Let Yourself Go

My mother was forever offering congratulations to overweight women. She'd cheerfully ask, When are you due? and inevitably get a blush or a stammer until one day a woman said, I'm not pregnant, just fat in the bluntest most unapologetic tone possible. That was the end of that line of questioning. People let themselves go, she'd say, shaking her head. It sounded great to me, although I didn't understand what she meant. Letting myself go meant that I would worry about anything and I thought if I stopped worrying that either my world would dissolve like ice on Texas cement or that I would die. Not that I was dramatic or anything.

In high school, one of my close friends had one green eye, one blue, like a cat, and blonde hair that she styled like Robert Smith of The Cure. She'd also taken Robert's rather cavalier attitude toward lipstick application to heart. Robin often told me that I was a fucking control freak, that I needed to loosen up. I got her point, although coming from someone who not infrequently found herself naked after a blackout with her car keys nestled between her breasts. Robin terrified me, not because of her drug proclivities, but because she saw into my cramped and worried soul and the truth is always scarier than pot laced with PCP. I did have my time to repay that favor. One day she lost her car keys at school (noy thinking ahead about storing them somewhere safe!) and I had to drive her home in my huge boat of a Grenada. She'd been having a pretty intense LSD trip all day and when she got in the car went into a panic. It was raining, I hadn't been driving long, and didn't really care about things like signals or stoplights. I was behind the wheel and for once, no one was in control or even pretending to be.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn't even the star of his own Halloween special." Chris Rock

Charlie Brown's After-Dinner Drink

1 part rum
1 part coffee liqueur

Serve as a shot.

Benedictions and Maledictions

The Private Possession of Dangerous Reptiles

The cost, well, prohibitive.
Like most things, people don’t
understand the need. But once
a man named Garland brought
my mother a rattlesnake on a string
leash in a box lid. She put the snake
in the deep freeze where it lived for
weeks, among the loaves of Wonder
Bread, only its eyes telling me it
was alive, trying to exist on its weight
alone, like so many people I know.