuitous. It seems my neighbor's dogs keep finding random hair heads and dragging them to the neighborhood. It's an new day in KARland with a million ways to potentially entertain myself. Perhaps I am too easily amused.

Why, hellooooooo there! New to the neighborhood?
I just so happen to have a nice plate of chocolate covered bacon right here in my hand
and you look like a man who could use some chocolate covered bacon.

What? No. I actually mean bacon covered in chocolate.
No. I didn't mean my vagina.
I'm just not the kind of girl to cover my vagina in chocolate.

A cat fight over the new man. It happens in trailer parks sometimes.
Sometimes it happens in front of the piggly wiggly, too.

Why hello, neighbor! Earning your Eagle Scout Badge? Oh.
She took the trailer in the divorce. I'm very sorry to hear that.

So I guess the appointment with the plastic surgeon didn't go well? So sorry to hear that. But hey, going noseless is all the rage in hollywood these days.
Besides, you can't even really tell. No, really!
Now why don't you crawl out of the car before something else melts?

Gardening is good for the soul.

Going on vacation? You forgot the stamp.

When I Unraveled

2008-11-04T14:11:00.002-04:00

When I Unraveled

How can I tell the truth? I did not want another pregnancy, another baby
tugging at tired breasts. Life slips away - self buries self with each child
I carry into the world. Yet, I carried him – sure that life brings purpose
with the bright stabbing beautiful pain. I carried him, pretended life
was only beautiful. But sickness invaded small cells and circulated

in blood, pushing life out of life I’d carried. Only then did I know my need
of him – blood of my blood. Flesh of my flesh. Oxygen and dripping antibiotics
bonded him to earth. I floated untethered, unraveling in the difference between being
and not being. Life became a bubble – iridescent and molecule thin.

He slept under blue lights, circulated sick blue blood, turned blue when air
was not rich enough for pale, weak lungs. I swallowed, ingested and engorged
myself on guilt and fear and extracted it from it prayerful, entreating balm to beg forgiveness and breathe hope into the gloaming. Life is bright
stabbing beautiful pain and I gashed my hand on its rim.

-cnb

The Weird Attack and Close Ups

2008-10-23T21:10:00.004-04:00

Okay. Seriously. What in the hell did he attack her with - a dull KFC plastic butter knife? There has obviously been no blood loss and it's raised like she ran an eraser over her face. (Remember that weird game we used to play as kids? Or was that just me?)

I don't even know what to say about the eyes. No swelling. The "black eye" seems to taper off over her cheek bone. And I guess this 6'4" black man must have had very small hands and no drive behind his punch since it only covers her eye. I was punched in the eye by my 13 year-old 5'8" brother once when I was 16 and that whole side of my face was swollen for days.

Just wanted to post the close ups somewhere.

A small rant

2008-07-25T22:36:00.004-04:00

"We are offering non-paid writing opportunities. This is an excellent opportunity to build name recognition and gain experience in the rapidly changing publishing world and be a part of a growing web property."

Sure! I'd be absolutely and perfectly willing to offer up my services for free. Oh, suuuurrre, I only have eighteen thousand dollars in student loans to garner a B.A. with a concentration in creative writing so I can work for free. (I won't mention where this came from as it doesn't really matter since it's a bit of pretty generic crappola that I've seen many, many times.)

I'm absolutely sure that all those psych, education, and business majors are out there canvassing public schools and whatnot so they can offer up free services so they can "build up name recognition" while the revel in relative poverty just so one day, they too, can make the grand sum of $32,000 a year.

I don't go to McDonald's and demand free cheeseburgers then promise the guy at the counter that I'll "really help get their name out there."

Hey! Writing isn't like breathing, miserly ones. It does require some sort of thought process. If you can't afford to offer your writers a pittance of some type (I'll even take peanuts depending on the article length) then write it yourself. I can write for free on my own.

Jesse McDaniel

2008-04-14T19:04:00.007-04:00

You know how sometimes you don't sometimes see people for months or years and then one day something comes over you and you have to know where they are right that very moment? I finally wondered where Jesse McDaniel had gotten off to so I called up the boys' father and asked him. What kind of response do I get?

"Hell, Jesse died back last fall."

Now why in the hell don't people ever tell me these things? Everyone knows I don't read the paper, don't look at the weather and don't watch the news so it's very important that someone calls and lets me know if I need to put on a coat, check to see if my Malt-o-meal cereal is being recalled, or buy a dress for a funeral. My best friend always calls me with weather updates and gas price reports and very rarely does she forget to keep me up to date. But other people are falling down on the job.

And really, I'm rather sad about the whole thing because Jesse was his own person and not one of those people you ever forget. I met him 10 years or so ago at the old Huddle House on 441 North. And maybe a random Huddle House doesn't seem like a big deal, but this was the Huddle House and there was always somewhere there I knew. It's where I went for grease to soak up the alcohol when I got plastered and it's where I spent a lot of time with the boys' father before they closed it down. It was old as hell with orange laminate tables, fake wood benches, chipped floor tiles and horrible, horrible greasy dark brown paneling straight from awesome 1972. God. I miss it.

Jesse was always there. He was a veteran of some war, though I can't ever remember which one - maybe Korea. Sometimes he lived at the Veteran's Home, but I guess sometimes he got tired of putting up with other people's rules and shit because he'd leave and rent a room at the New Milledgeville Motel, this little shit dive, right next to the Huddle House.

When he stayed at the Motel, he was in the Huddle House three or four times a day for tea and dinner, or bullshitting and companionship. He wore these ancient old overalls, brogans and had liver spots on his head but no hair. If you ever met him, you never forgot him. At times, he'd talk and talk and you'd have no idea what in the hell he was talking about because the pitch of his voice was so odd at times. Everybody at the HH knew him and everybody tended to him.

Whenever he saw me, he'd pull lint-covered pieces of candy from his overall pockets and say, "Give this to RAINey!" and shove candy in my hand for my daughter. Double Bubble bubble gum or now & laters. Whatever he had on him at the time. He always remembered to give me candy for Rain, although I don't think he ever realized or remembered their kinship. He was Rain's great uncle on her father's side. Maybe he did remember, I don't know.

My Huddle House closed almost seven years ago. People went in for dinner early one evening and the employees were sitting in front of the locked door wondering why no one had bothered to tell them they weren't going to have jobs. Everybody wondered what Jesse would do now because the Huddle House was his home away from the Veteran's Home. Folks fretted about who would look after him and worried about him walking up and down the main dragstrip looking for a new place to bullshit and get tea. Not everyone was going to appreciate a rheumy-eyed, overalled old man with lint-covered candy in his pocket.

I don't know where he went after that. The Huddle House was closed and their was never another grease joint that felt greasy and icky enough with paneled walls to appropriately be called a grease joint. Maybe he went to the new Waffle House across the street, but it seemed more like he roamed from one place to the next. He'd walk to Kroger or Walmart. No place was ever the same as the Huddle House. The last time I saw him, I was walking into Kroger with my youngest and there he was on the sidewalk.

"You tell John SoandSo I said I'm waiting on my hogleg! I need me a hogleg to take care of these hoodlums!" he said.

The boys' father (John SoandSo) had been promising Jesse a hogleg (a long barreled gun) for months. I think it was a bit of quandary for John. Everyone worried about Jesse walking up and down the highway by himself, but it was a more worrisome thing to give a crotchedy old veteran a gun to wield at hoodlums. John gave Jesse a lot of rides over the last few years to try and keep him off the highway.

I told Jesse I'd get on to John about that hogleg for him. Then he asked me,"Where's RAINey?" and I told him she was at school. He reached into those endless overall pockets and pulled out a couple of pieces of lint-covered candy. "Here, give her this candy." I took the candy and stuck it in my pocket.

Jesse passed with hardly a ripple through this town, but there should have been.

KAR slams the poetry

2008-04-07T16:04:00.003-04:00

Revel in the oddness of my very first ever "slam poem." Please excuse the shoddy sound. I am but a poor, humble writer devoid of adequate funding. Since there is a bit of static in the background, I've included the poem on this post for you.

I’m not jealous of Freud’s penis
Freud was a dick
I’m not jealous of any man with a penis
because dicked people look crazy
naked Crazy with kibbles and bits hanging off
like a funny afterthought

I’m not jealous of the
masculine testosterone WCW John Fucking Wayne NASCAR drive
to conquer and deliver forth a world of
Fighting gamecocks

I’m not jealous
I’m frigging pissed off

I’m frigging pissed
because I can’t wave my labia around like a
Kamikaze windmill
I can’t get raving piss drunk and piss my name
in the dirt I can’t piss standing up but always
just in my shoe
I don’t get to aim and hit the bull's eye

When I was four years old I tried to pee standing up
because it seemed so much
easier so I got naked
And straddled the toilet backwards ass to the door
and I pissed down my leg

I’m not jealous

I’m pissed because I have to wait in line
to urinate

I recently celebrated my third 30th birthday

2008-03-31T16:13:00.004-04:00

In homage of my first 30th birthday, I pulled up an old post of mine from a certain parenting message board. My friends and I went on a drinking rampage for my first 30th and I came back home and attempted to relay the details of the day while still under the influence under some twelve shots. The day began with a commitment ceremony of two ladies I know at the AA center. It is an interesting read if you like drunken posts. I am too old to drink like that now. It took me days to get over the copious amounts of alcohol after I posted this. (Names edited to protect the dastardly.)

went to a lesbian wedding this afternoon. very bootiful. at the aa center. they met at aa.. my mom and i were the only non aa peopke there. one of the groomsmen or something wore brogans with his suitl. little disturbing. combination ghetto redneck wedding. very interesting. had a full dinner at at the wedding. fruits. vegetiable. cornbread. shrimp. chicken. salmon patties. collard. rootabagas. cake. punchj. )(nonalchoholic punch.)

dn't like the bride. known the brood grime or whatever for years. very sweet lady. bride bride wore a traditional wedding dress. bridegroom or whatever wore a nice blue suit, been to redneck weddings. been to g hetto wedding.s never been to a redneck g hetto wedding at the aa. very sweet. i evejavascript:checklength(document.vbform);
[check message length]ned teared u7p. i don't cry. so it was a very sweet wedding at the aa center. they met at the aa. They didn't do hor deversses. I am drunk. fuck foff. Thjey didn't do hor doevres. They did a full fucking dinenr. fruits. vegetables. collars. green beans. rootabagas. black eyed peas. potaota chips. n on alchoholic beverages. I'm still full from attedning the wedding.

went to the bar for my 30th birthdat. don't want to do that no mopre. I think I had ten shots of somethning. maybe 11. strange people kept byying my drinks. took me 7 times to sign on here. met some weird gyy. met lots of weird= peopel. people. in this weird town are fucking weird. the band sucked. i zm 30. I am 30 met some guy named tommy who bought me two shots of jack. tommh's stepdad was a presbyterian preacher. I forget what happened to his real dad. maybe he was heaten by pure whit ewolves. tommy was 23 before he ghot laide. what the hell? I think he has one of those big holes in this ears. he freaked me the hell out. but he bought drinks.

then io got to meet goerge who should be marrried to my friend tammy and i may have told them so. nopt sure aabout what i said. do know that i kept telling alica to shove a cue ball up her soon to be ex husbands assa. maybe two and a pool stick.

the band scukec. i have the hiccups. imy oldest freidn (of over 25 years) is having an affrair with a married man. I think I told her he was a balless fuck. Her ex husband and her nephew awas there. It was really weird seeing her nephew there. Ir emember when he used to waer diapers. i am old. oooooolllddd.

I questioned sme other guy about our shared parenting segment of psychology 101 in 1994. My first (rain's father) owe's a really cute tall guy 2000 dollars. I have to remember to tell him that. Too bad the really cut e tall guy has a fuckign girlfriend.

My best best best friend took very good care of me. riding in a car with yar eye's closed and complety drunk is ddizzyng. I had toast and water at the huddle house. am goijnt to bed now. dom't want to do this driniking thinkg anymore.

Saw lots of old friends i have not seen in a while becaus I was always busy. realized how much i miss them. want to see more of them. but not when i'm drunk. the band sucked ass. closed the bar down.

kearning nto to laugh at fat peole dressed in skinny peole clothes. laughed at fraeky looking people then it turned out i knew them and then tey bought me drinks for my birthday.

don't want to be drunk no more. gong to bed. i cried a little at the lesbian wedding. tina is suvh a sweet lady. used to see her all the time when i worke dat the convenience sotre. when i was abougt 14 or so. used to confuse me because i thought she was a cute little man but kept thinking she looked like she had boobs or something. took me over a year to figure out the cute little man was a woman. going to bed now. no drink no more.

2008-03-31T10:17:00.002-04:00

Stolen from Venus.

Here’s how it works:
1. Go to www.photobucket.com
2. Type in your answer to the question in the “search” box
3. Use only the first page
4. Insert the picture into your Blog

1. What is your relationship status?

2. What is your current mood?

3. Who is your favorite band/artist?

4. What is your favorite movie?

5. What kind of pet do you have?

6. Where do you live?

7. Where do you work?

8. What do you look like?

9. What do you drive?

10. What did you do last night?

11. What is your favorite TV show?

12. Describe yourself.

13. What are you doing today?

14. What is your name?

15. What is your favorite candy?

So apparently my dream of being the Swiss Family Robinson is bullshit.

2008-03-18T22:31:00.009-04:00

I took all of my children to Lowe's a couple of weeks ago and we picked out all kinds of vegetable seeds, herbs and flowers in homage to my sudden raging desire to make something grow. This happens almost every spring. The sudden urge to plant and become productive, to create sustenance from dirt and sunlight overwhelms me and I come up with huge, wonderful, awesome ideas for herb gardens, vegetable gardens, day lilies and fruit orchards. (Don't ask me where the fruit orchard would go, I live on a third of an acre. But it's a great idea.)

This is actually the first time in several years I've tried planting anything. I've been in school working my way toward a job that will allow me to pay off my massive student loans and between that and children and children in school and children randomly puking from the top of the bunkbed, it's been a bit hectic. I held back on that deep, instinctive nature to play in dirt.

It is for the best as my gardening abilities are not really abilities so much as depraved and sadistic activities. I've killed nearly everything I touch and was dubbed The Dark Gardener by a concerned family member when I was still a teen.

But this year finally caught me. My children are older. My goth girl is 13. The boys are 6 and 5. I'm a senior now and I thought they would be more interested in gardening. I am also suffering with an insane case of senioritis. I don't wanna play with words anymore. I want to pump gas for a living or dig ditches. I want to grow things. It became plainly apparent to me one Sunday that the best way to foster a sense of family unity while simultaneously ignoring my homework was to plant a massive garden.

As we speak, I have successfully transplanted the sunflowers to the front yard and they are still green. I did kill a hydrangea a few days before. The hydrangea, though, was on clearance and already looking a little green around the gills so its demise is not entirely my fault. Now, I have watermelon, hot peppers, bell peppers, chives, mint, pole beans, cow peas, lavendar, oregano and a strawberry bush all growing up very nicely in their little greenhouse thingies. I don't even know where I'm going to put all this stuff. Maybe I'll borrow a bit of the neighbor's yard.

The problem though (besides buying more plants than I have yard) is my secret desire. Picking out the plants and the lawn cultivator and the cheap frigging garden rake that does not stay all in one piece I had such wonderful dreams of being a loving little single parent family unit. My daughter would divest herself of the Robert Smith eyeliner and we'd wear cute little matching sunhats with gingham ribbon as we talked about her day at school over the watermelon patch. My boys would gamble about in their cute little buster browns and perfectly coifed hair with the little wave in the front, pulling weeds willy nilly while exlaiming over the size of the tomatoes. Okay, so maybe it's a little too cheesy for my tastes, but my point is we'd radiate love, happiness and togetherness. We would be A UNIT.

I think the neighbors have been blowing their pot smoke through my bathroom vents because I was obviously out of my mind. I should have known to leave Lowe's without spending the money. One stomped because I wouldn't by the Venus flytrap. Another kept climbing up on the plant tables and jumping off. And the other developed a random one-time bout of diarrhea right before we were ready to check out.

It was all downhill from there. My UNIT dissolved into whining messes. I made the mistake of only buying one garden rake and everyone wanted to use the garden rake. No one wanted to actually touch the dirt and the whining reached a crescendo when my oldest informed me I was so unfair and no one was making me dig up the yard and no one made me clean house and no one made me cook, I did it because I wanted to and it was unfair for me to make her dig up the front yard.

Oh, my poor little Orphan Annie. I sent her to her room until they found a cure for puberty.

So now I have all these damned sprouting things in my house and only a third of my back yard dug up. My kids think it's the hokiest thing ever. I'm left out there all alone while they run around the yard with the neighbor kids and I festered over my inability to create unity. What the hell it is about me that cause such disjointed behavior is beyond me. Maybe it's the hair. I've never successfully pulled off one cohesive thing in my life. My plants always die. My children act like war combatants, demanding and vying to be heard over everybody else until I hide in the closet with a key lime pie and pretend it's all perfectly normal. My cars . . . you know what. I'm not even going to talk about my cars. That's a whole can of worms that should be discussed in therapy. Unless it can be put together with duct tape, I'm apparently incapable of pulling it together. Maybe I should just duct tape my plants to the ground.

But I have discovered one thing. When I stopped trying to involve my children in the gardening to create the perfect White Trash Stepford unit and stopped grousing because they whined, I discovered it was quiet. Apparently the best way to get my children to ignore me is to stand in the yard with a lawn aerator and a garden rake. For the first time in countless years, I was left virtually alone for an hour while they played with the neighbor kids.

As I step-punched-twisted holes across the back yard, I thought about my capstone portfolio due in two months and I wasn't quite so hysterical about it. I could begin to feel the form and the ending of my brilliant masterpiece that will be the bulk of the portfolio. That little freak in my head who runs around with her hands ripping out her hair while declaring the apocalypse was upon us went somewhere. Maybe she took a nap or went looking for the rest of the key lime pie. (HA! I ate it! nyeah nyeah!) And even though my hands were starting to blister, I kept going across the yard because I was calm. I had my hands in something and somehow it gave my ideas a shape and a feel.

I didn't want the peace to go away so I ignored the dishes in the sink and the clothes in the washing machine and the obvious fact my five year old was slowly divesting himself of his clothing in the back yard. We had sandwiches for dinner because it was late when I finally went back in the house.

My thesis leader dude has been telling me to breathe for three months now. Every time I saw him, my whole being was in an uproar and I was absolutely sure I was on the verge of an aneurysm or a stroke. (The facial tics may be more indicative of a stroke.) And he kept saying to me, "Just breathe. Take a walk and breathe." Of course, being the nutbag I am, I only nodded at him like it all made perfect sense and then ran to the bathroom so I could rant by myself:

"Breathe?! Breathe?! I don't have fucking time to breathe. I'll breathe in May after grades are distributed. But there is no breathing now! No time for breathing! What crunchy hippy granola zen goddamned bullshit. I don't need to breathe. I need someone to tell me what to do."

So I've been directly ignoring everything everyone has said for months and drowning in my own hysterical melodrama. Then I haphazardly set out to plant a garden in this random stab at creating this family idea that I keep seeing around town. HOW does my middle son's teacher manage to walk out the door with three triplet boys and they are all wearing shoes, socks and presumably underwear and they sit so quietly in public? What is she doing? Bribery? Duct tape? Nyquil? So far, I've failed miserably in creating a garden of togetherness. But someone should remind me to tell Stephen I've started breathing again.

Church Wrasslin

2008-03-14T11:37:00.006-04:00

The best of everything. Church. Wrasslin. Getting saved and getting piledrived all in one building. Words cannot express my enraptured joy. It's like chicken and waffles. Cheese and pecan pie. Sheer marketing genius. The Lord and speedos. I am complete.

A random rough draft from Schott's

2008-02-27T16:17:00.003-04:00

Foremost, I absolutely must recommend Schott's Miscellany to all random information lovers. This is a random poem created around a one of Oscar Wilde's droll quips. It's not anything special. I particularly like it because it was a clear step outside of my general first person view.

Displaced Housewife

He hadn’t a single redeeming vice
No divine and decadent lust for life
Never a nip or a tuck or roving eye -
But her devious dreams weren’t so nice

What virtuous valor – really he was
Holding his counsel, holding the cause
Stoic and sad when she burned her bras.
She - hell bent to breathe, never gave pause

Looking ahead, she left him behind
Took with a man who screwed her blind
She screamed with joy – she was alive
While he sat at home and gave just a sigh

Travails with the USPS bleeds into amazon territory

2008-01-24T10:04:00.000-04:00

The postmaster of my tiny post office called and left a message at my mother's house yesterday. I'm not really sure how he knew to call my mother's house since the post office is in another county, but it's a small world down here so I don't question things much. The postmaster dude, like Josephine, seemed interested in what my package looked like and wanted to know if I'd contacted amazon about the situation. Well, no, honestly I had not been thoughtful enough to contact amazon as it seems the US Post Office has their hands on my box. But I emailed amazon in the vague hopes they could work out some sort of hostage negotiations for my stuff before next Christmas. Here is the email I sent to Amazon. I am awaiting a reply.:

I ordered these items and they were supposed to be delivered 12/18/2008. I called both amazon.com and the USPS and could not get a definitive answer on where my box was at that time, just that it had been shipped.

I allowed for the holiday mail issues and resigned myself to the idea I probably would not get the tinker toys before Christmas. On 1/18/08, I learned my package was being sent to a recovery center in Atlanta. Discovering this lead on my missing amazon box, I emailed the USPS. Josephine the USPS Lady was very kind and sent me a questionnaire to complete. I described what I thought my package may look like, where it came from (well, sort of. I don't know amazon.com's mailing address - it's all very magical and internety to me) and when the package was mailed.

Well, my postmaster general dude called and left me a message yesterday and wanted to know what the box looked like. You would have thought Josephine might have relayed this information to him when they discovered my box on the loose. But you know what old people say about mights – they grow on a chickens butt. Anyway, he also wanted to know if I'd followed up with Amazon.com to see if you people know where my box of tinker toys and sundry notions has gotten off to.

Seeing that the USPS tracking site told me it was off in a recovery center somewhere recovering from only Lord knows what, I don't know what you all can do for me. But if you can find my box or call my postmaster general dude and let him know what my box looks like or give them a tracking number or whatever, I'd be mighty obliged. I don't know what good the tracking number is going to do, I've e-mailed that all over the place and haven't gotten anywhere with it. A hound dog showed up at my house yesterday, though. I’m thinking about driving him up to Atlanta this weekend and seeing if he can’t sniff out my tinker toys.

Travails with the USPS

2008-01-22T18:55:00.000-04:00

I ordered a few Christmas toys and books from amazon.com on 12/12/07. Ordering so late in the holiday season was a thoroughly bad idea and I willingly admit it was not a wise move. I also was okay with the idea that I could possibly not recieve my order before Christmas. However, I was sure they'd be in within a week or so after Christmas. My tinker toys never materialized and I've set off on an email mission to locate them. Here is the beginning of my search and subsequent responses. They are long and rambling because I am a long, rambling sort of woman. I'm not sure anyone else is actually reading them so I'll stick them here for you to not read.

(with typos thoughtfully righted for you . . .somewhat)

tracking number: (must remain confidential lest you all try to claim my tinker toys)

This package was picked up from an amazon warehouse on 12/13/07. It was due to me on 12/18. When I could not find any information about my package through the USPS tracking site, I called customer service. I was informed since I am too cheap to pay for extra shipping, no one really could tell me where my amazon box was or when it would be in my grubby little hands. Just that it was out there somewhere.

However, I would like to commend the USPS customer service number. Like most customer service lines, the CSR was completely incapable of answering my question and I was foisted off like so much Family Dollar Christmas tinsel. However, the representative did have an American accent and it didn't take us 30 minutes for her to impart her lack of information to me. While I do not consider myself a xenophobe, I do appreciate that the USPS has not taken to outsourcing customer service calls to Bangladesh.

On a whim and with wistful hopes, I checked checked the USPS tracking site today - a month after my box of Christmas dreams were due to me. Lo and behold! It's a bleak January miracle! My package was sent to the Atlanta Mail Recovery center on 12/19/07 at 10:48AM.

Now, I don't know what sort of pain and humility my box has been through. Maybe it was taken hostage by some of those crazy people who are boycotting the use of the word Holidays. Weirder things have happened. However, I consider it a very valid explanation for these reasons:

1. I've had the same mailing address for the last 9 years.
2. Amazon has successfully mailed packages to this address for the past five years.
3. My mail lady knows where I live, yet she never brought me my package or left me a note telling me I had a package waiting to be delivered. Certainly, had my mail lady ever actually seen my package she would have made sure I got since she always brings me my bills.
4. Those "Happy Holidays is against God!" people are a little whacky and scary. Maybe they were stealing packages all over the place and trying to send them to the Island of Misfit Toys.

Provided you, dear reader, are still paying attention to this missive I applaud you for your interest in delivering top notch customer service to the agitated. I'll end with this:

I'd really like my damned mail. Do you think you could have one of those people up there in Atlanta dig my box out and send it to me in the next week? Fairly now, the shipping has been paid and it is a little more than rude to randomly sit on a customer's package.

Really, the sooner the better. I was very excited about the Tinker Toys.

Thank you,
kooolaidred

The USPS Response

Dear KOOOLAIDRED

Thank you for contacting us about item number, 9102001206932595118718.

According to our records, your item could not be delivered or returned to the sender. It is being forwarded to a USPS mail recovery center where it will be processed.

I apologize that we do not have any additional information regarding the status of your item. Complete tracking information is only available for Express Mail® items. Services that confirm delivery are designed to be a low cost alternative to full tracking. Electronic Delivery Confirmation™ may, but is not required to, provide the date and time when it was picked up or accepted for shipment.

I will document this issue. However, I need some additional information so this can be sent to the correct office and you can be contacted:

- Full name of the sender
- Address of the sender
- Type of mail (letter, large envelope, package, large package, or unknown)
- Class of mail (Express Mail®, First Class Mail®, international, military, Periodicals, Priority Mail®, Bulk Mail, Parcel Post®, Media Mail®, or none)
- Services added (Certified Mail™, Registered Mail™, Return Receipt, Merchandise, Insured, C.O.D., Signature Confirmation™, or Delivery Confirmation™)
- Location the mail item was sent from (sender’s residence, other residence / business, Post Office™ ZIP Code™, Collection Box®, or unknown)
- Time and date the mail item was sent
- Whether you would like to receive a call regarding this issue (There is no guarantee that further information can be provided via email.)
- If you suspect foul play:
- Do you know who was involved?
- Do you know the name(s) of whom you suspect?
- Was it a Postal employee?
- Do you have a description?

If I can be of assistance to you in the future, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you for choosing the United States Postal Service®.

Regards,
Josephine

I was so happy at Josephine's quick response, I immediately filled out their questionnaire:

-

Full name of the sender
Amazon.com

- Address of the sender
I do not know the address of amazon.com. I just know my box of goodies was magically assembled in a warehouse by internet gnomes and the box has that arrow and lower case "a" on it.

- Type of mail (letter, large envelope, package, large package, or unknown)
I am assuming it should be a brown cardboard box approximately three feet long by one foot wide by one foot deep. I could be wrong about the particulars, but I'm pretty sure it is definitely a nice sized brown box. I would definitely recognize an amazon.com box, though, because it has that arrow and a lower case "a" on it. In fact, I'd say it probably looks like the box in the attachment. That's not my box, though. My box wouldn't have a harry potter sticker on it.

- Class of mail (Express Mail®, First Class Mail®, international, military, Periodicals, Priority Mail®, Bulk Mail, Parcel Post®, Media Mail®, or none)
I am also unsure of the class of mail. It is listed as Free Super Saving Shipping on Amazon.com. I suppose it would be US standard shipping.

- Services added (Certified Mail™, Registered Mail™, Return Receipt, Merchandise, Insured, C.O.D., Signature Confirmation™, or Delivery Confirmation™)
I do not believe any services were added.

- Location the mail item was sent from (sender's residence, other residence / business, Post Office™ ZIP Code™, Collection Box®, or unknown)
amazon.com. Again, I do not from where my box was sent.

- Time and date the mail item was sent
Well. According to my tracking number the USPS received my electronic shipping information on 12/12/2007. And then on 12/19/2007 my box was being sent to the Atlanta Recovery Center at 10:48 AM. That is all I know.

- Whether you would like to receive a call regarding this issue (There is no guarantee that further information can be provided via email.) No. I don't like people very much and phone calls with strangers about my missing box have grown disconcerting.

- If you suspect foul play:
I don't really suspect foul play. I mean, maybe I don't. I did mention that thing about the Anti-Holiday Fundamentalist Christian people, but that was really sort of a joke.

- Do you know who was involved?
I cannot really name the Fundamentalist Christians since I have no proof my box has become a victim of foul play.

- Do you know the name(s) of whom you suspect?
Not applicable.

- Was it a Postal employee?
No.

- Do you have a description?
The box is brown with Amazon.com markings.

Don't you guys want my address? It is supposed to go to me after all.
(Private so I don't incur stalkers.)

If I can be of assistance to you in the future, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Thank you, Josephine for your interest in my loss. Really, I do want the tinker toys. They were supposed to be one of those memory making moments for my family and it did not happen. That little part of my imagination and happiness is sort of in suspended animation. Sure, I could have gone right out and bought other tinker toys, but these amazon.com tinker toys were on mad clearance and I was so happy to get such a deal. I don't know what it would take to get my amazon box if the shipping sticker was all mangled, but I am perfectly happy if you want to open up some amazon boxes and look for my receipt. It will, of course, have my name and mailing address - the very things you need to bring me my package. Just don't steal my tinker toys. Or the hullabaloo game. It was on clearance, too.
-

Finally, something close to complete

2007-11-19T13:21:00.001-04:00

This is a complete revamping of a previous essay I posted. Officially, it's a braided piece with two different stories connected by text and this is the first time I've toyed with this type of essay. I like this format and will probably use it more often since it complies with my erratic nature. It's very close to finished with some minor changes that still need to be worked. Comments, as always, are greatly appreciated.

It's a little long, so I broke into three parts for your convenience. Also, I attempted to format it to make it as easy to read as possible, but blogger seems to have some rule against paragraph indentations which I find quite annoying.

Generations

2007-11-19T13:04:00.001-04:00

Nanny’s cast iron frying pans are smooth, black and cool to the touch when I scrape the food out and gently wipe a rag over them. Nanny, paternal great-grandmother to my children, is a seasoned veteran of cornbread, sweet potato casseroles, collards and hasty meals thrown together to appease the ever-advancing army of visitors. This meal is one to feed the hordes brought together by the death of her brother-in-law, Claude Junior. Nanny, as I’ve known her since I became part of the family, has always been the most genteel of hostesses insisting I “don’t need to worry abut them dishes” but she and Pa are leaving tonight to sit with Claude Junior’s family. I want to do my part, however small, and insist it won’t take me long to finish up.

I don’t tell her I secretly want to feel her cast iron frying pans. Running my hands across them, I can feel generations before me passed into the skills of their daughters. Nanny’s pans have been well cured.

Standing before a stove for more than fifty years, Nanny has spent her life caring and cooking for the ones she loves most. Her own mother, raised in the hills of north Georgia, brought her daughters to the kitchen in a gentle process – testing their mettle in the heat and steam – slowly applying layer after layer of love to seal the strengths of her children. It was a curing process meant to last a lifetime.

“Joyce,” her mother would say while she was shelling peas or feeding chickens, “Why don’t you go on in the house and make some chocolate pudding? You always make such good pudding.” Joyce – Nanny now – must have basked under the praise and she willingly followed her mother’s suggestion. Certainly she carried this lesson with her through out life. She is always seeking to find the strengths of her family and fortify them with love and encouragement. Nanny never gives up on a lost child, always striving to bring them back in the fold. She has spent a lifetime caring for family and friends; treating their ills with a hug, a suggestion, patience, a home remedy, or a meal and a place to sleep.

* * *

My mother gave me my first cast iron pan when I moved into my own home at 23. It was small, black and smooth – just large enough to sauté onions or prepare an omelet. However, I began housekeeping as a mother to a four-year-old daughter and quickly discovered one pan would not suffice.

After a day’s long search that carried me through every local store, I gave up and called Mama in frustration when all I could find were gray and bumpy cast iron pans. They were not the black, smooth ones I’d grown up with in my mother’s house. Even the gastronomically inept such as me could see these gray imposters would never be worth using. Between gusts of maniacal laughter she said, “You have to cure it.”

“Of what?”

The perplexity of preparing meals had never been one I cared to explore when I lived at home.

* * *

The properties of cast iron make it a natural choice for use in cooking. It retains and diffuses heats evenly across the surface of the pan. It can easily be molded into many shapes including cookware. However, cast iron pans in their natural state are porous and food is prone to sticking to the surface. To create an impermeable cookware, one must cure the pan. Many people prefer to cure cast iron pans by simply cooking with them. By cooking food with a high fat content such as bacon, sausage or ground beef, the pan is cured over a period of several uses.

The process my mother gave me when I bought my first new piece of cookware was to simply coat the entire pan, inside and out, with a thin layer of shortening. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and put the pan upside down on a large sheet of aluminum foil in the oven. Bake it for two hours. Mama said to repeat the process several times.

Generations (part 2)

2007-11-19T13:03:00.000-04:00

On the day of Claude Junior’s death, Nanny meets me at the door of her house that began life as a two-room sharecropper’s shack a century ago. The roof is still layered in handpicked cotton under the modern shingles. In her drive to find the light in darkness she calls it her little cottage. Nanny’s eyes are tired and shine with grief. Always, they mirror a lifetime of love and hope and patience.

“You shouldn’t have worried about coming out here,” Nanny scolds as she reaches to hug me. “I know you’ve got too much to do with the babies and school.”

“I couldn’t have not come. You’d do the same for me,” I remind her. And she has many times. Even though John, my children’s father, and I are no longer lovers his family is still my children’s family. My family. It is the way of people who cling to the small criss-crossing maps of kinship. We do it to remember who we are – the molding of ourselves.

She points in the direction of the kitchen. “There’s some dinner –sweet potatoes and collards – on the stove. Lynn brought over some cornbread. Fix you and the younguns a plate.”

I protest because I have not come with needs of my own, but to offer condolences and assistance.

“Go on and fix some plates,” she urged while simultaneously greeting and hugging the children. “We’re about to head up to Claude Junior’s here shortly and there ain’t going to be anybody here to eat it. It’ll just go to waste.” Nanny seems to only use the word “ain’t” when she is insistent and I know a continued resistance of her offer is futile.

I give up and walk into the kitchen. The house is already full of her children and grandchildren, but it always seems that way. Nanny said she once counted twenty people walk through her front door on a Monday. She’s never turned away a visitor or a person in need. It is an amazing concept to me – to have people near me endlessly. In my desire to find peace and solitude, my withdrawal from society takes a near hermit-like approach. She must have an inordinate amount of patience and love of people.

Performing a dance between the stove and dinnerware cabinet while weaving between children clamoring for dinner and drinks and popsicles, I savor the way a small kitchen retains the aroma of dinner. The sweet potatoes float in butter and brown sugar in a cast iron pan on the stove. The cornbread, cracked across the top where heat expanded the crust in the baking, is dark and crispy on the sides and bottom, a state of perfection only achieved through cooking it in cast iron.

I sit next to Lynn, Nanny’s oldest daughter, with my plate and a glass of lemonade. We’ve spent a lot of time together this past year - two single mothers seeking to rebuild ourselves and strengthen family relationships not only for our children, but also from a personal desire to tie back into traditions and bonds. “That cornbread probably isn’t all that good,” Lynn warns me. “I ran out of milk and had to water down what I had left to make it.”

I cannot notice a difference in this pan cornbread and any of her previous pans I’ve eaten. She is, after all, of a matriarchal lineage capable of imparting culinary secrets to their children. It is delicious and I eat two pieces while she insists the cornbread is not good.

* * *

“How do you make biscuits?” I asked my mother. Again, my quest to become Julia Child demanded an exact explanation of where I went wrong. My own biscuits always seemed to look fine when I put them in the oven. They came out a dark, crispy brown in approximately the same thickness and circumference of a quarter. The oven, obviously, lacked some important mechanism to make my biscuits rise and expand.

Mama had grown used to my random demands for over-the-phone cooking classes. She did not laugh, but seemed to be suppressing either mirth at my antics or eagerness to finally be needed by a contentious child.

“Well, Marie Taylor likes to use lard in her biscuits then she pats them out with her hands. Don’t you remember how you’d always see the prints of her fingers on top of her biscuits?”
I considered Marie Taylor’s biscuits and only recalled inhaling them, not considering the little pieces of Marie Taylor’s personality and finger prints imbedded on her biscuits.

“No,” I decided. “And where do you find lard?”

“You can get it over by the Crisco, it’s in a white bucket with a green top. But I just use the recipe on the back of the White Lilly flour bag and pat them out. Your brother likes to make cathead biscuits.”

Jesus. My brother could make biscuits and I made miniature hockey pucks. Perhaps if I’d had more patience as a child or if my mother had found patience with me, I would have known how to cook before I moved out. We’d come to an unspoken agreement years before in order to preserve the peace between a woman and her teenaged daughter. Our shared personality traits divided by a generation clashed more often as not in my search to find autonomy. She provided dinner and I washed dishes. It was a minimal conflict approach.

After moving out, I began to realize I’d let something important bypass me. Not only was I incapable of cooking, I had little to pass on to my children in the way of preserving family bonds. In eschewing the skills and small traditions my mother had to offer, I’d taken something very important away from my brood.

“Be sure to sift the flour first,” she reminded me.

* * *

Cast iron pans share a curious connection with food not found with other types of cookware. Curing a pan changes the porous nature of cast iron. The grease seeps into the natural voids and seals them, creating a smooth, nonstick piece of cookware. Each time the pan is used, the pan absorbs a little more from the food and a tiny memory of the meal is sealed into the cells of the pan.

Doctors have recommended cooking in cast iron pans to patients with a history of anemia, an iron deficiency. The food absorbs particles of iron from the pan increasing the iron levels of the meal. The pan takes natural fats, giving back valued nutrients. (Still not happy with this sentence.)

It is a symbiotic relationship.

Generations (part 3)

2007-11-19T13:00:00.000-04:00

Nanny leaves her company to pack an overnight bag in the bedroom painted light pumpkin chiffon. She is a firm believer in the value of color therapy and has told me of the many crying and inconsolable babies she brought into the chiffon bedroom to soothe them with those peaceful hues. My own children have slept well there.

Still desirous to be of assistance in their time of need, I gather all the dinner dishes and stack them next to the sink. While I’ve never been touted as a master chef, I am an excellent dishwasher and am determined to provide my services. Washing first the glasses, the cups, bowls, and utensils I finally come to the pans.

While I’ve managed a basic competency in my own kitchen skills, I’ve still not treated my cast iron pans well. The pan my mother gave me so many years ago has lost the cure through my carelessness. The inside is pitted and dull matte black.

I consider the food still left in Nanny’s pans and waver. I do not like washing pans and almost leave them. But a sudden desire to see the inside clean and free of leftovers – to see the finish on the bottom - clutches me.

Hefting the pan of left over sweet potatoes, I am awed by its weight. I’ve relegated myself to simple aluminum pans since the ruin of my cast iron. Aluminum is not as solid and enduring as cast iron. No one bequeaths aluminum pans.

Nanny has been in and out of the kitchen since I’ve been washing dishes picking up one thing and packing away another. When she comes back, I am scrubbing a sticky spot on the sweet potato pan with a metal spatula. She calmly informs me there was a scrub pad in the sink I could use to clean the debris away.

“Oh,” I reply in ignorance, “I can’t reach it because it’s under all the clean dishes in the other sink. I was just going to get this little bit of brown sugar off.”

“That’s okay. I can get those,” she insists. I am beginning to realize I may have done something wrong. She does not panic, but is possibly a little anxious and I am mulling over the possibility of a faux pas in my dishwashing capabilities.

“Oh, I’ve got it now,” and I rub the rag over the pan and rinse it off.

“Just use the scrub pan next time, if you don’t mind. The spatula might scratch the finish.” The light bulb flashes over my head and I realize I’ve attacked a well loved pan like a barbarian.
We talk several minutes more and I learn to never apply soap directly to the pan since it will take the finish off and the curing process would have to be done over. Nanny is particular in the care of her pans and through a simple mistake in her kitchen, I am learning I’ve committed egregious sins against my own cookware.

* * *

I called Mama. “What are you bringing to the family reunion?” I have not attended a family reunion in years, but lately I’ve been feeding an urge to explore the past and my people.
She considers her list a moment and recites a litany of typical reunion fare: vegetarian hash, butter beans, cornbread, and baked ham.

“You aren’t bringing apple dumplings?” I was disappointed. My mother always makes apple dumplings for any special dinner.

“No. I just didn’t feel like it this year.”

I am excited by the prospect of finally settling on what dishes to bring. “Good. I’m bringing the apple dumplings. Maybe I’ll bring some purple hull peas, macaroni and cheese, buttermilk pie and biscuits.” My biscuits have come a long way.

“Don’t forget to add an onion to the peas,” she reminds me. She had suggested she would simply cook enough for both her own household and mine since I was “still her child.” People are still leery of my food, but I was determined to prove I’d learned something productive in 31 years. That I had listened.

A week later, I carefully cooked each dish one at a time in an effort to allay any mishaps. I am incapable of cooking multi-course meals without disastrous affects. By 2 o’clock in the morning, I’d successfully cooked the dumplings and purple hull peas with the onions. The macaroni and cheese, a recipe highly recommended by an online friend, turned into a five pound hunk of crispy mess when I accidentally set the disposable pan on a hot eye. An attempt to repair the damage by adding an extra pound of cheese was only nominally successful. The apple dumplings from my mother’s recipe and buttermilk pies were exquisite but I’d lost patience after seven hours of cooking one dish at a time and went to bed without making any biscuits.
The next morning, I packed my children into the back seat with pans and foil-wrapped pies packed into boxes insulated with towels and old coats. In a small frenzy, I begged my thirteen-year-old daughter to hold the peas and the dumplings tightly. We lost the peas three miles from the house and I had to stop to scrape them from the floor. I did not berate her. It was my fault for using a flimsy pan. It was a small blow to my tightly-strung pride. No one would taste the delicacy of my purple hull peas. And I’d remembered to add an onion, too.
Later, I stood over the table wondering where all my apple dumplings had gone when an aunt I do not remember walked up to me.

“Honey, do you know who made these apple dumplings?”

I puffed up a bit. “Oh, I did.”

“Well, let me tell you,” she said, “I was talking to James earlier and I told him whoever made these things ought to be either shot are given their own restaurant because they must be a genius in the kitchen. These are the best things I’ve ever tasted. What’s the recipe?”
I was disturbed that someone wanted to shoot me over the apple dumplings. Regrets over claiming the dish began to rise when it seemed my cooking could incense violence. Finally I began to understand shooting the cook for their excellence in the kitchen to be a compliment.
“Well, you just cut the apples into 8 pieces and roll them in cinnamon and sugar and then rap them in crescent rolls and there’s this thing with orange juice and sugar and butter. . . ” I wanted to hold onto the moment, but I couldn’t remember the recipe and I felt every bit the sham for attempting to relay my mother’s recipe as something I did everyday. “I tell you what. My mama makes them all the time and she’ll probably remember it better than me.”

In a short time, my mother found herself surrounded by a covey of little gray-haired ladies eager to replicate apple dumplings for their next get-together. It was my small homage to her for waiting through the years I’d ignored everything she could have shown me until I was ready to listen. I’d cooked them, but she taught me how and I wanted the aunts to know.

* * *

All the families I’ve ever known do not question the value of cast iron. It is an unending belief passed down through some seven centuries, carried across the Atlantic Ocean and Eastern mountains by settlers who finally settled in the rolling Georgia midlands. The proclamation of cast iron goes back even as far as the fourteenth century when King Edward III, sovereign ruler of England, proclaimed iron pots and pans to be a part of the crown jewels.

Edward may have realized the valuable properties of cast iron, but it was the people who understood the history carried in the molecular structure of a pan handed down from mother to daughter. A cast iron pan carries a tiny memory of each meal cooked in it. The cornbread a daughter cooks in a pan that her mother passed down to her carries the faintest traces of her own mother’s cornbread. History and lessons and memories flavor each meal.

I’ve accumulated three cast iron pans over time – one for each child I’ve borne. Soon, I will repair the damage done and infuse them with small memories. Somewhere along the way, maybe I will teach my children the patience and endurance learned from my mother and their great-grandmother. Years after they’ve left me to forge their own way in the world, it would be nice if they gently rubbed their hands across the smooth blackness of a cast iron pan one day and could feel all the family lessons and history soaked up from years of sautéed onions and cornbread.

It doesn't roll until the last stanza, but I'll play with it later

2007-11-10T15:41:00.000-04:00

Magnolias Stink

So you don't like
my robert plant hair
my inconstant habits
my trailer park stance
my mismatched brood

So you think
I'm a little trashy
a tad bit uncouth
I'm completely of no use
and definitely up to no good

And maybe I am
with my two buck smokes.
I stand by your man
in paint stained pants
and hard edged gutter laugh

Because I am
moved with a drive to disrupt
and divide the cultured cult
to steamroll and undo
to make you pay back my dues.

My people grow older

2007-10-25T23:24:00.000-04:00

So My Unicorn Has Cancer - A writing prompt

2007-10-18T11:12:00.000-04:00

This is a writing prompt assigned by my capstone professor: Begin a story with "So my unicorn has cancer." I may stick writing prompts and my response up from time to time. Feel free to try them yourself. These are generally rough drafts I stick up here for amusement. Well. I sort of stick everything up for amusement. There is no rhyme or reason to this blog.

So my unicorn has cancer. Or so he told me today. The week before, he had gangrene in his horn. The week before that was asthma and the week before that he was pretty sure he'd had a stroke. I should have known better than to buy him from Lying Jack.

Lying Jack got his name because he is a liar. Pretty simple, yes? But the problem with Lying Jack is he is a very good liar. Really Good. I guess people call him Lying Jack so we could all remember why not to listen to him, but somehow people still forget. At least I'm not the only pulled in by Lying Jack's fast talk and dead serious eyes.

Toot Knowles bought a bunch of beans off him one time. Lying Jack said they were passed down from his great-great-great grandfather and they were not just any kind of old beans but they historical magical beans; that Toot had probably heard about his great-great-great grandaddy when he was a little boy. People told all kind of stories about him and his magic beans in children's book.

Oh, I know. It sounds ridiculous to hear about it now, but you obviously don't know Lying Jack. He just has this way about him. Some sort of earnestness in his eyes and his voice just seems to soothe doubts into nothing. It's like he truly believes everything he says. Maybe he does. It's hard to tell with Jack.

Anyway, Toot found himself with a handful of historical magical beans and felt pretty confident he'd gotten the better end of the bargain as he watched Lying Jack walk off with his wife's new Kitchenaide Mixer. With the attachments and a meat grinder. It wasn't until late in the bean season that Toot finally decided he'd been had by Lying Jack. All he has was a record setting beanstalk and the new nickname of Toot. You know. Because of all them beans. They did seem to rumble a stomach more than other types of beans. And Toot did get his name and picture in the Market Bulletin. He looked like a man with a sour stomach in that picture. He's been cooking for himself ever since he gave away the kitchen aide mixer.

I wish I could tell you Lying Jack never did take in anyone else, but then I'd be lying. He got nearly everyone in town to fall for some craziness or other. The chef, the baker, the candlestick maker. The mayor, the police chief, the lunchroom lady. All his life, Jack's done what Jack knows how to do and it seems to benefit him fairly well. Finally, I guess my turn came and he reeled me in with his story just like every other fool in town. I don't care to go into the details. It's a frightful embarassment how I ended up with ailing unicorn. My wife calls him a hypo-chondri-ac. She says we need to talk to him some more and show him we care. She watches a lot of that Dr. Phil.

She wanted to try and get us on that show so we could sort our problems with a real doctor of psychiatry for free and maybe get a little vacation as a nice bonus. I can't. How would it look for me to stand in front of the entire world with my head down because I let Lying Jack con me into buying some trumped up creature that don't do nothin but nag and sigh, sigh and nag. I've already got him sleeping in the bedroom because my wife thinks it'll make him have better self esteem or whatever.

I done been poked in the butt by that unicorn horn three different times on my way to the bathroom this week. He don't move, say excuse me, sorry, nothing. I can't. How would it look for me to stand up in front of the entire world with my head bowed because Lying Jack conned the devil out of me, I'm being run out of my own house and then have that Dr. Phil tell me my dog won't hunt. It ain't fittin.

Sure. Everybody around here knows about the unicorn and how I'm being pushed out of my own house. But that's different. Everybody here knows Lying Jack and they don't say much because they have their own affliction to contend with at home caused by him. Nettie finally put that phoenix out in the yard the second time it burned up her carpet. And Carl just does barely seem to tolerate that long haired blonde Jack introduced him to. I told Carl he ought to divorce and be done with the whole thing, but he won't. Says she just squalls every time he mentions maybe she ought to go home to her mama a little while. She goes to wailing and says she can't stand that boy climbing her hair no more. He doesn't know where she came from exactly, but he's just too soft-hearted to send her back to that kind of nonsense.

I understand. I don't know what to do with this unicorn. I got unicorn patties all over the house and a sore butt and my wife things I'm some sort of horrible person for not wanting to get therapy on national TV. I can't. Those people don't know Lying Jack and I just can't abide by being made more of a fool than I already am. Maybe I ought to do something, though.

Rough Draft

2007-10-01T13:55:00.001-04:00

Mama gave me my first cast iron frying pan when I finally set up house on my own at the age of 23. It was small, black, and smooth – just large enough to sauté onions or prepare an omelette. However, I began housekeeping with a family of three already in place and needed more pans. After a days long search that carried me through every local store, I gave up and called my mother in frustration when all I could find were gray and bumpy cast iron pans. They were not the black, smooth ones I’d grown up with in my mother’s house. Even the inept such as myself could see these gray imposters would never be worth using. She laughed at me.

“You have to cure it.”

“Of what?”

My mother had neglected most of my culinary education. Or rather, it seemed a mutually agreed decision to preserve the tentative peace between a woman and her teenaged daughter. Our shared personality traits divided by a generation clashed most often as not in my search to find autonomy. Many women of my grandmother’s era seemed to hold housekeeping close to them they way some may hold hard earned doctorates as sign of their abilities and importance. I cannot say my mother learned any of these skills from her mother and most likely learned to cook on her own or from her stepmother. My uncles will still laugh about the biscuits my mother made when they were growing up and claimed they once knocked down a wall with one. It seems she was sandwiched between a mother who had no skills to pass down and a daughter who did not want them.

Cooking was not a bonding experience in my family. In fact, my mother’s people have never been ones to bond in the traditional sense. Instead, we fight and argue and sometimes seek alpha dominance. Love is not a topic we feel the need to discuss or routinely exhibit. Instead, love seems to be expressed through a certain oddness where arguing is equated with love. Arguing shows concern and an effort to bring a certain loved one to the appropriate decision. Love has not so much been a pussyfooted kindness, but an unspoken demand from each of us. In exchange, we stand beside each other in the lean times, the stronger caring for the weaker ones. We push our own worried and fears aside when one is sick or in trouble. We do no cry then. Then we are poured from a cast of metal spines, clear heads and mildly hot tempers. Love is not expressed through words and hugs, but a level headed determination to find all the answers and provide the best solution possible to a problem. Love is a strong shoulder to lean on and a clear voice ask what needs to be done. At other times, we are all oil and water and cannot be mixed well enough to find peace in each other’s company for too long. In a family stocked with outlaws and inlaws left over from marriages gone bad, love is more of a loose confederacy. Even now, there is an awkwardness between us when my mother or I say “I love you.” It as if we are turtles deprived of our protective shells and we find ourselves unshielded before the world. It is expression enough in her gift of a frying pan and curing instructions. We know.

When I first began dating John, my children’s father, Pa and I had not yet been familiar with each other enough to hurl our now customary insults: “Good lawd, Ugly! I was havin’ a damned good day till you come along and messed it up. I do believe I done gone blind.” Pa is a big man, standing well over six feet with white hair and twinkling blue eyes that express too much mischief for a man his age. Like many men of his generation, he is missing more than one finger – lost in an effort to provide a home and meals for his family. On one of those summer days in the beginning of my relationship with John, Pa sat in the shade of a large tree in the unraked side yard of the house tending to a fire whose purpose I could not determine. I did not know him well in those days and was too shy to interfere in his business. Then he simply called me “Guhl” as he called most of the other women around him instead of my Pa-given nickname: “Ugly.”

I met up with Nanny in the shared yard between one of her daughter’s homes and her own small white house that began life some hundred years ago as a two-room sharecropper’s cabin. The roof is still layered in hand picked cotton under the modern shingles. Her eyes easily tell her lifetime of guiding her loved ones and she explained to me Pa’s decision to cure a frying pan in a handed down method of curing it over an open fire with bacon grease saved in an old coffee tin. He sat over the heat of the open fire gently turning and wiping the pan until the process was completed.

For some five decades, Nanny has stood in front of a stove providing meals for the people who mean the most to her. First, under the tutelage of her mother raised in the mountains of north Georgia and then in her own home while children stood under her feet in a kitchen not large enough turn around in. She raised and fed and tutored grandchildren in that same kitchen and now her great-grandchildren come in search of cornbread, popsicles, hugs and sweet tea. She has never turned away a child in need and shared more than would seem feasible to those who hold on tightly to their private stores and hearts.

King Edward III, sovereign ruler of England for half of the fourteenth century, proclaimed iron pots and pans to be a part of the crown jewels. The belief in the unending value of cast iron cookware has passed down through some seven hundred years, carried by settlers across the Atlantic Ocean and Eastern mountains who finally settled in the rolling Georgia midlands. Nanny, like women in my family (myself excluded), knows the value of a cast iron frying pan. She would hold them only in a slightly lower position directly under her loved ones in her casket of jewels - family being the only thing of greatest importance in life and the true reason for gently caring for her cookware. She does not berate me the day I wash her frying pans and attack one with a metal spatula because I cannot find the scrub pad. She does not even seem overly concerned, but tells me it would be better to use to the scrub pad and to not let the pans soak too long in water or put soap directly on the surface. I finally begin to understand why food still sticks to my own cast iron pans.

Unlike women in my family, Nanny is not opposed to crying openly in the face of uncertainty. It seems my children’s family wears their hearts on their sleeves and it is not in the slightest bit unusual to hear Nanny say, “I love you, son” to an adult grandchild. Expressing such personal emotions in the open was different from anything I’d ever known in my life. While it had never been directly stated by anyone close to me, attitudes told me it was a sign of weakness - emerging from this protective shell we don in our day to day interactions with each other and the world that has run against us since anyone can remember. It has taken many years for me to understand to walk through life without a permanent armor is a courageous act in itself.

I’ve amassed a collection of three cast iron frying pans since I began my time as an adult. In these years I’ve cooked with aluminum, anodized aluminum, nonstick, glass, and stainless steel in a vain hope my dinners would be palatable instead of just a serviceable meal to stave off the pangs of starvation. Slowly, I’m learning it is not necessary the fault of the pots and pans I choose to employ, but my own impatience with the intricacies of domesticated life. One cannot speed estimated cooking time under the premise that turning the burner to high will cut time spent over the stove in half. Years of personal experiments have confirmed this for me. My pans have also paid the price for my gourmet inaccuracies. The cast irons have sat in an ignoble place on the bottom cabinet shelf for quite sometime because I’ve ruined the finish and have only recent brought myself to the truth: their failures are of my own making. Washing Nanny’s pans was an affirmation that my own pans can be useful again with a little care. I plan to cure them again soon. They are growing older and are not going to always believe that Cajun blackened chicken noodle soup is a real meal.

I would like to pass them down to my children – one pan for each child; well seasoned with years of family meals and little lessons taught in between. Maybe somewhere I will be able to teach them it’s okay to cry in front of others and it is okay to stand up and defy the world when the cause demands it. These lessons are easy, it’s knowing when to choose the right course of action that life can work itself into knots. Years after they’ve left me to forge their own way in the world, it would be nice if they gently rubbed their hands across the smooth blackness of a cast iron pan one day and remembered life and family and love can be complicated, but every day is worth the effort knowing someone else will find small joys in their efforts. Hopefully, they will remember their mama loved them enough to cook even though I never seem to master the mysteries of a kitchen.

A truly ridiculous sort of poem created when asked to describe my muse

2007-09-12T15:05:00.000-04:00

My Antagonist Muse

Bleached blond gum cracker
Loud and obnoxious lip smacker
"Kiss my grits"
Good god. She's a transsexual Flo
Talking out of all sides of humankind
Telling me to write about underbellied life

Good Lord? God Almighty? Somebody?
Why send me this one?

She . . . He . . . ?
is all kinds of in my ear
nattering over the gum
about men and women and women and men
about war and peace and children and gin

Shut her up so I can hear what she is saying

just once.

A bit of childhood mystery for you

2007-09-12T14:52:00.001-04:00

(As a side note, a lot of things I post will be rough drafts from class. I welcome constructive criticism and fawn under praise. However, if you don't like my shit, just kiss my cracker ass. Thanks! -KAR)

When my oldest child was a toddler, I found an old Fisher Price record player at a yard sale and something from my own childhood called me to buy it even though the world had long moved onto CDs by then. We listened to a few records I’d bought with the record player but Rain never showed any real interest in it and over time I realized I’d been attempting to pass my Fisher Price memories on to her.

My record player was a small brown deal decked out in the wonderful late 70s colors of brown, orange and more brown. A plastic technological wonder of my very own, my record player was an untouchable to all other children, including my brother who still wet the bed. It was mine and was the one thing I ever bothered to take care of except for the Grimace cookie I once kept in the top dresser drawer as a pet. (The Grimace cookie was specifically chosen for its potential long shelf life after I was horrified to discover Grandaddy longleg spiders did not keep very well in a dresser drawer.) Grimace and I spent a lot of time jamming to our records in my little room of closet proportions fashionably decorated in 1978 trailer wood paneling.

We listened to “This Old Man” and sometimes I shouted out the lyrics so the Doberman out in the yard could hear them:

THIS OLD MAN! HE PLAYED ONE!

HE PLAYED KNICK-KNACK ON MY THUMB!

WITH A KNICK-KNACK PADDYWHACK, GIVE THE DOG A BONE!

THIS OLD MAN CAME ROLLING HOME!

I knew this old man had a lot of problems and obviously drank to excess otherwise he could walk home instead of having to roll. For days, maybe even weeks or months, I’d come home from my kindergarten mornings, grab Grimace out of the dresser drawer and crank up This Old Man while I contemplated his life. I kicked off my shoes and sometimes danced around on the gritty bedroom linoleum my mother seemed to have given up on or possibly forgotten about in the struggle to keep body and soul together. It was a very catchy song.

This Old Man was also a very deep song about alcoholism and stalking. I knew this even then. They weren’t fooling me with that knick knack paddywhack business. The man played it all over the place. He played knick knack on my thumb, my shoes, my spine, and my gate. He gave the dog a bone to shut him up when he went on the knick knacking spree and then he rolled on home drunk as my Uncle Timothy Paul. Only a drunk would have to roll home. Normal people walk or drive. I guess paddywhacking was a very stressful sort of life and This Old Man had to drink himself into a stupor to deal with his own existence.

This Old Man captivated me. He was an alcoholic. Possibly a pervert. Maybe he was a few bricks off of a full load and just more child-like than perverted. The answer stood in the actual meaning of knick knack paddywhack. I was captivated and Fisher Price was the key to discovering the truth of This Old Man.

I lost Grimace because it turns out McDonald’s cookies do not have an exceptionally long shelf life . Life, however, moves on quickly for a five year old and I found a new record: Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child in the City.” It was my most favorite song, even more so than the disturbing This Old Man. The 45 single, with it’s blue paper and butterfly symbol, expressed mysteries of wild and unknown places like cities where hungry children were shaped up like something wild and all the young boys wanted to take her home.

Fisher Price introduced me to what I thought was the idea of real freedom, of discovery by young girls of the world and their place in it. We rocked, pigtails and jelly shoes or not, we could be cool just like those kids at the roller rink. I’ve spent a lot of time as an adult wondering about what kind of people my parents were to let a child listen obsessively to a song about child prostitution. My favorite movies were Lady Sings the Blues and Barbarella so I can assume they were not ones to monitor the media content of their children.

I lost the record player sometimes after my parents divorced. I’m not sure what happened to it. Maybe I unknowingly lost it when they split the meager assets. My father often had a habit of taking bits and pieces of advanced technology and taking them apart to create something else. It is entirely feasible my record player became part of a fisher price/RCA/duct tape concoction used to hold a car engine together or play Atlanta sations on the radio. I was 13 before it was ever properly replaced with a wood paneled dual tape player, turn top, subwoofer system bought from the JC Penny Christmas catalogue. I slept between the speakers most nights.

My children still have the record player I picked up from a yard sale all those years ago. Only my youngest has ever expressed an interest in listening to it. He seems to especially like Puff the Magic Dragon. But we don’t ever listen to This Old Man. The guy’s a pervert.

Look ma! No Rhymes!

2007-08-30T11:23:00.000-04:00

Fairy Tales

When she said the front yard was haunted

we believed her

because the sky was never blue there

and it seemed on the long drive up

you could see the rocking chairs had

barely visible occupants

only seen by the slightest movements.

So we would not go there

and relegated ourselves always

to the back yard to play,

the freshly plowed dirt in the fields,

and the bales of hay in the barn

where we would sneak away Lewis’s

little bottles of whiskey.

We would avoid the tire swing

beckoning us to come and sit

under the arthritic limbs of the solitary

gallows tree in that front yard.

Only the living had abandoned it –

Instead, we made a playhouse

in the abandoned hog pen

and locked Lewis in the chicken coop

with an angry one-legged rooster -

Always laughing loudly at our own antics

To keep the boogeychild away.

2007-06-30T17:50:00.001-04:00

There should have been a picture of my very first campfire here, but my scanner has moved on to the greener pastures of technological death.

A campfire may not seem like much, but there was hella lot of aggravation involved in its creation. In 1998, I was a single mother of a beautiful and terribly precocious four-year-old daughter. (Who is still very beautiful and precocious. But now she is 13 and I'm oft inclined to spit and roast her because precociousness just isn't very amusing on a 13 year old who thinks I am an idiot. However, I digress.) 1998 was the year we went camping with my best friend and her three year old son who was very handsome and also very precocious. If you ever put two terribly precocious small children in a car for a five hour joy ride, then that's a whole lot of precociousness in a very small space and never enough Valium to go around.

At that time, my best friend and I were right tight. Our kids played together, we went out together and over that summer we lived in her Mimi's lake house. We were both decidedly manless and were women set on conquering the world. We didn't need no stinkin men! Men were hell! Men were useless! They didn't help with kids! They couldn't keep jobs! Or they were dead! Let's go camping!

At the time, camping seemed like the logical thing to do when you were setting out to prove women could do everything men could do a million times better. We were mostly right in the assumption. Except for the campfire.

We set up camp in a light rain the first afternoon we arrived. Or maybe I set up camp because I was much more anti-man and infinitely determined to prove I was just as handy as any testicled-being. I taught my friend how to lay old blankets on the ground to absorb some of the moisture before setting up the 6000-pound 8-man tent I'd borrowed from my parents. Then we created a windbreaker and a porch-of-sorts from the plastic canvases we'd purchased from the evile, world-dominating Walmart.

After putting our things away in the tent, there was really nothing left to do that evening. Except build a campfire. No camp is complete without a fire and I wasn't about to let my camp be outcamped by those mancampers around us. Hell no. Of course, we didn't bring firewood with us on a five hour trip to go sleep in a dirty tent in the rain, but that was okay because the camp store gladly offered firewood for a relatively low price. I purchased my wood and set about creating my little campfire. I cleaned all the debris from the previous fires created by mancampers, arranged my little fire rocks in a nice circle and set up my firewood in a nice stack that I deemed to be worthy of a woman campfire.

Now in truth, I'd never really played with fire of any kind before other than the bic lighter necessary in lighting my cigarettes. My house burned down when I was 17 and I'd always been a little cautious in dealing with fire. But I wasn't about to let a little psychological disturbance stand between me and the perfect campfire. I gathered up a few pieces of pine straw that had managed to stay dry through the summer shower and twisted them up into what I considered a nice, tight little bundle. (I'd learned this bit of a trick from my Little House on the Prairie books when I was seven and had filed it away for future reference.) I lit up my little straw bundle and placed it under my stacked firewood and waited with all the confidence of a 22-year-old woman who knew everything.

When that bundle didn't work out, I lit three more bundles and strategically placed them under and in my firewood and blew gently. When I'd worked my way up to 8 bundles of pine straw, a few pieces of scrap paper and an empty toilet paper roll, my friend suggested I should ask the guys across from us how they started their fire. I gave her a firm, but polite, grunt and a"hell no" and went about my business of Creating Fire. There is something very neanderthal about Creating Fire and I found myself in favor of protecting my fire and my fire-starting secret. Except I had neither a fire nor the secret to creating fire. Yet, nearly every campsite around me had a fire. What in the hell were these idiots doing that could possibly be smarter than my pine straw bundles learned especially from Pa Ingalls? WHAT?

Some 45 minutes later, with our young and terribly precocious children waiting with their bag of marshmallows and straightened coat hangers, I swallowed my very unevolutionary pride and walked to a campsite just across from us.

"Hey, uh, so how did you start your fire?"

And that is when I learned about Magic Fire Sticks.

This guy, with all the calmness of an experienced fire starter, pulls out this . . . thing and told me he used it to Create Fire. In all my years of camping as a child, no one had ever shown me this Magic Fire Stick. I knew from its magnetic pull and the special glow of the yellow and red greasy paper wrapping the Magic Fire Stick that it had to be very special.

This Master Fire Starter explained to me that the Magic Fire Stick was a quick way to create the perfect campfire and walked with me back to my own cold, dark and miserable camp to show me how it worked. He showed me how to stick the Great and Mighty Magic Fire Stick under my little logs and light it. I Had Fire. Then he left me with my very own Magic Fire Stick for later use.

My friend clapped in giddy delight over the Magic Fire Stick as I calmly filed it away for future reference. Never again would I be fireless. This man, this fellow compatriot of humanity, had shown me the light. While I was still pretty anti-man for some months after that, it gave insight into my own stubborn attitude and I spent some time marveling over how I have spent my entire life determined to never ask for help, spending hours, day, weeks, or even months proverbially creating useless straw bundles to prove myself right when all I really had to do was admit I was wrong and let some guy give me a Magic Fire Stick.

That sounds a bit dirty rather than thought provoking.

To Blog or not to Blog?

2007-06-02T12:26:00.000-04:00

To blog. Yet, what bloggest I?

A year and a half ago, I began a blog in an effort to amuse myself. Two entries into it, I lost interest and it molders in the world of livejournals gone bad. It was funny. I was amused. And then I grew bored and frustrated.

The eternal question of my audience rendered me incapable of deciding anything for myself. Would my audience be amused by my antics? Did they want to read about a grown woman occasionally hiding in the closet and screaming in the pillow when her children were clearly developing a mutiny that would certainly overshadow any smalltime schemes of Fletcher Christian?

Should I espouse my political agenda? What is my political agenda? Oh. George W. Bush sucks donkey balls. I think many other people have cornered that market and made much better use of the material than I ever could. I’m not politically inclined. I’m not socially inclined, either. Quite frankly, I’m pretty happy sorting out all the little introspective voices in my head without some war-happy jack ass invading my personal time.

Should I take a religious approach? And who would be thoroughly interested in redneck cracker transcendentalism? I once told a friend that Ireland is truly God’s country. (According to the pictures I’ve seen because I don’t get out much.) “Which God?” she asked. Hell. I don’t know. Pick one. I don’t care. God is another name for yourself. Or the part of yourself you aren’t prepared to accept responsibility for because it’s too large for you. God is a woman. God is a cat. God is a transsexual Elvis impersonator. Believe what you want. I don’t care. You’re right. I’m right. We’re all right until you tell me I’m wrong. And then you can fuck the fuckity fuck off.

And this brings yet another question. Should I submit to my fondness for base language? Certainly it lowers the overall intelligence of whatever argument I am submitting to the public at large for consumption. And yet, it’s coarse and I am an earthy, barefoot, three-second-floor-rule sort of chick so perhaps it will be fine.

Welcome to my neurotic rants and random things that seem to happen only to me. Strap in, because I have no agenda and no idea where in the hell we’re going.