checkstand July 31, 2008

there are hours of my workday when i am On Reg, meaning i work a checkstand. i like having a few hours to stand there but remaining active. at times it feels robotic and that is a welcome break from wandering and stocking. if i get dizzy i can hang onto the lip of the counter to steady myself.

i talk with people in short bursts. you learn something about a person by their shopping. a collection of items take on a feeling of essentials. a random trio of items for an animal, houseware or dressing are more the true esentials and i admire sticking to a list.  other essentials are more personal; candy, flowers and wine… you know. sweetness. icecream, chips and soda water are about comfort. i can see how healthy a person intends to be, how wealthy they feel, if they plan on making dinner, maybe lasagna, from scratch…

 carts billowing with products are intimidating and you know you’ll be chatting with them for a while as you scan then bag it all up. one such woman was, as i could tell by appearances and foods, busy, possibly single and wealthy enough. her appearance told me she was a christian (gold cross pendant)  and image conscious (coiffed and smelling of perfumes). i scan a bevy of frozen delights and ask how her day was going. it’s afterr five pm so it is safe to assume they are changing from business to casual with the shopping as the in between. 

she gave the standard and thoughtless, “fine”.  sometimes i let that go and talk about myself seeing as they are not to be bothered. but not her, i asked “really? just fine? let me ask again, what did you do today?”

 she paused to think and lit up. “i went to a foster home for seniors and did a dear friends nails, i’m a manicurist and donate my time once a month…”  she went on to share in glee what a great thing this was, to be doing for others, making them feel pampered and beautiful, putting them back together. she also went on about what this old woman had given her in spirit and story. she was amazing it sounds like and i understood. i know old ladies like this. as she spoke i got goosebumps for the joy she transmitted with the whole thing.  she chatted the whole grocery time and as she left she said thank you to me for helping her remember what a great day this has been. it has been more than fine.

drinks with evel knievel July 17, 2008

^{several years ago i was sitting in an old haunt in Spokane, Washington. I’d had one of those days off that I started drinking at happy hour and stayed in to see people. At about 9pm ish a red white and blue RV pulled up swallowing the street view i had been enjoying a smidge. It eclipsed everything, almost took all the light out of bar. The door opened and out stumbled a man i knew as the usual end of the bar guy, an old drunkard i sometimes talked to. “who’s place is that?” i asked. “that is evel knievel”. I want to go in there. “I;m sure he’ll let you in.“ my friend walked me in and there was this EK, nothing as i wanted to see, no super suit, barely upright in a styling roving planet, not evel knievel I knew. He was doitn hsoe little rascal commercials now. Inside was amazing, there were mirrors everywhere and a large etchign of him on a motorcycle. EK sat in a stately lazyboy and said hello. I said hello back. In real life I left shortly after that, drunk off this random event in a glorious Man Town on wheels, but I’d like to pretend he told the driver to move, and we drank together driving around the blocks of downtown Spokane.}

^{i was speechless.}

I have wanted a home like that ever since.

 

Mortified July 17, 2008

    The rule was;It must fit in the Trunk.

My offering to Mortified lacks the journals. I lost them through time. To fire, trash heaps, left behind and missed greatly. I barely have photos of past times. But I’ve always had this blue trunk of …stuff. I started it in high school, during the mid to late eighties. I have moved it across statelines and added many stickers along the way. recently I was reunited with it from storage. There it was. I was glad it was still around. I held back for a whole afternoon to go through it‘s content. it seems more slight than I remembered, or wanted to, even if it is jam packed.

Things I would show and tell-

The trunk itself.

One of my art class sketches. They are horribly eighties. Totally half assed. Drug induced. Tennagery.

A school dance picture. Maybe group or maybe the most hideous one of all time, I could really get Mortified.

Matchbook that says “Enjoy Life“ on one side and “eat out more often” on the other. Yeah, nasty.

the bud light keg cap or a paper beer label that’s been peeled clean and completely off it’s bottle ( which meant….).

Zine/ flyers by friends of mine

Cassette cover art and empty cases. music was a pretty big deal to me. sigh, The walkman. Personal savior.

The typewritten locker list from Pasco high with all the names of bands I thought were good, cool, or I should, like no matter if I never heard them. I highlighted some that I think were what I acquired, and more lines and stars without a key. The bands are completely new waver punk circa 1985.

The plastic bag filled with san Francisco stuff, not teenagery, from aardvarks on haight but contains funny stuff, I was still a kid in many ways.

A piece of a senior year boyfriend’s flannel.

A few yearbooks and journals are there, but those are only funny to me. Nothing really juicy. Except juicy bits from half of 1986 into 1987.

But most intriguing is the large mail envelopes marked with names, not years. The names of past girlfriends – and boyfriends- eras. it’s all I have kept of what’s left of them. I plan on keeping it as long as I can. Inside each pouch are trinkets of all kinds, then letters or notes. There was a flushing gushing joy when I received something in the mail. Sigh, again. Nostalgia.

I always loved to write, keep in touch, even if we were in the same room. I also have been a packrat, knowing I’d want to see these things again, even if it made no sense to keep them until I was in my late thirties.

There are many notes once passed around at school.

The long letters from a Hawaiian mormon plantation.

Girlfriends

Jael

Doodles.

Mine would have to be more show and tell rather than my journals. Those are gone daddy gone.

 

 

what i meant July 4, 2008

open up or so help me i’ll kick this fucking door down!

i prefer to think of it as ”better than it sounds”

ology July 4, 2008

what’s your blogology?

sermonious celebrity I can read.

A file of my creative attempts.

 

 

match.com July 4, 2008

She has a stash in an old saltines tin for nights she can’t find her lighter. The tin was once filled up tight with books of old matches but she forgets where she leaves things all the time and returns to the Plan B a few times a month. It was inherited, left behind in the kitchen cabinet of an old geezer’s rental in which she lived for a few years of clearing time. The book she strikes from tonite is for Molly screw anchors. The book of red heads used to have printed text inside, often forms in miniature to order what they were selling. They don’t do that any longer.

 

 

house quilting July 4, 2008

^{Brown paper bags hand painted to say, WELCOME HOME, lay on every surface of the room waiting to be hung. He had been gone for ten days and there was an ache in every empty room. It was never this hard to be apart before, but something changed. she wanted him here all the time.}

^{Thinking of him as she employed scissors to an old magazine she could pinpoint the time. Something happened at the wig store. They walked in because it had air conditioning and well, wigs. For an hour each wig upon them had a new name and the gait of each person they met underneath them. they knew each other. they were strangers happening to bump into each other in some way. Once they wore a combination of distance and then she knew. I want to know him. He knows me.}

She played music on shuffle and each song seemed to inspire her to feel deeper than the last. He was arriving in the afternoon of the next day and on this eve she had a cup of coffee nipped with bourbon to her right. On the floor to the left was the half emptied tin of pens, pencils and paints. The colors elected lie around her in crescent. The glue with glitter dramaticizes the words, LIKE NEON, she imagined. There was a trip to the kitchen when it was decided to put macaroni on one, like the first birthday card she had given him. She remembered a box of broken glass she collected and applied a mosiac HOME to one. This was her crafting the return of her lover and more than that welcoming her love home.

 

fireworks July 4, 2008

my stomach and back press sweat into my shirt. hot air blows my hair like flames. i’m going to the rez, to the red, black and purple shack, on the side of Archery Road.

The car rattles in speed toward the 18^th mile. In the shack is the big fun size kit I will ask of the mysterious boy inside. It will ride in the front seat beside me as I barrel back. impatiently i’ll strike one and toss it out the car window ( a brief fire catches the side of the flatland highway).

Back at the dented stead i start immediately in on the dirt lot that was springtime grass. The sun is not yet amber low. dust flies from beneath take offs and crack the space around me open. dusk’s musky tone highlights the smoke ghosts of the dead and gone good times. Sulfur- dirt fills my nose. i light those bangups one…. by….. one, allll night long. one after another. maybe even two at a time. Wait for a fifteen before the next. It grows dark so the brilliance hidden by light greater than is indescribable.

in the distance the big show downtown has begun and I save the few for myself after everyone else has spent their loads. The sky blossoms look like time warping stars reaching for us. I sit back and watch, content, I toast the sky again for a good day.

firewater July 2, 2008

She sang,”I might as well be dead, but I could kill you instead.”

murderer, coward and theif. undead. blight.

That is why they water.

You have died already, years ago, maybe twice.

yes, we share the same blood.

you had to posion my roots too.

The ones you lied about, you said you lied.

I say I have allergies before anyone asks.

i revived you innocently, you came to life before me.

I am intolerant to heartbreak, liars and losing dreams.

once happily dead then painfully alive. you die again, but..

The dreams you gave me, then took away.

You lie about lying you are that much of a liar.

you asked to come inside.

I have cried four rivers in the last ten hours and that is why my eyes are red and puffy.

I lose sleep, too. rarely sneezing.

you are rash, flaky and crusted.