Walt Whitman and NAMBLA

Here's a good reason to think before you look: you might get fired. Not that it matters--if they dig into my old work computer's memory, what are they going to do--refuse to give me a recommendation? That's pretty much it; it would take too much investment to sue me, especially when others have done worse. Mostly what I did was waste time on the internet. Just today I was reading a Walt Whitman poem when I remembered that I'd looked up the NAMBLA website at work...NAMBLA stands for the National Man-Boy Love Association. It's something I'd heard about from people whose sense of humor knows no boundaries of taste or sensitivity--people like me. I wondered if such an organization could be true or legal. One day at work the thought crossed my mind, and so I googled NAMBLA and spent a good half an hour exploring their site...NAMBLA supports erotic, loving consensual unions between underage boys and grown men. They use Walt Whitman and his teenage companion as an example. This young fellow lived with an aging W.W. for quite some time. They were constant companions, and then several years later had a falling out. I guess if Walt Whitman does it, anyone can! Anyhow, I think some things are not allowed or accepted by society because...well, they just should not be allowed. There should not be a National Man-Girl Love Association, either, but there's no need for it because that sort of thing, while still under the radar, is much less repulsive to our culture...But whoever is sitting at my former desk can easily access the NAMBLA site. Perhaps they might learn something. I did!

Bulky Trash Day

The small town I live in has a bulky trash collection every year. You heap old junk you don’t want on the curb, and the city waste agency picks it up. For those wanting to de-clutter their homes or score free finds, bulky trash day is a dream scenario. People haul out their hefty rubbish a few days early so passersby can salvage the choicest items before it all gets carted away.
But most of the scavengers come out at dusk the night before pickup and root around through rotting boards and rusting patio furniture like Earthly versions of the Jawas from Star Wars. My husband and I are scavengers, too. It’s so voyeuristic to sift through the grubby castoff innards of outwardly tidy dwellings. Sometimes you can piece together past lives through the mildewed shelves, brittle plastic baby toys, stained mattresses, and cobwebbed odds and ends that seemingly proliferate from nowhere. The change of venue transforms objects and cruelly exposes them: a sofa in a house is lived-in furniture, but a sofa on the sidewalk is an eyesore.
This year I put out my worn-down 1965 Singer sewing machine and an expensive but mechanically flawed electric mixer, and I was happy to see them both disappear from the curb within the hour; I had loved those appliances in their functionality, and was hoping someone else could love them out of their brokenness. It’s comforting to think that your junk can gain a second or third life. People don’t like to throw things away—it seems so wasteful. Bulky trash day provides the illusion that yes, someone will see the potential in your hulking, outdated seventeen-inch computer monitor or your water-stained gypsum boards.
Bulky trash day is a fun spectator sport, but it dredges up all kinds of melancholy truths about how our society alternately covets and discards…stuff. Even the most pathetic examples of junk begin as shiny new merchandise. Walk along the streets in my neighborhood on the eve of bulky trash collection and you’ll see the detritus of ravenous consumerism before it recycles lower on the food chain or dies a sputtering, tawdry death at the dump. Today’s treasure is tomorrow’s bulky trash, and hopefully…another man’s treasure.

Lean, Mean Bridal Machine

I spent hours yesterday trying to make our wedding invitations. The invitiation part is pretty easy--we bought high-quality blank notecards and matching envelopes in this attractive sage color, and to these I glued three or four square-inch cutouts of nature images: lava spewing into blackness, a field of wheat browning in the sun, the sheer granite pitch of a mountain, bright orange tropical fish ain an azure sea. Then I accented this with a few choice placements of Joe's beloved Chartpack tape...it's laborious, but worth it in that normal storebought wedding invitations are both expensive and a poor reflection of me and Joe's aesthetic. The little booklet inside is the problem part. These days you can't send out invitations without a little printout of a Yahoo! Map and a list of places to stay and things to do. Our wedding site is particularly difficult to locate, and we do have a fair amount of guests coming from out of town. So my verbose writetly instincts launched into gear, and I expertly pounded out a veritable "Best of the East Bay" for friends and family...I tried to format it into columns in Word, and then tried to import the file of of map as an image. This is what took forever. I'm no computer-savvy graphic designer; I can't even fix the margins on Word halfway right! So I broke down and decided to do what I know how to do, and that's 'zine-style cutting and pasting. All our our invitees are basically getting Joe and Sara's wedding 'zine. So listen up, gals and parents: 'zine-making in youth pays off in adulthood! All of those late-night Kinko's Xeroxes and tasteless black and white political collages WILL lead to bigger, brighter, more matrimonial things. This is like my life's star performance 'zine...So this is all good fun, but it's labor-insensive fun. I keep on thinking "geez, it's good that I got fired--I'd never have time for this otherwise." What I should be doing now is writing and looking for a job, but instead, until August 13 (well, more like August 21, which is when we'll get back from the honeymoon), I'll be a lean, mean bridal machine. All of which makes me realize that the drawback to a DIY wedding is that...you have to do everything yourself.

The Grocery Zone

My little laptop is acting fussy this morning. If this computer gets ill, I'm screwed; it's my one connection to the rest of the world. As a writer, the computer is my vehicle. I'm lost in the 19th century without it! My typewriter (IBM Selectric) is broken, so until I get it fixed, pen and paper are my last line of defense against insolence...I went grocery shopping yesterday. We needed sundries such as plastic bags, baking powder, and dryer sheets that are best purchased at a large chain store. Typically we try to avoid these places. Months ago I chopped up or lost my Safeway and Albertson's cards on the grounds that I'd rather spend more money than have to stuff my wallet full of "club cards." I don't want to belong to ther club. It's just a sneaky way of getting our personal information so they can sell it to solicitors and make money. So, as a matter of princilple, I spend the extra money and ignore the club card savings...Yesterday I chose to go to Safeway, because our local branch is smaller than the behemouth Albertson's, and therefore easier to shop in. The parking lot was full, but the store wasn't as jamming as I'd expected. I grabbed a cart--the only cart in the cart rack--and got to it...This annoying lovey couple was there. They were too lovey to be married. The girl of the couple had a cute little daughter with her, probably about five years old, that she gleefully ignored in favor of her too=loud boyfriend. The whole trio, with the exception of the little girl, were loud and cutesy and very annoying. I sped up my shopping toget away from the produce aisle and therefore them...Everyone else in the store had an uncanny skill of stepping directly in my way. At the grocery store, I try to park my cart in an out-of-the-way place and run to and fro until I move to another station. Most people just slowly push their carts in the middle of the aisle and then stop...in the middle of the aisle. I think my way is the more courteous of the two. But the same seven people--including the annoying couple--kept on getting in my way all throughout the store! Was this a conspiracy! To compound this, the task of selecting non-club card items was time consuming. I hope not to go to Safeway again. At I can get to Albertson's on foot easily...Then I went to Trader Joe's, which is always hopping. It's like a war zone in there, but I like how it's more hectic and therefore the confusion in shopper traffic is more justifed. I always try to shop with a basket so I take up less space and am therefore more moblie. Trader Joe's shopping carts are of moderate size, but have you noticed that larger chain stores disposed of traditional metal shopping carts in favor of monsterous plastic ones? Who, outside of families of seventeen, needs so much cart space? I think iot's a dirty grocery store industry trick to get us to buy more. Losers. I'll stick to the basket so I can work on my trim figure, thanks.

Pre-lyweds

Now that I'm a bum, I can easily focus all of my energy on planning our wedding. I bet you a zillion dollars that there are a zillion blogs out there devoted to nothing but wedding plans by brides-to-be who are devoting 10 hours a day on meeting with caterers, poring over bridal magazines, doing color studies...but those blogs are probably written by people who are having more trad weddings. Our is shaping up to be pretty trad as well, but it's going to be compact and simple. Last night we shopped at Costco with good friends who have a Costco membership. We bought fancy clear plastic cutlery, fancy white paper napkins, and fancy Chinet brand paper plates. You can tell we're going all-out because we bought sturdy, high-grade Chinet brand plates and not floppy regular Dixie plates. See, getting ready to have a wedding is actually very boring to talk about. Today we're going to look at rings. Thank god people have given us a little cash and stuff for early wedding plans. Our clergyman is a friend who got an instant oridination off of this website. It was free and everything. It's cheaper to get married as a heathen.

Fired Up

Yesterday I got fired. Technically they "terminated the position," which is more like a layoff, because I do get to file for unemployment. But it's so much more dramatic to say that I got fired, and the drama of this whole situation has been kind of fun.
For the past year and three-quarters, I've worked at a chocolate factory; the first year I was a chocolate factory tour guide, which was challenging and fun and sometimes not fun. Oftentimes we were understaffed and undermanaged, so there was frequent chaos and frustration, but I worked hard and learned a lot about chocolate.
After about a year in the store, the chaos and frustration got to me. I was very close to putting in my notice when the vain but charismatic (how many charismatic people aren't vain?) owner/founder of the company offered me a position "upstairs in the marketing department." In the heirarchy of the company, downstairs people were the engine--everything they did was very cut-and-dried and devoid of glamour: shipping and receiving, accounting, customer service. Upstairs was a privilaged land for the few, a hazy place which served as the company's creative heart. It was a firmament of ideas. No more nagging customers, no more phones ringing incessantly, no more slender paychecks. So I accepted. The glitch was that I had no marketing experience, which I made clear. "I'm a writer," I said. "Great!" our charismatic-vain leader assured me. "That's what we want you for, your writing skills." And now I'm here, at home and jobless. I tried to do a good job, but my advances in productivity and efficency were spurned. No one gave me work, and no one responed to the work that I did. Every day I'd go to work and stare at my computer and think, christ! How am I going to get through this day. Sometimes I'd create tasks for myself, like cleaning the filthy staff kitchen or hanging pictures in the conference room; usually, though, I messed around on the internet. My job was to make it look like I had a job, which was very draining. All around I'd see my co-workers upstairs with me frantically managing their workloads, and I'd feel guilty and lazy. Sometimes I offered to help, but all I could do was write and clean kitchens and test recipes. Writing for work or for myself became very difficult. I never felt inspired or motivated or focused; the only time I wrote was at work, usually revisions of verbose essays on cacao that one of the founder of the company had written years ago. I should have quit. I knew that I needed to, but not having to worry about money was so seductive. I opted into the 401 K and was squirreling funds away in a savings account. I figured I could stick it out at least until after Joe and I got married and all of the wedding chaos was over. But yesterday the company took care of that for me. I was always prowling around with a shadow of suspicion that they'd realize their mistake and call me on it, but generally I was such a non-entity that I assumed it never occured to anyone to do anything about it--except our new marketing director. She came in February, and I think right off she had me down for house cleaning. They fired me with another girl, the graphic designer. The marketing director said that she needed someone with analytical skills, not writing skills, and that she needed a graphic designer with more leadership skills. Both of those things are true. But what gets to me is that all of the work--and pretend work--that I've done in the past six months is totally worthless to them. The marketing director was basically giving me busy work until she could pink-slip us. It makes sense now, how she was friendly on a personal level but treated me as a nuisance whenever I asked her for feedback or direction--she had to come up with a lie or some vague excuse why I should hold off on this or that project. What a colossal waste of everyone's time. This whole little six-month experiment is a failure--I however, was paid for this failure, while they lost money. So I think I've come out on top. I actually feel somewhat guilty about not being proactive and assertive enough to leave on my own accord--I knew the jig was up. Really, I'm too good of a writer to work there; I'm a creative writer, not a copywriter. Writing copy is hard. I'll leave that to the pros, to the marketing director and the replacement she already hired for me. Nice sneaky trick. Part of me is bitter, which I think is normal and very human and a feeling that I'm entitled to indulge in. Like I want to say that the marketing director is a squat frizzy-haired bitch, but I'm actually very happy to be let go--I should be thankful to her, not hateful. I'd fire me, too. The killer is that I'd spent the whole prevous afternoon making marshmallow and graham crackers so we could develop a recipe for our company e-newsletter. I got up and cut the marshmallows into squares and packed them up and carried them to my car so I could drive to work and start my day of nothing. On the drive over, I passed a guy in his early 20s standing in front of a movie theater in flip-flops and jeans holding a tall paper coffee cup. He had shaggy collegiate hair and this wonderfull look of purposelessness--it was 9:30am and there he was, standing in front of the movie theater, sipping coffee and deciding what to do with the day. I had a sudden longing for summer, for freedom. "I want to be that guy," I thought. Well, today I'm drinking coffee here at home at my desk. My fingers feel good on this keyboard. I'm doing what I'm good at. It's overcast today and I put on a Nick Cave CD that I've not listened to in years, and it sounded good. I used to listen to Nick Cave all of the time back when I was a tourtured, creative artist. The new person starts on Monday. I hope they like the job and do well there, because now it's not me that has to.

Monday Afternoon Best Buy

For some crazy reason, I agreed to accompany two co-workers on an errand to Best Buy this afternoon--oh, wait, I know why I went: I was bored.

I've been to Best Buy before and never particularly enjoyed it. But today I realized that hell is actually Best Buy. That's where you go when you die and you've been bad. Best Buy. It's information overload city: 2,000 super-size flatscreen monitors visually blaring snippets of shitty blockbuster movies, music videos, and sitcom advertisements. Soundtracks from at least 50 different video games, DVDs, radio stations, and television shows. You can't hear one continous strain of sound in the whole place--it's a barrage of crap, crap images and sounds. They had these $140 power strips so you can plug your satellite, TiVo, TV, VCR, stereo, DVD, gas grill, cell phone, and god knows what else all into one MEGA-strip.

I got depressed. What was I doing there? I'd rather be bored at work dicking around at my desk than cowering from American middle-class media explosion at Best Buy. I think it's good for me to dip my toe into this stuff, though. Reminds me what life is like for so many people, compiling all of this electronic shit on their credit cards and tacky living rooms.

I also saw the first season of ALF on DVD. (?!) I guess there are those who fondly remember ALF. If I ever actualy write a manuscript and it gets rejected, remind me that ALF is available on DVD so I can go kill myself.

It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time: Burger King

I ate lunch at Burger King yesterday. A medium Whopper Value Meal. I'd neglected to bring my own lunch to work, and then I wound up dropping a co-worker off at the airport around noonish. There's not a lot of places to eat around there--I actually went of out my way to go to the Burger King.

My poor body. I've been polluting it lately. We have this ice cream treat at home (with a shortbread crust and chocolate sauce) that I've had for breakfast the past few days. Ice cream for breakfast? I used to do that more often, actually. But two days in a row is kind of pathetic.

Perhaps that's why I've been feeling sluggish in the evenings. I get home and don't feel motivated to run, cook, write, clean, sew, or do anything productive. I just melt into our sagging old easy chair and watch DVDs.

I was able to really myself the other evening before dusk. I took a walk (running has seemed boring lately) up Albany Hill, which is always a good place to go. I do run up Albany Hill sometimes, but you always notice more when you walk. It's such an odd hill, how it pops up in the middle of flatness. This necklace of condos rings the hill, but at the top there's nothing but shaggy eucalyptus trees and poson oak. There's also a jerryrigged swing that some crafty kids contructed. It swoops out crookedly over the hillside on chains and fraying ropes. I'm ususally scared of it, that I'll fly off into the poison oak-laced steepness of the hillside. Mostly I walk up the hill and walk right down again and pay attention to the view.

But that day I didn't. I heard a singsong hiphop voice from the woods on top of the hill. It scared me but drew me in. You don't spot many other people on Albany Hill. There's a road to the top and all along the sides you find used condomns, empty bottles, cigarette butts. I think displaced kids go there to do naughty things--I sure would have, even if technically I didn't do much naughty stuff. When I walked by parked cars on the road up Albany Hill, I keep to myself and let the sex-having, pot-smoking kids inside have some privacy.

Albany Hill can be a dark and lonely place. It's a stupid place for a girl to go alone at dusk, but still this voice drew me into the trees down the weedy path. This slender dredlocked guy was singing; he stopped when he apologized and in a somewhat fey voice accented with Europen intonations pardoned himself. I told him to keep going. I'd practice singing up there, too, if I sang. But I don't anymore, not even to myself. Instead I went over to the shady swing and pumpded my legs in the dimming air and swung heavy like a pendulum over that hill as it melted into the night.

Redhead of the Day

I saw this beautiful young redheaded boy today. I was driving home, and he was walking across my street as I turned onto it. My car slowly passed this whole gaggle of teenagers, and he was in the middle, his wonderful red red hair alighted by the sun. He had these small but sloppy tatoos on his lower right arm, one a red cross and the other something in indigo blue writing. I hoped the tattoos weren't real, because he looked too young and unspoiled to have prison-style tattoos. The rest of the kids didn't look like hoodlums, only like bored kids trying to entertain themselves on a summer afternoon. No one should ever spoil freckles with tattoos anyway.

Wedding Music Dilemma

Joe and I have not selected a musician to play at our wedding ceremony. I think this is because we're not going to have a musician play at our wedding ceremony, unless Mr. Boom Box counts. Mr. Boom Box is free, which live musicians (god bless 'em) are not.

Wedding music is tough. You always hard things like Pachabel's "Canon" during the processional, or just the trad old Wedding March (composer?). I wonder if this will work for us. What if we buy a bunch of cheap plastic melodicas and pass them out and encourage the guests to improvise a wedding march? That's ver avant-participarory. Sounds nice, but it would probably sound bad.

Joe and I like a lot of the same music, but ultimately we like very different music. Our main music crossover is easygoing 70s soft rock and early 90s shoegaze. Something makes me suspect that marching down the aisle to My Bloody Valentine or Gordon Lightfoot won't work, though.

At least we're not succombing to the employment of a wedding DJ. Wedding DJs bite ass. Here's my list of the least apprpriate but most often-played wedding reception songs.
1. "I Will Survive"
2. "Mony, Mony"
3. "You Shook Me All Night Long"
4. "The Chicken Song"
5. Anything from the "Grease" Soundtrack
6. Anything by ABBA

I like the idea of playing old standards. But not cliched ones. What a challenge! This will be like creating a mix tape for 50 very different people to enjoy.

Fashion Tip

One great new thing in my life is little girl underwear. I needed some new knickers a while ago--the ones I had were looking pretty nasty and ratty--so i went to Target. All of the cotton womans' underwear had Hello Kitty or Tweety Bird and was in a weird demi-thong style, which I hate. Plus it cost about $2.50/pair. I did get a Snoopy and Woodstock set of underwear in bikini stlye.

Then inspiration struck. I went upstairs to the girls' section. They had 10-packs of really cheap underwear with generic monkeys and frogs and hearts. I bought size 14 and it all fit perfectly. So that's my fashion tip. I love all of my new underwear and it's breathable and very comfortable. But Joe said I had a melvin from the frog pair last night.

LeRoy Exposed: The Saga Continues

Perhaps I spoke a bit harshly in my previous post about JT LeRoy. I was upset because he and his assistant phoned the PR line of our chocolate factory asking for chocolate, when in fact my own generous offer of free chocolate many months earlier via email went ignored. But perhaps JT LeRoy never even saw the email. There's a good chance he didn't. Emails get lost in space, sometimes.

But then Mr. LeRoy's assistant sent a follow-up email after the call. This is an excerpt.
"JT is unusual in that he hearkens back to an earlier time when filthy lucre was avoided by means of barter. In the world of big business, advertising dollars are spent willy-nilly, in periodicals that may or may not attract a dedicated audience. JT decries this depersonalization of product. He prefers to give items that he loves a
personal spin, explaining, as only he can, how his life has been enhanced by this or that thing. I've attached a piece that JT had done for Black Book about Mandy Aftel's perfumes. Through it, you will see how JT can best any PR firm's appraisal of a product. As you read it, please understand that no money ever changed hands between Mandy and JT. Instead, gifts were sent to JT's friends and a story woven out of that experience."

Sick! So if we give JT LeRoy chocolate to share with his friends, he'll write about us? I personally feel that this is filthy lucre, and that if he wants to write about Scharffen Berger, he should just do it. We give everyone free chocolate; you don't have to get all slimy about it. The whole thing leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

It made me mad for the rest of the day, and the only reason I care is because JT LeRoy is famous, so he can get away with being like that. People melt for fame. I'd like to think I only melt for famous writers, because I admire them or their talent, insight, skill, and hard work. And success.

This is not true, though. I'm as big a whore for fame as any schmuck. I know this because Wavy Gravy was in our store yesterday, and I couldn't help but walk by and get a look at him. Wavy Gravy is hardly even famous! He does have an ice cream named after him, though (Wavy Gravy is best known for being the guy who, at the original Woodstock, warned revelers against the brown acid--but he's also a philanthropist who runs a clown camp for disadvantaged kids. That's cool, even though I distrust clowns).

If I get all excited about Wavy Gravy in the store, of course I'm going to get my knickers in a knot over this ridiculous JT LeRoy business. I guess I'm dissapointed that it turns out he's under the influence of his ow fame, bandying about for greasy-palm chocolate. I'd like to think he's more pure than that.

What if I'm famous someday? What if someone met met and they though, "oh geez, what an insufferable bitch." I must remember not to covet fame, and to be nice and down-to-earth under all circumstances. More like Wavy Gravy.

JT LeRoy Can Bite Me

My coworker just got off the phone with JT LeRoy. JT LeRoy, the enigmatic, much-hyped young indie writer with the heartbreaking backstory. Joe bought JT LeRoy's last book, "Harold's End", and in the acknowledgements at the end of "Harold's End" the diminutive author mentioned his love of dark chocolate, 70% and darker. He provided an email address welcoming offers of dark chocolate.

I must admit that I was/am a bit intrigued by this fellow. He does not appear at his own readings, sending insead actor friends to read. Perhaps he's terrified of people, perhaps he's a shrewd generator of publicity. The dude has a band but does not play in the band, he's friends with all of these famous folks, and he wears disguises in public. I like his writing okay; better is that he grew up in West Virginia and he writes about ramps (wild leeks, not wedge-shaped elevation contructions).

I emailed Mr. LeRoy, saying that I worked at a chocolate factory and had lots of 70% and darker chocolate at home and that I'd be happy to share it, but I never heard back. I think that's the main reason I emailed, was to see if I'd hear back at all.

So anyway, JT LeRoy and his assistant just conference-called my coworker asking for chocolate. My coworker said that JT LeRoy sounded like a woman and he thought he was a woman until he looked up JT's website. Then my boss chimed in, saying that when she worked for this free-range meat producer JT LeRoy called asking for stuff and that he sounded like a girl then, too.

So I want to know three things:
-Why can't JT LeRoy make his own calls by himself like a big boy? Or just have his assistant do them by herself?
-Why was my previous (and non-creepy fan-girl) offer of choolate accepted or responded to?
-Why does this all bother me so much? I get kind of pissed when people make such a fuss over JT LeRoy. Maybe it's playa hate.

Oskar Schell

That's my boyfriend of the week. He's the nine-year-old protagonist in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer, who would be my boyfriend of the week except I think Joe is jealous. Like it matters, I'll never meet the guy (JSF or Oskar Schell).

Anyhow, I finished the book last night. Sometimes, when I'm really into a book, I won't pick it up for a whole week just because I'm sad about finishing it. You know the end is near, and it's like having a long-term houseguest apck up their bags and move on. I want the last day to stretch into a week, into two weeks. So instead I skim over New Yorker articles and save the book until I can't stand it anymore. Now I have to figure out what book to read next. For all of you, your book to read next is "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

20 Minutes Over Devola

My Dad took me flying in Ohio. His good friend Charlie Pickering has an airstrip in a cornfield and a few small hangers. They call it Checkpoint Charlie. I spent a lot of time there as a kid, because we shared a 4-seater with the Pickerings. Dad liked to fly the family to our relatives' houses. My grnadparents lived about 4 hours away, but it only took an hour or so in the plane. Even so, it took time to drive to Checkpoint Charlie, ready the plane, visit with the Pickerings, fly to some dinky rural airport, wait for relatives to pick us up...this usually added up to about 4 hours. I think Dad enjoyed flying, so that's why we did it. I was in 4th grade when we flew all the way to the Bahamas in that tiny plane. 14 hours air time. It was too loud in there to have a conversation, if you had to pee you'd have to hold it, and there was no room to get comfortable. I think I read a lot in the plane. We even took our dog Daisy with us a few times. Mark, my brother, often puked during the landings.

Dad had a bad drinking problem that got worse and my brother and I got older. He had a few DUI arrests and spent some time in 5the county jail. The FAA took his pilot's license away, but he still drove. That was hard for Dad. It's funny, because he's a very serious pilot and he'd never, ever fly drunk. Apparently he didn't mind driving drunk.

At the time I didn't think about it much. All of a sudden we stopped taking the plane places and drove to visit relatives instead. We sold our share of the plane. It's gone now. Dad told me that the plane had appeared in the background of a James Bond movie once, one of the crappy lesser 70s Bond films.

Losing his pilot's license was a big deal for Dad. He was trained as a fighter pilot, but he flew C-130s for the Air Force for over 25 years. He served in two wars (Vietnam and the Gulf, which maybe does not count), and most of his good friends are pilots.

Last year he got his license back. I hadn't flown with him in ages. He wanted to take me up in the L2, which is a little 2-seater WWII canvas plane. It hops around on the runway, which led to the plane's nickname, the Grasshopper.

Flying in my youth was always a thrill, at least at the takeoff. I always felt safe flying with Dad. These days in the big commercial airline planes I get nervous, but the L@ is like a magic amusement park ride. We had these ancient sound-activated microphones, and up in the air Dad pointed out all kind of landmarks--my old elementary school, our house, the boathouse. We fley over our neighborhood a couple times. Things always look so different from abouve. It's a good perspective. I looked at all of the hills and imagined what they looked like beneath the trees. A denuded hill is like a wet cat.

It was a windy day, which translated to some turbulance. ad had to try three times to land, because he was looking for what he called a "down wind." When we finally did land, Dad's dog Rex jumped around like crazy. We taxied to the little hanger and once Dad shut off the engine, Mom let Rex off the leash. He bounded over to the plane and practically jumped inside with Dad, even though there's not enough room.

Things like that are why I miss home.

Ohio: Boyfriend/Entity of the Week

The past six days I've been visiting friends and family in my hometown in Ohio. So many things to say, mostly feelings and impresisons...can't do it now, because I'm back at the old chocolate factory grind. So I'll just type out a few speedy micro-stories.

Choke & Puke. This is what we call Devola Creamland, the little soft-serve ice cream shop that's about a three-minute drive/ten-minute bike ride from my parents' house. Little run-down soft-serve stands are part of the soul of the rural Midwest. I've probably consumed about 200 ice cream cones from Devola Creamland over the years. This visit, my Mom, Dad, and I went out there on a Sunday as the sun began to set. I ordered a cone, Mom ordered a cup, Dad ordered a cone, and Mom...ordered a large cone? "What's that for?" I asked.

"It's for the dog," she said. Yes, my parents get the dog ice cream every time they visit Devola Creamland.

Story # 2 is not a story. It's that I'm a few days late with Boyfriend of the Week. I'd like to say that it's Ohio, but I can't, because Ohio is a state, not a girl or a boy. So I'll make Ohio the Entity of the Week. My friend Carrie's boyfriend Brian was born and raised in Ohio. 33 years of Mariettadom, which is insane. He's really cute, though. We all went on a hike on property of his family. Brian said the word "holler", as in "Hollw", as in "a mini-valley in the woods." I hadn't heard that word in ages. For that, Brian get to share Entity of the Week/Boyfriend of the Week with Ohio.