Command Perforamnce

I'm under orders from the two Denises to post the next time I do the drugs and booze thing, which I did, which I'm now doing. Except it wasn't much of either drugs or booze, but in these hard times you have to make do with whatcha got. See I thought I had to get up early to go to market and I wanted t get enough sleep, but now I think that I didn't really have o get up because I think market is out for tomorrow. Too quick to bend the elbow, there, Lee. I am howver feeling sleepy and occasionally typing with my eyes closed. This is good. maybe.

Mao is curled up by my chair, and was there ver a more loyal cat than he? No. The answer is no. I lov the Maoser to little pieces. Dar wants me to get him stuffed when he dies, and I at first said no but now I'm rethinking because he's awfully cute, isn't he? Aww, he's licking his paw all spread out down there. Not even knowing that someday he'll be a footstool or something. Awww.

May I say (fuking keyboard) that I'm tired of not breathing. And from not breathing. Heheheheh. I made a breathless pun. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa! or that's not really a pun. A witticism then. A bon mot or whatever the hell the frenches call it. A joke dman it. Anyway, it vexes me. I am very vexed. (Caerwynx things that Joaquin Phoenix is gross. Tell her that she's wrong, ok.) So it's not like having emphesyma (ispelled that like 3 times and gave up) or cystic fibrosis so don't think I know that I m not whining about something rather piddling in the big picture of lung deficiencies, but really. Give me back my lungs, please.

Don't smoke, kiddies. This iw what happens. I quit on December 14, 1979 and thought that that was it. Clar sailing, free beathing, all mine. Mineminemine. But no. Evil smoke screwed me up anyway. It didn't help that ll of my friends continued to smoe for years after I quit. Hell, for all the secondhand stuff I was breathing in I might as well have continued on my own. I figured I saved a gazillion dollars by quittig though. Not to mention no more yellow fingers (ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww) and burn holes in my clothes. Ysy!

Still no little men running across my keyboard. Ah, for the highs of yesterdyer. You know, Ireally wasn't much of a druggie considering the times and my companions. Who were really pretty fucking stoned most of the time. I was a girl scout compared to them. Well, actually I was a girl sout, so there was that. No badge for pharmaceuticals, though. Althoug I bet I could have got one in horticulture. Bwah! They just keep on coming.. Uhoh. I thought mao was asleep on my foot but he's behond me. And my foot is right there. O dar God, what's sleeeping on my fooooooot?!!! Heh.

I should call it a night. But everyone calls it a night. i shall call it a . . . azcasin. AN azcasin, excuse me. Except is sounds too mch like asskickin' doesn't it? And that's not desirious of my intent. (WTF did I mean by that?) Neologisms must need wait until the morrow for now I sleep. If i can get this invisible being off my freakin' foot. Until then I bid you all . . . rashahm. (that's the new night, pass it on.)

Insubstantial time

We always think that we have more of it than we do, that we can control it with wishful thinking, tack it in place with good intentions.

I found out today that two people who were as close to me as family had died in the past few years, and I didn't know. I didn't know because I didn't keep in touch with them as I kept meaning to do. Today, though, today I decided that I was going to get down to it and send off that long overdue letter; I went to google their names just for the hell of it, and I came across their obituaries.

Eleanor and Al were my parents' best friends. Al was a distant relative of my dad's, but it was pure coincidence that they moved in next to us in the housing project where we lived when I was a child. Eleanor was 10 years younger than my mom, but they hit it off instantly and became close friends. Since both of my parents worked, El looked after us until my mom got home. She was like a second mother to us, and as I grew toward adulthood, she also became my friend.

Al was the only child of German immigrants, but El was from a large Irish family, who also happened to live in the project a couple streets away from us. Her siblings, because they covered such a large age range, were our playmates and our babysitters. I remember that it was her sister Ilene who taught me how to tie my shoe laces. Every Christmas Day we'd end our holiday visits at El & Al's where all of her family had gathered in a loud, raucous, loving mass. It was great.

My mom and El were inseparable for years. Then when I was in my 20s my parents divorced and my mother remarried. The wedding was at Al & El's, and El was my mom's maid-of-honor. About a year later my mother and her husband made the decision to move away from CT out to AZ to live closer to her sister. It broke El's heart, and a small rift developed. When my mom moved back to CT several years later, they picked up where they'd left off, but something had changed. Instead of talking it out, they let it grow and split them apart.

The last time I saw Eleanor was at my mother's funeral. They hadn't talked to each other for about 10 years; El found out about my mom's death through the obituary in the local paper. She was completely devastated, distraught to the point where I was worried about her. She couldn't even remember what had separated them, it was so inconsequential. She'd always thought that they'd make up. Some day.

This is the part where I'm supposed to say that we should always be sure to stay in touch, always be sure to reach out. But I won't, because we all know that anyway. We're human beings, and as complex and wonderful as our self-aware brains make us in the grand taxonomic order, we're still all subject to the defensive anaesthesia that tells us that time is our plaything when in fact the reverse is true. We can't help ourselves; we can only regret and remember.

No excuses

A belated but heartfelt happy birthday to shyday - the wordsmith, the will-o-the-wisp, the young woman, I believe, born out of her time. May you find that time machine to take you back to the days of the glamor and the hep and holy Rat Pack.

Pixel

Remember that fuzzy, tiny, sickly kitten we brought home last year? She's grown. Still got a kittie brain, though. She's on top of the refrigerator hunting for something that none of the rest of us could see. Get 'em, Pixel!