Blogging with the Aliens

I walked Connor to daycare this morning. We call it “school,” and it feels a little better, even if all he’s learning is how to hang out with other kids and not bite them. On the way to “school” and on the way back with the empty stroller, which always feels weird, but is a necessity of walking a child to daycare with a stroller, I met five people whom I know either well or as acquaintances. Five. The first two commented on how big Connor is and how much he’s changing. Someone else was walking their dog and waved. Another was on her way to work and honked. Yet another said he hadn’t seen me in a while and asked how I’ve been. Man, I love this town.

But those who know me know that I’ve slowed down a little these days. A friend loaned me season three of X-files and I’m just as likely to be watching “Paper Clip” or “Nisei” or dipping into the Aliens Quadrology that I bought for the Monsters Ink course. When you get really successful, you know, because you can write your favorite toys off your taxes. So it’s a lot less porch, a lot less cocktail hour, a lot less late nights and beverages and more. I’m hoping this is more than the encroachment of age and responsibility, but it might just be a vestige of 40 creeping up a month or two early. Mostly, I think, it’s just fatigue. I’m too tired, too sad and too tired of being tired and sad. Think I’ll go watch something with Aliens eating people.

It used to be that when I was having a really bad week, I’d dig up my copy of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and reread it. It seems a funny choice except that no matter how hard your life is and how many people seem to be in threat if imminent or future demise by long, slow, bone-and-body eating diseases, at least the vampires aren’t eating your town. There is still a place in the imagination where it could be so much worse. To me, that’s comforting. Sick, perhaps, but comforting. The only caveat is the new ghost stories. I saw one (Silent Hill – thanks, Stephen!) that really creeped me out; kinda like The Ring meets Jacobs Ladder meets Hellraiser. And anything that the Japanese have dreamed up lately can full on give a ghost-and-dead-thing connoisseur nightmares. One most go gently into this good night or get the socks scared off ya. It’s enough to make you want to stick with the classics: Aliens, The Thing, Ghost Story.

Speaking of ghosts, I got to wander out and about this last weekend during our local Bragg Jamm music festival. Dan’s band couldn’t play because the lead singer had a wedding, but he sat in with a good new band and did a great job while folks danced and sweated. It felt like a kind of homecoming, an old home weekend. Everyone was out, dressed up, playing music, dancing, sweating in the Georgia summer heat that even new air conditioners couldn’t properly combat. But either side of Saturday night, I just couldn’t get my dancing feet up to their usual revelry. I’m sure it’s because some very good friends are about to lose their first child to bone cancer, and I just wanted to hold onto mine for a little while. It could also be that the thought of their losing their little girl and having to face the long, slow suck that this is going to be just made me physically ill. Either way, I was happy to take it slow this weekend, and then to take it even slower this week. My stomach is in accord, aching when I don’t eat and then punishing me heartily when I do something stupid, like take asprin on an empty stomach, or eat chili and eggs for breakfast.

So we’re going gently this week, playing with the baby, starting back on the manuscript, planning the Fall literary festival and watching movies about how the things that haunt the night eat the unlucky. Survivor’s guilt much? Sure, all the time. But that’s the full contract price for being lucky, then, ain’t it? Ain’t it. Aint it, just. Think I'll go watch The Mummy again.

Smashed Up Little Slushbox

Okay, so what’s with the lotion booger? You know, that hard half-congealed knot of goop at the end of the pump-nozzel of the lotion that, if left long enough, turns to concrete. What do they put into this stuff that the drying of it leaves a gelatinous booger harder to remove than that crust that forms around Jurassic fossils? Now this is not a problem, really. I don’t have problems these days. People with brain cancer have problems. Those with three kids, a broken arm and no health insurance have problems. Those with no homes around November have problems. I do not have problems, but I do have lotion boogers. In all of the bottles. I went through the house today and got rid of them all. It seemed like part of the Spring cleaning that’s a few months late but applies to closets, parts of the floor the babysitter’s puppy didn’t get to, and an occasional desk drawer that’s gone feral.
I am thinking about such things because I’m making a to-do list of all the crap I want to have finished by the time I head back to campus in mid-August. It’s things like switching the credit card for the gym membership, getting a battery for one of the calculators that gave up the ghost, getting a hotel for a conference I’m going to in October.
At the top of the list are two numbers, one for a mechanic and another for a body shop for my car. It all started so harmlessly. I backed into a lady in her new, red Honda Civic at the grocery store. A series of scratches on the back white bumper seemed hardly worth reporting, so I put an 11th Hour sticker over the biggest one and got on with my life. Years went by and we contemplated selling the car and buying a newer, slightly bigger one. With Boogs in tow and a large carseat to fit into the back, it seemed like the thing to do. I looked at Nissan Altimas and Toyota Camry’s, even the new Hybrid. After test-driving a lovely light-sage 2006 Camry Hybrid, I ran the math, got sticker shock and came home and detailed my little white slushbox for further use. It’s a good car, gets good gas mileage and aside from the fact that it’s white and has a cassette deck and no cd player, is a fine, practical vehicle.
Then in the middle of the night one night, someone bonked that rear fender. It was a little mashed, not badly, and I was going to get a dent doctor to come fix it. After calling him and verifying that there can be no paint damage in order for his fix-it to work, I realized that yes, I had some cracking and some rust and was going to have to get the fender fixed the old-fashioned way – take it to the dealer and have them bolt another one on.
Then my dealer screwed up. While driving to work, I noticed the car pulling hard to the right. I pulled over, adjusted all the inflation on the tires, and was bummed to find that it still pulled to the right. Since we were going to be heading out of town the next day, I figured that I should bring it in to have the dealer look at it. I barely made it before the tread flew off the tires that this particular dealership had been inspecting and rotating since I bought the little car. So, in a fit of umbrage, I fired them as my mechanics and am now using a well-recommended private mechanic. I figured I’d call them and get the number for a reputable body shop.
Then, we scraped up the poor little burro of a car yet again, getting out of a Taco Bell. My inveterate vehicle decided to take on one of those cement posts that stand along the curbs of many fine fast-food dining establishments. This post has obviously been hit often and cantilevers hard to one side, yet now there’s another piece of the car that needs to be bolted back on. Quel Dommage. It’s time, though, to admit defeat, get the insurance company involved and just bolt back together this poor smushed up little slushbox. She’s a good car, even if she’s a little boring, and I owe her that. That and it will give me something to do other than hunt down lotion boogers.

Spectres of Dancing

Fuck, why can’t I do this anymore? I’ve got all the focus of a three-year old with a World Book Encyclopedia Atlas. Sorry, my friends, I’ve become a bad blogger. To those of you who have been waiting to hear my wit and slightly caustic sense of humor, well, it’s missing these days. Or not. Mostly, I’m using those talents, when I have them, in the classroom or on the porch and have not reserved a lot of time out of those spaces to come in and write things down. This is supposed to be a log and instead it seems to be more like a message in a bottle, or a postcard from the middle – “Having a grand time, wish you were here.”

In the background, of course, is the fact that my mother is still seriously ill, but she’s bucked this last challenge (a bowel surgery) with all the grace and strength that she bucked some of the earlier challenges, so it’s still very serious, but she does not die today.

In the foreground is the edgy kind of anxiety you get when you have a lot to do and you’re playing hooky writing blogs. Maybe its because this blog was supposed to be a kind of translation from the world of those who have children to those who don’t about what the experience is, why anyone would do this to themselves and what the draw of the little boo-boo face and those little arms around your neck at bedtime really are. It’s a fool’s errand and I think only one who didn’t yet arrive there would think it were doable without getting squishy, sentimental or just plain dull. Nothing is so dull as those who go on about their kids, except perhaps those who go on about their grandkids. Dull. Like watching the dirt not move or watching kudzu. Always gonna be there, nothing much new there and by the way, when is lunch?

Monster’s Ink, my new course at the college, has been a blast. We’re doing ghosts next, hauntings, traces, poltergeists and things that go bump in the night. I’ve been studying this stuff since I was thirteen and can do this blindfolded. In fact, I owe those guys a final essay assignment that I promised last Thursday. I suppose, though, it’s not for nothing we’re doing ghosts this week. Trying to explain the life of being Connor’s mom to those who haven’t yet had the pleasure and torment of having an infant in the house is like trying to describe the green of Ireland or the round flavors of an Italian Chianti from the café off the Trevi Fountain before you’ve been there. Some things have to be lived. And in the midst of all this living, I’ll try to be better about dropping a postcard now and then to remind myself of how lovely the trip is being.