A Game You're Playing Against Yourself

I once knew two people who were best friends -- both the girl and guy looked alike, dressed alike, and seemed for all intents and purposes like siblings though they were not, nor were they romantically involved. When I saw them together on campus, I thought of the Carson McCuller's line about the two mutes who went everywhere in town together. The couple seldom spoke and when they did, it was in a language that I could not entirely crack. I worked as a desk clerk for their dorm and they'd sometimes come down into the lobby and play solitaire, each bringing their own card deck, sitting side by side, the only sound the occasional curse from losing a game that you're playing against yourself. The guy left for a week in the middle of the semester, and the girl spent a lot of time by my desk, talking more than she ever had. I asked her what she liked best about her friend, and she said, We can be silent together. We never have to talk and it's perfect. All that quiet scared me, but I understood her point. To be understood without speaking, the luxury of it! They had a falling out eventually, and I'd often see them alone. The quality of that silence had an entirely different tenor, a sad stretch of quiet that seemed to speak of brokenness.

Years ago I had a student bring in a framed picture of herself, one that had a big oval in the center for a senior picture and was surrounded with eleven circles for school pictures from each year beginning with first grade. She pointed to herself as a third grader and said, This is when my stepfather started abusing me and every picture marks a year that I had to keep my secret, she said, tracing the frame as if it were a clock, a clock in hell that is, and everyone looked at it with a respectful, awed silence before she started reading her essay about the experience. Despite a pretty decent long-term memory, I don't recall all that much about the essay except that it followed the pattern of these things -- trauma, secret, revelation, and aftermath. She could have chosen to read anything, but she chose to read her best paper, the most difficult one. The silence after was like that of a church, a deep abiding one in which anything could happen.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Thalia was a place were the dust seldom entirely settled." Larry McMurtry

Cocktail Hour

Drinking novel suggestion: When The Light Goes Larry McMurty (the final installment of The Last Picture Show series)

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Thursday! Go Pistons!

Cactus and Rose Bushes

Five miles away from where my parents lived their last days on this earth, a woman and her four children were found hanging in their trailer's only bedroom. The woman's sister found them, the youngest baby still alive, having managed to work her way out of the arm of a yellow sweater that had been placed around her neck. The sister called the police and told them to come quick, that her sister was "sick really bad" and needed help. I can see the scene, the rows of trailers surrounded by cactus and rose bushes, by children's toys. It's a bleak, poverty-ridden stretch of road, the stuff of not so quiet desperation and crystal meth addiction, a place you don't choose but you end up there all the same. The neighbors say the standard lines about the woman who committed this act -- She was a good mother, happy, played with her girls. I guess you could say that she was a crying on the inside type. At 23, she already had four girls under the ages of five for which to care. It's not difficult to see her world, as circumscribed as her makeshift nooses.

Texas has had a fair share of mothers who murder their children and the most famous, Andrea Yates who drowned her four boys in the bathtub, was a nurse at MD Anderson during my mother's stay in their famed gynecological cancer ward. I saw her from time to time, and she looked a little strung-out and appeared to never wash her hair. She had that thin, haunted look of someone whose eggroll is wrapped a little too tightly, but that hardly prepares one for the horrible morning in which she chased her sons down to drown them in a bathtub and cover their little bodies with sheets. The latest filicide cases haven't resulted in the death penalty which Texas loves (provided that the mother doesn't kill herself along with the children) -- but lie under the umbrella of the insanity defense. Andrea Y. said that she believed the children were possessed by Satan, that the demons got to her and their voices drowned out the sounds of everything else. The sister who found her nieces hanging in the trailer said that things were eerily quiet until the tiniest baby started to cry, struggling to hang to a life already haunted by its extraordinary beginning.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"You have folded up my life, like a wever who severs the last thread." Isaiah 38:12

Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: Rain Dogs Tom Waits

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Wednesday!

Go Pistons!

Mommy took me for a spa treatment today! It was so invigorating that I could talk about it for weeks. See my beautiful picture in my towel! I'm watching the Pistons right now. Go Pistons! My favorite player is RIP! Mommy's favorite player was Ben Wallace last year. This year she's not sure. She loves all of them. That's Mommy -- she's a diplomat. I am still working on my manuscript about leaving the house. It's very hard to write! I'm going to go and watch the game now. xoxo, Grouchie

In The Name Of Love

Once I started singing verses of various songs in an almost empty Indian restaurant. The chicken vindaloo had lost its luster, an I had to make my own fun! I started with Eartha Kitt's version of "Santa Baby" and ended up at Peggy Lee's "Fever." I can't blame it on drinking because I wasn't, and my companions begged me to stop, but I continued complete with creepy hand motions, like a Supreme gone wrong. A couple at the next booth were meeting with their wedding planner, going over the details for the big day. "I want flowers, not funeral flowers, but really beautiful ones. This only happens once. I don't get a second chance to make my big day special." Where do people learn this sense of entitlement and the vocabulary for it? Furthermore, who says you only get one big day? My mind cast back to a tank top I'd seen once that read, Stop Talking About Your Fucking Wedding, and I began laughing so hard that I spit the sip of water that I'd just taken all over the table. My sister calls this kind of merriment being "drunk in the spirit," when everything is funny for no reason. Our waiter looked over at the table, the soaking wet place mats and shook his head. I attempted to compose myself until one of my friends confessed that her boyfriend pets his dog while they have sex (quite a feat of dexterity!), and this sent me off into more laughter. I did not sing or drink water anymore out of fear of making a bigger ass of myself than I already had.

When a dear friend of mine visited Detroit, I took her to the Motown Museum. We went with two other people in one of my vain attempts to allow my friends and then-boyfriend to get to know one another in hopes that they would see in each other all the wonderful qualities I did. The group dynamic was similar to the old experiment with prisoners and guards -- my friends made passive-aggressive jabs at one another as we saw Michael Jackson's glove and The Commodores' singing costumes. When we got into the last part of the tour, our guide picked three of us out of the crowd to sing "Stop In The Name Of Love." I wanted to die when he looked at me and said, "You can be sexy Mary Wells." I tried to be a good sport and went along for the ride. When I did my stop hand motion, I directed it toward the people who, despite loving me, could not love one another. They could not, as St. Francis dictates, love each other constantly or even a little. They could barely eat dinner together! In a situation like this, the best thing you can do is sing, even if you don't do it well. At least you have a chance of making someone laugh even if it's only yourself.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.” Francis Bacon

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Shinebox The Gourds

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Tuesday!

The Thing Speaks For Itself

The first time I managed to water-ski, it was Memorial Day weekend about a million years ago and yesterday in Possum Kingdom Lake. My parents and next door neighbors, Larry and MaryAnn, were out on an ancient ski-boat to which someone had affixed glittery letters that should have read Fun At Sea, but some had fallen off, rendering it un A Sea. I'd never had any luck yet -- I was a small child and physically inept and way too nervous to let myself relax enough to let the boat do the work of pulling me out of the water. But this time, Larry got into the water and put my feet into the skis and taught me how to position myself in the water, all while managing to smoke a cigarette and not dousing it. I was so impressed with this feat and mesmerized by the ashes crumbling into the less than pristine water that I forgot to be afraid and managed to rise from the water in the tiny wooden children's water skis that were leftover from many years ago. I went a fair ways until I realized what I was doing and in trying to do it, managed to fall. That was the first time I realized that you could do something without exerting your will and that in fact, your will was the thing that fucked everything up, made it impossible to be in the moment.

I had no words for what had happened, but everyone was happy when I got back into the boat. I sat eating bean dips and Doritos and watched everyone else take their turn. Some people could ski with one ski; my dad could even do tricks like letting go of the rope, turning around, and grabbing it again. I knew I would never be that good. By age six, I had taken to calling myself a fatalist, a word I loved because of the way fatal sounded. It sounded like you didn't have to hope for things that weren't going to happen anymore, that you had come to a peace. But I had made it up on the skis for a brief moment -- I would never be a person who couldn't ski again. Things had changed! It was the beginning of summer in 1978, and the last war we'd fought was Vietnam. I had no recollection of it, of course, except for the men I knew who'd been in it. They didn't talk about it very often. Sometimes a thing speaks for itself -- words become superfluous, dying flowers on a grave, the flags at half-mast, a day off to think about the sacrifices others make before heading into the summer that will go all too fast before the hard winter begins.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says 'Bad war, good soldier.' Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.” Max Cleland

Cocktail Hour

Drinking movie suggestion: Full Metal Jacket

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Memorial Day! Much love for our troops and prayers for their quick and safe return.

You Know You're In Detroit

When my sister visits Detroit, she has made some trenchant observations about what Detroit is like. Taking a page from You know you're a redneck when . . ., she often says, You know you're in Detroit when . . . So how do people roll in the D? Well, here's a partial list:

-- when people complain about how weak mixed drinks are at certain restaurants
-- when people pay more attention to the cocktail menu than the food menu
-- people still smoke in other people's houses
-- the smoking sections in some restaurants and bars still exist
-- there are so many potholes, you stop noticing until your tire is flat
-- people start complaining about the heat when it hits 75 degrees
-- you can go to a bar and watch three sports events at the same time with all excellent Detroit teams (and nobody ever mentions the Lions)
-- people swear as if they were in a Sopranos audition without blinking

I could go on, but I'll stop with that. I love the D, all its quirks and particularities. Of course, my Detroit exists only for me, the way that Woody Allen's New York exists only for him. But I don't think it's the knowledge that allows you to write about a place, it's the passion. To quote the late great Marivn Gaye, That's the way love is.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell." Marvin Gaye

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: Waitress

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Sunday! Go Pistons!

Goddesses and Doormats

I once had a friend named Paul who married his high school sweetheart, a really horrid-looking girl named Rena, who the other students, in all their infinite kindness and generosity of spirit, referred to as Rhino. Rena/Rhino did not have flaws that were exceptionally hideous; it seemed as if all her features formed a miasma of ugliness that is impossible to describe. The strange part of this pairing was that Paul was handsome, gorgeous, a kind person, and generally good guy, and nobody could understand why he'd picked Rena who in addition to being homely also had a propensity for nagging. She did not, as we used to say, have a great personality (code for ugly but desperate), sew her own clothes (nothing like a useful girl!), and wasn't loaded with money, intellect, or anything else that might bring the boys knocking. When questioned about it by our mutual friend Hank, Paul answered with an honesty that startled me. I won't ever have to work with Rena. She knows she's lucky to have me, and I'll never have to worry about losing her or busting my ass to keep her interested. This degree of insight and pragmatism from one so young struck me as utterly bizarre. Most of us were still in our hormonal fantasies of love that would never end or at the very least, someone to make out with at a Depeche Mode concert or that we could pine for while listening to Berlin songs.

So far as I know, this couple is still together much to my everlasting amazement. I pride myself on being a pragmatist (code for a cynic the same way that everyone who calls themselves a cynic is really a romantic), but this truce with reality gives me pause. In those days even though I never had any really far-reaching romantic fantasies, I still played Grover Washington Jr's Winelight and imagined when I was older, living in a place of my own, having living room picnics for whomever my beloved would be (at this point, I didn't understand that I would never, ever cook) and light candles and be madly in love. Maybe we wouldn't do all the douchebag things that people in my hometown were prone to -- putting our names on each other's trucks or wearing matching clothing, but it would be more romantic than settling for someone who wouldn't expect much and would never be tempted to leave by the knowledge that he or she had far exceeded what we used to refer to as a person's "league." As Tony Soprano said in one of his last episodes, What's the fun without a little risk? To gamble when the game is rigged, well, what's the point in that?

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"There are two types of women: goddesses and doormats." Pablo Picasso

Cocktail Hour
Drinking novel suggestion: The Cheer Leader Jill McCorkle

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Saturday!

An Empty Tank Of Gas

One of my friends, on the verge of divorce, said, Marriage is a lot like torture. The worst part is there is no end in sight. Even a marathon has a stopping point! In the midst of one of the most grisly parts, the division of the things, she'd hidden beneath her desk as her husband sold their washer and dryer to a stranger. It had been the thing she had always wanted to have at home and now it was gone. The specter of the grim laundromat loomed large, haunted by broken men with sad eyes, nursing cheap cups of coffee. My friend, a delicate doe-eyed beauty, said, I never even really loved him and now he's sleeping with someone ten years younger. We spent a lot of time the summer of divorce talking about the end of the things, the nature of loss, and why she couldn't stop sleeping with this horrible man named Pat who I referred to as Pat MIA because he couldn't be found for days on end and would show up at the worst possible times hoping for some loving. The term booty call had not yet entered the lexicon -- in those days this practice was referred to as being an asshole who couldn't commit. I had no idea dating was so horrible, she said.

One of my ex-boyfriend's toasts when he was drunk enough to feel sentimental was, Till the wheels come off. So it was for my friend when her hoopty of a marriage broke down. You can drive for a long time on an empty tank of gas, get out in the middle of nowhere. You step out when the car stops, try to get your bearings. Maybe you're somewhere far from where you started, more likely you've driven in circles. But whatever the case, it's strange to stop moving and stand on your own again.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"A lover teaches a wife all that her husband has concealed from her." Balzac

Cocktail Hour

Drinking memoir suggestion: The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion

Benedictions and Maledictions

Congratulations to my beloved Pistons for winning again at The Palace! Same score as last time (79-76 so close, so close!) -- to quote RIP Hamilotn -- If it ain't rough, it ain't right. Happy Friday, friends!

Three Mile Island

Once when I was very drunk, I slept in the back seat of my car on the way home and according to my friends, crawled into the filthy floorboard and said, I love this spot! It's so comfortable. I don't know why I never thought about sleeping here before. Mercifully, I am spared the actual memory of this as I passed out shortly after making this wise pronouncement. Generous to a fault, I thrust my bottle of Southern Comfort on my sober friends in the front seat and made myself at home. I drank it then because Janis Joplin did and in my nineteen year old glory, I thought this was the best reason to drink anything. Janis, that beautiful Three Mile Island of love and misery, a Texas girl desperate to get away from it -- hell, what was there not to love? Every note meant something, every wail was my own. While other girls were falling in love with horses and haunted men, I was trying to commune with the dead and take their secrets for my own. Of course, I had my own secrets, but what good were those doing me?

I've never been comfortable with the pristine and beautiful and would choose the battered and worn over the new almost every time. The natural world, with its perpetual cycles of death and renewal, had ceased to be interesting to me. I liked things that died and rotted and the rot became something living, something to be tended to, like a garden, a garden in hell. Dying things stay with you a long time, get into your blood, make you love them. They demand an attention that something beautiful doesn't need. When I play footage of Janis for people these days, someone always says, She looks so old. I don't think so, never have. She's in what would be the prime and end years of her life, and she looks like someone who drank a lot of Southern Comfort and did copious amounts of heroin. She looks like she should look. The time in the car was the last time I ever drank any Comfort; the drink, too sweet for my taste, sounds better than it is.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable." Janis Joplin

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: Little Children

Benedictions and Maledictions
Good luck to my beloved Pistons tonight!

Reconciliations Heard After Dark

The first time I saw a confessional, I was shocked that it wasn't like the movies, all cloak and dagger and hidden from the priest. I'd expected to come in all dressed in black, mumbling incoherently and vaguely about my spiritual failings and then flit out, nobody any the wiser to my identity. But confession is no longer confession in the Catholic church, it's reconciliation, and very few people hide behind a screen anymore which makes sense as the one I saw would only serve to hide a toddler, a prop more than anything else. It's more talking than anything else, said my deacon, by way of explanation. I felt the evil psychiatric profession leaching its way into the ritual, but was still intrigued. The way I had been raised had nothing but contempt for priest as middleman between you and God -- preachers of my youth would decry this as totally unnecessary. You can talk to God, they'd say. You don't need some so-called father doing it for you! But I believe they were missing the point.

Despite the Jocastas in our soul that beg us not to look, everyone needs to look sometimes and looking alone into the morass of our deep longings that we cannot voice is not an easy task. Our obsessions, circular in nature, turn in on themselves and like the rabbis of yore, we sometimes need another person with a rope to drag us out of what we consider the holy of holies in our mind -- doomed love affairs, addictions, past miseries. I think about the confessions I have heard, not as a priest, lawyer, psychiatrist, or with any higher authority save for love. Sometimes they happen early in the day, sometimes late in the evening -- as the masks drop off, the language becomes simple and is underlined with a desperation -- I would give my life for this thing, the thing that I should not want. To whom, as Chekhov writes, shall I tell my grief? Reconciliations and negotiations become one in the same and nothing ever balances, but for whatever relief we receive, we give thanks and this is prayer enough to save us.

Michelle's Spell for the Day

"There are places in the heart that do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering that they may have existence." Leon Bloy

Cocktail Hour

Drinking memoir suggestion: Parched Heather King

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Wednesday!

A Year On This Earth

For a few years after my first rape, I lived the secret life of dark circles and bloody fingernails, the days of panic attacks and singular obsession, that shopworn wish that things could return to before, a mystical land that had slipped beyond my grasp, something, as they say, I had never appreciated until it was gone. That was the season that birds were dropping by every window, diving into them, trying to tear through the storm window screens and deliver their messages of death. Every noise was anxiety and silence drove me into panic. For all my morbidity and sadness, I had never resided for so long in the land of dry bones and had almost no faith that it would be any other way again. So much in my life was normal, so much utterly bizarre. Did everyone have a public self and a private one that had no relation to each other? I started to search the past for signs and found them -- the two theater movies my rapist and I saw together were Fatal Attraction and The Accused. What can I say? In a small town, there's only one show. You don't get a choice.

Time makes so many things into a comedy. You swim away from the shore of something until it becomes smaller and smaller, and you are free except for the memories of the distant land that has become part of your language. But you are never free from yourself. For a few years, I wore a pair of rattlesnake rattles for earrings. They had come off two huge snakes, each rattle representing a year on this earth. Most snakes broke off some of their rattles through wear and tear, but these had stayed pristine. When I wore them, I'd shake my head every now and again to hear the noise. But sometimes my head would shake without me knowing it, and I would startle at the sound as if the danger was somewhere outside instead of coming from me.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"The ambulance's ruby element can move among us without care." Denis Johnson

Cocktail Hour
Drinking documentary suggestion: Capturing the Friedmans

Benedictions and Maledictions
Congratulations to my beloved Pistons for winning over the Cavaliers!

This Dress Is A Zebra Print

The other day I walked into a vintage clothing store filled with cats. There were at least ten of them, living around the massive piles of clothes, clothes packed in so tightly that you could barely see anything. The place was located in a rough part of town; two of the windows were knocked out of the place like gaping teeth that had been boarded up with box remnants. When I walked in using a very tiny side entrance, I was greeted by a fake kitty meowing, an alarm system of sorts, and several of the real kitties swirling like eddies around my feet. I fell in love then and there, but my companions were less than enamored by the smell of cat urine and mounds of old clothing. A tiny woman came out of the back room and told us that there would be more clothes next week. Where, whispered one of my companions, would she put it? She had a kind sweet face and when she returned to the back to sort more clothes, she talked into the eerie silence of the store to the kitties, telling them about each garment and how she planned to mark it. Hi Fluffy, she said, this dress is a zebra print from the sixties, I overheard her say in a lilting voice that could break your heart.

There's an old joke about two types of children -- the one that gets the pony for Christmas and starts looking around, saying, There's a pony in here so there's got to be some shit somewhere and the other kid who gets a load of shit for Christmas and says, There's so much shit that there's got to be a pony in here! As is the wont in fairytales, I felt as if I'd stumbled someplace magical when I went into that store. I bought some earrings, and she told me that she'd have some shorts from the sixties out for display next week, although there was nothing about the store that lent itself to the kind of clarity associated with the word display. "They're homemade," she said. "You won't find anything in the world like them." Of that, I was certain. I walked out of the store into the gritty street where my companions had already set up camp, driven out by the cat smell. "Did you find something you liked?" asked one of them. "I always do," I said, but this time, unlike so many times before, I meant it.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Writing is a process of dealing without knowing, a forcing of what and how." Donald Barthelme

Cocktail Hour

Drinking short story suggestion: "Parker's Back" Flannery O'Connor (one of my very favorites)

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Monday! Go Pistons!

One Bullet By My Bed

A friend of mine went on a first date with a woman he'd met on a website titled Cupid (perhaps one of the most evil words in the English language?) who asked him to unload her guns at the end of the night and put the bullets into Ziploc baggies. The baggies had Disney characters in Halloween costumes on them, leftovers from an attempt to make bags of treats for trick-or-treaters that braved her heavily armed House of Usher. I got too sad and couldn't finish, she said. As he took the bullets out of her three pistols, she said, You know that I'll find them eventually. And I always keep one bullet by my bed. My friend is an easygoing guy, but he didn't know what to say. So he took his leave from Ms. Suicide Hotline and cruised on out the door and into the night, an infinitely safer place than her well-appointed house.

She called him back, asking for another date. The crazy ones always do, and he decided to give it another shot since she was beautiful. He ordered a margarita to get the party started and she followed suit telling him that he'd have to watch her closely. I'm on so many anti-depressants that something is probably contraindicated. But a drink sounds so good! It did to him as well. I'm so glad that you went out with me after the gun thing, she said over potato skins. But I figure if someone won't come through for you on the first date, you might as well forget having a life with him. By the time they made it to the main course, he was eyeing the door in a desperate, hopeless way. He'd driven them there, you see, and he'd have to drive her back home, to a house filled with guns and Prozac with stray bullets hidden in places you wouldn't expect them to be. She'd said in her ad that she wasn't into games, that she wanted someone real. I have a bunny from childhood, she'd written. And I loved him so much that now he's real. He didn't recognize the plot from The Velveteen Bunny. Besides being a nut, she was a plagiarist. He found the bunny thing charming and cute, a way of standing out from the crowd. I didn't know it was true, he said. I saw her bunny after I took her to bed for the first and only time. He told me that it watched them from the corner and by the end of the night, he thought it was real as well.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity." James Dickey

Cocktail Hour

Drinking short story collection suggestion: The Angel on the Roof Russell Banks

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Sunday!

It's Not The Years, It's The Mileage

I once was in Branson, Missouri where I saw an older man who looked like Hank Williams serving popcorn at an Elvis impersonators show. He'd sing as he served, a few verses of "Jambalaya" or "Your Cheatin' Heart." Turns out, he played Hank in the morning revue which wasn't all that popular. Turns out that not so many people wanted to see a fake Hank as much as they wanted to see a fake Elvis. Their are whole cottage industries devoted to impersonating the King which makes sense -- Elvis performed with lots of bells and whistles which are easy to imitate. Of course, it's all an attempt to get at the soul, which makes for a much tougher time. The fake Hank had to be sixty which left me thinking that the real Hank died at age 29, looking as beat to hell as anything. As my friend Hank used to say, It's not the years, it's the mileage and everyone I have ever known named Hank has had plenty of mileage.

We become the things we love, even if we aren't stuck in some hellish reprisal of them for the rest of our days. I once heard an Elvis impersonator say, The best thing in life is to be someone else. Elvis didn't have problems, not like me. I'm guessing Elvis would have been shocked as hell to find out that he didn't have any difficulties, that it was all smooth sailing in the Jungle Room. I think of the icons I love the most and they seem like nothing but a beautiful mess to me, impossible to capture in their full glory and misery. Like Hank Williams. The name means gracious and sometimes it's listed as meaning ruler. But as Hank W. himself would say, it also means being drunk out of your mind, heartsick, broken, close to death. You can hear it in his voice. Even when he sings about seeing the light, it's a painful horrible light and you feel as if it might go out at any minute.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself." Henri du Bois

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: Fargo

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Saturday!

The Dying Light Of Afternoon

One of my favorite things to do as a child was to walk through an empty house, a silence as deep as any church, and search through my parents' bedroom for clues to their lives. I had no ability for directness in my soul so this had to suffice. The more I knew, the more I couldn't understand and the secrets of the house fell hard around me. I could fathom a surface and an undercurrent and the two were not the same. It was in their lives I understood that there were splits, compromises, and betrayals, loneliness so deep that nothing would fill them, and a lot of truly wretched poetry written in the seventies and given as gift books that were full of deep meaning about life and love. I can still remember a particularly awful line from Javan, a poet/pilot/artist whose books I still see in the stores from time to time -- This is a Red Letter day of love, magic, feeling. What, I thought at the time, does that shit mean? And damned if I still don't know.

When I was five, a boy at school rocked me so hard that I fell out of the chair and hit my head on the floor. My teacher pinned a note onto my pink turtleneck telling my parents what happened and to watch for signs of a concussion. I tucked the note underneath my sweater to hide it, fearing I would catch hell for what someone else had done to me. All though dinner, the note crinkled against my skin while I tried to pretend it wasn’t there. It was a strange sensation, hiding something so close to my chest in front of everyone. It never occurred to me that I could take it off. I didn't have a secret room yet, but I would. I knew that meant you'd grown up. I can still picture going through my parents' things in the dying light of afternoon, before everyone returned and I became a child again, adept at pretending that everything was fine and unlike everyone else, I had nothing to hide.

Michelle's Spell of Day

"I don't need a psychiatrist; I need a man." Marilyn Monroe

Cocktail Hour

Drinking movie suggestion: My Aim Is True Elvis Costello

Benedictions and Maledictions

Congratulations to my beloved Pistons for last night's victory over Chicago! Happy Friday!

Drink The Water

As I was purchasing some Vitamin Water at 7-11 yesterday, a woman asked me if it was okay to drink. I need that shit, but all of it tastes, you know, like medicine. You look like someone I can trust to tell me the truth. What flavor do you have? The woman looked a little strung-out, the way I feel most of the time. Her Big Gulp shook in her hands, so much that some of it had spilled on the counter near my array of items, selected in a rush because I have not worked up the nerve to endure the grocery store in some time. The Vitamin Water I favor is Revive, a purple concoction tasting vaguely of grapes. I told her and she said, Rhubarb water in a horrified voice that made me laugh. I assured her that I was the last person to be touching a vegetable much less drinking water flavored with those vile little things. Truth is, the woman was right to ask me. I hate drinking water, loathe it. I force it down as if it were gin, sip after small sip, making faces and telling myself it's good for me, an elixir for eternal youth. I have to take so many things I hate, she said. I don't want to hate one more thing.

Earlier in the day, I saw another woman in line ordering ice-cream and water. She had two small children, was exceptionally beautiful, perfectly groomed, well-dressed, and had an aura of calmness that seemed impossible. I was mesmerized by how placid she stayed when one of her boys threw his water on the floor, saying that it was too cold. I don't like it and you can't make me drink cold water, never ever ever ever, he said. She asked the woman at the counter if she had any warm water. The woman, not young, pretty, or rich, looked as if she wanted to smack her, but regained composure and got a cup of it from the sink. When it was my turn, she asked me what I wanted, and I ordered yogurt. The woman offered me some free water for waiting so long behind the mother and children. I wanted to say no, but I took it and forced some of it down. Like so many things that are given freely, like advice and love, it was hard to accept at first, but I did and was thankful for it.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"I drink to find other people less boring." Christopher Hitchens

Cocktail Hour

Drinking short story collection suggestion: Days Mary Robinson

Benedictions and Maledictions

One of my most wonderful students, Sharon Laurents, died yesterday after a long battle with leukemia. Rest in peace, dear Sharon! Many condolences to her family and friends.

On a side note, dear readers, I ask you for civility to others in your comments. I am loathe to monitor comments because I believe that the board tends to right itself. There is room enough for everyone on the board! Please be as kind as possible. Unlike Rodney King, I will not ask why we can't just get along -- I only ask that everyone is treated with kindness, respect, or plenty of space.

Also, Baby Grouchie left the house for the first time in many years to revisit the toy store where he lived before me. He will write about this experience later this week in a piece he has tenatively titled, "Grouchie Leaves Home For the First Time in Some Time in Mommy's Car Snowflake and Was Very Very Afraid But Did Not Cry."

Angels For Every Occasion

Yesterday while driving in a dreadful storm, I saw a car with a faded bumpersticker that said, Never drive faster than your angels can fly which cast me back to the 90s, when angels were all the rage, book upon book touting their life-affirming powers -- Find Your Angel Guide, Guardian Angels Are Here, Angels For Every Occasion. You get the idea. I never thought much about angels (I'm more of a saints and martyrs girl myself) and resisted the notion that people who had died were acting as angels for my wicked soul. I figure that they act like they did in this world, which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. The one angel story I recall from my youth besides Jacob and his long night wrestling with one consisted of a woman who was walking down a deserted road at night. If the storyteller was worth anything, the road would be misting with rain, as dark and foreboding as any John Carpenter movie. The woman walked by a mean-looking dude who did nothing to her as she prayed for her safety. The next day, predictably, someone tells her that there was a rape on the same road she was walking! When she asks why the man didn't attack her, he was said to have reported that she had two huge men walking with her. She'd gasp and say, But I was alone! until she remembered praying for her angels who had appeared as men. The poor second woman was shit out of luck, I suppose. But for the story to work, there has to be someone who reminds you how lucky you are and how many bad things can happen to you if you're not vigilant.

So you can see that this story is a bit galling, not unlike a Pat Buchanan speech, which as the great journalist Molly Ivins joked, It probably sounded better in the original German. Still, I do believe in angels. The Bible was rife with them, most of them complicated as anything, some fallen, some not. Like Jacob, we wrestle with them all the time. I often have dreams that mimic the angel story -- walking in between tall buildings at night, rushing to get somewhere. Sometimes I take the time to look around, see all the beauty that the urban landscape holds. My imaginary city speaks to me in the language of neon and stray wrappers, love and loss. That sort of thing.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"I have been noticing/ how everything loved must/ reach the touch of grief to the lover." Denis Johnson

Cocktail Hour

Jerry Falwell Remembers His First Time

1 glass of scotch

1 copy of Hustler

Drinking novel suggestion: Veronica Mary Gaitskill

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Wednesday!

A Star On Earth -- A Star In Heaven

Years ago, I received one of my favorite gifts, a copy of Todd Hayne's movie Superstar. The movie, all about Karen and Richard Carpenter, is banned by the Carpenter estate (for unauthorized use of their songs) because of its unflattering portrayal of both Karen and Richard, portrayed not by actors but by Barbie and Ken dolls. The elegiac voice of Karen is interspersed with scenes from the Holocaust, wars, and clinical explanations of anorexia nervosa. The main plot plays like strict biography -- the rise and fall of this duo, each with creepy voices speaking through the dolls. As both of the dolls got sicker and more battered by life and the claustrophobic environment of their family, their faces are filed down into sharp edges, black circles are colored underneath the eyes, and the Karen doll is seen reaching for big scary looking boxes of Ex-Lax and bottles of Ipecac. Where to start? What's not to love?! My tape has a fuzzy quality and is interspersed with snippets from the eighties television show, Webster, a time that seems oddly marked by shows where African-American men with serious pituitary disorders play in the role of child/man to an older white authority figure as some sort of advisor/comic relief/disturbing social stereotype.

The person who procured this gem for me said he could find anything. It took him a year to find this movie, the hardest task he'd ever had in this regard. During this time, he was attending classes to cure him of his homosexuality, a religious program called Exodus, as in Exodus from the land of sin and disease, according to their ratty brochures that looked like wedding invitations gone awry. Do you want to find your perfect self under the garbage heap of desire? You bet I do! The program suggested that sexuality was a crucifixion and that it could be changed. File that under the category of not fucking likely. Which leads me back to the movie and Karen's perfect voice. The most affecting scene sums it up -- the Karen doll singing "Top of the World" and fainting in front of an adoring Japanese audience. So much had been sacrificed to the pursuit of beauty and perfection already that almost nothing was left, just the ethereal sound of someone who had managed to put her pain into a beautiful song about a love she would never experience.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Of course, all you have to tell me is that something's not normal and I'll go for it!!" Karen Carpenter

Cocktail Hour

Drinking movie suggestion: Safe

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Tuesday!

You Could See Forever

Years ago, I spent the weekend at the house of a friend and her family. It was a beautiful place that I could only dream of living, a mansion that overlooked a lake. You could, as they say, see forever. Their was wax fruit in the bowl that looked real, candles that never got lit, towels that were only for show, and a beautiful bar containing a plethora of jewel-like liquors. When the sun began to set through the big picture window, you could see heaven in those bottles whose levels never went down. A maid dusted them every week until they gleamed.

The alcohol that everyone drank was hidden with the cleaning supplies in the laundry room. With little to no ceremony, my friends would take out the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and pour large amounts into styrofoam cups. Nobody clinked their cups together or said cheers. One night we ran out and all the liquor stores had closed. What to do? My friend's husband said, I hid some whiskey behind the toilet in case of emergencies. He went to go get the toilet whiskey, and I thought about how nice it must be to think ahead like that. Another dilemma solved with simplicity and grace! I didn't like the idea of drinking whiskey that had been in a bathroom for God knows how long, but I did. To not would have been rude. When I got home, I realized that everything I used was in front of me, that nothing was hidden or merely for display. Unless you counted my heart, which I could wear on my sleeve or lock up in a box and really there wasn't as much difference as one might hope.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"I like the feeling of vanishing." Andy Warhol

Cocktail Hour

Drinking novel suggestion: Exile Blake Nelson

Benedictions and Maledictions

Rest in peace, Christopher of The Sopranos! Three more episodes!

A Graveyard Full Of Dolls

My mother had a story for every occasion, usually along these call and response lines -- you might say, I'm getting a wisdom tooth pulled and she'd say, I knew someone who died getting a wisdom tooth pulled. Ended up in the hospital with a blood infection and died. When I got all four of my badly infected wisdom teeth pulled, I was put under so deeply that I didn't wake up until I was home in bed. I crawled to the telephone and dialed home, told my mother that I did not have to mind her or obey her rules anymore and promptly hung up. The glories of painkiller! I was about twenty-nine when this happened, and my only company for the entire day of pain was a creepy-ass Tigger doll, a gift from my then-boyfriend whose head moved back and forth as if possessed. Tigger spoke, saying things like, How's about let's do some counting? Or my favorite -- How's about sharing a secret? I don't know what we talked about as I worried about getting dry sockets, but I can only imagine that if it was like the phone call to my mother, I spent the entire time saying what I would and would not be doing anymore.

A couple years later, my mother was dead and there would not be any phone calls to make except ones I did not want to make. The most complicated relationship in my life had ended and what was there to say? I think about her often, of course, in the most confused of ways, with great love and great fear. Sometimes I see her in my own expressions and it startles me. I like to think of her at her best -- brave and strong and funny before life turned on her and broke her down. But that's not the whole story. She is, even dead, my ultimate cautionary tale, someone full of life and death, someone lonely beyond belief, someone damaged by a terrible past, infused by a better future, the woman I am most like, my mother.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"I lived in a graveyard full of dolls/ avoiding myself." Anne Sexton

Cocktail Hour

Drinking essay suggestion: Plan B Anne Lamott

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Mother's Day!

The Stoning of St. Stephen

As a child, I longed for God to speak to me. In lieu of this miracle, I went to church after church. Some, as the saying goes, were better than others. And it was here that I got my first writing assignment outside of school and proving that God does have a sense of humor, it was a play. I could pick any biblical story I wanted for the basis. So I dwelled and dwelled until I came up with the stoning of St. Stephen. Of course, I didn't know he was a saint because I didn't go to a Catholic church until I was an adult -- Catholics were verbotten in my evangelical circles. (They pray to saints! And worship Mary! It was two steps away from voodoo. No suprise that I should end up there as an adult.) It wasn't that I loved the story more than any other, but that I hated one particular boy in the church group and thought he would make an excellent Stephen. I argued that we should use real stones for verisimilitude. Small stones, I amended. But real. And we should really throw them. Not at him, but near him.

The play was a masterwork in a Big Chief notepad in pencil with lots of erasings. The stoning scene lasted a very long time. Too long, according to my youth minister. Why all the blood and wailing? he asked. The Bible is a bloody book, I argued. I thought I had already exercised great self-control by erasing the following -- You are an asshole, you person playing Stephen. I hate you, you mean little prick. Nobody knew of my secret loathing. His hanging offense? Watching a tick crawl on my neck and alerting everyone else in the bus except me. I'd been walking around the woods on some godforsaken nature hike (wholesome activities were stressed -- what they didn't know is that those would eventually become opportunities for getting bat-eyed drunk on Everclear in the woods). My play ended up getting performed, but the stoning scene was edited a bit. We got to throw some stones provided we didn't throw them hard. I picked up a few even though I knew I was acting in the flesh. But I didn't care - I was no saint in this play and never would be.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into. " Arthur Schopenhauer

Cocktail Hour

Drinking movie suggestion: All About My Mother

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Saturday!

If I Was Young, Maybe

My mother loved the ocean, was oblivious to its dangers. But true to her nature, she had a whole mess of stories about the bad things that could happen to you in the water. If you ever fall out of a boat, you should float, she'd say. A person can float forever. I, true to my nature, couldn't float at all. I'd try and start to flail about two seconds later, imagining my watery grave. And even though my mother could float, she couldn't in life. She worried about everything, but even she couldn't envision what would happen to her. As she grew sicker and sicker, I'd read medical reference books in an attempt to understand the surgeries she'd have and the after effects. The worst one was the last, a fourteen hour ordeal where she'd have most of her intestines removed and replaced with bags. The last line of the recommendation in the book reads, Explain to patient that her vagina will be removed. The doctors could rebuild it by taking a chunk out of the patient's thigh muscles, an option my mother dismissed. If I was young, maybe, she said. She hadn't reached fifty.

Two days before the surgery, my mother put her feet into the hotel pool near the hospital. It was her last chance to swim, but she she didn't get in the water. After so many years of loving it, she couldn't bring herself to say goodbye or float around like she didn't have a care in the world. Once I swam in an infinity pool, the kind that stops at the edge of the ocean. You feel as if you are in nature with none of the inconvenience -- undertows and sharks, jellyfish and garbage. It looks as if it goes on forever. It doesn't, of course. Nothing does. It stops just where the danger starts. You can't go any farther even if you want.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner

Cocktail Hour

Drinking novel suggestion: American Pastoral Philip Roth

Benedictions and Maledictions

Congratulations to my beloved Pistons for winning against Chicago last night!

People Who Weren't There

In answer to an assignment, a student of mine asked if he could interview his boy scout leader. He's taught me so much about life, my student said. Sounds good, I said, but I thought it would probably be a little uninspired, one of those odes to a great guy. Odes to great guys don't always make the best papers, unfortunately. Writing needs tension to work. My student returned to me, horrified. I went over there on the day I said and he had forgotten about it. He was drunk and in his boxers and dog shit was all over his house. That cheered me up a lot. You have a story, I said. He shook his head. This was the man that told me to always be brave, to have integrity. He said that you could tell a lot about a man by the way he kept himself in the world. He always seemed so together. I wanted to be him when I grew up.

My student wrote a great essay, but could not be consoled about his loss of innocence. I told him that maybe he'd caught the guy on a bad day. No go. You should have seen the place. Years of garbage. And he cursed and yelled at people who weren't there. And he could barely answer my questions. I suppose finding your mentor in a house filled with dog shit and crushed PBR cans does not inspire confidence. I thought about the people I have admired over the years and their secret lives, the things that you don't see. Not everyone has a house that disappoints, but many a soul contains debris that we don't want to see. A woman who had inspired me as a child, whom I had loved deeply, a friend of my mother's who was a teacher, spent every night washing her walls with a toothbrush, had to wear rags on her hands because she'd scrubbed them so raw. It's a skin disease, my mother told me. Don't say anything. I didn't, but I loved her all the more for those strips of gauze that could never entirely conceal what she had done to herself in an attempt to rid herself of anything bad that she might have touched in the world.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Run towards the roar. " Tammy Faye Bakker

Cocktail Hour
Drinking reading suggestion: "The Hunger Artist" Franz Kafka Susan of Buckatunna Queen (www.buckatunnaqueen.blogspot.com) had an excellent Kafka quote on her beautiful, thoughtful blog yesterday -- it put me in mind of him and his fantastic stories. He's one of the bleakest writers ever and yet he said he laughed a lot when reading his stories to friends. We should all be so lucky! For laughing and for friends who allow us to read our stories to them.)

Benedictions and Maledictions
All love and prayers to Tammy Faye Bakker who is going through her final journey to the next world. And much love to her children, Tammy Sue and Jay. If you haven't checked out Jay's Revolution Church site, do!

Congrats to Jim of JR's Thumbprint (www.jrtomlinson.blogspot.com) for one year of posting every single day. He makes it look easy. It is not easy. Way to go, Jim. Check out his rocking video from back in the day!

And The Sun Shall Turn To Darkness

When my spirit is in shadow and my thoughts turn to my internal darkness, massive shortcomings, and hopeless weaknesses, I try to dwell in past glories such as my award of two dinky girl scout badges (reading and firebuilding -- these were all I really needed because it covered the ground -- studious and destructive)or future hope, like someone will give me Pistons tickets for the game tonight and I will be transported to Chicago in a limo containing many bottles of champagne, city of broad shoulders or little cat feet or something like that, and I will sit in the stands and drink overpriced beer and the glorious ballet that is basketball will go on in front of me and even though I will surely die, it will not be in that beautiful setting surrounded by people engaged in a simulation of warriors of old. Worry will drop away like a sweater that always itched, and time will stop.

I always hated being young when I was, drawn to the battle-scarred and damaged. Always hated the bullshit of enjoying the sunny day that is your youth. Was already afraid by then, hoping to escape. But the only way out is through. My mother's lover's wife once told me that to get something out of your eye, you have to be patient, pull the lid down and let it work itself out. Anything else you did would make it worse. I still have the delicate green and silver fish she gave me, a charm for a bracelet or necklace. It looks one way in the sun and another way when inside. It glints against my skin when I chose to wear it, like something from far below the sea that you only glimpse in passing and you don't know whether to be horrified and transfixed and so you are both.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"If I raise my arms in the blind dark/why can't you hoist me up?" Mary Karr

Cocktail Hour

Drinking accroutement suggestion: The Lewis bag for martinis - it's an old-fashioned bag and tiny bat to beat your ice to small pieces before putting it in the shaker. It makes a huge difference in the drinks!

Benedictions and Maledictions

Congratulations to Jim of JR's Thumbprints (www.jrtomlinson.blogspot.com) for finishing one year of blog tomorrow! Jim has made some veiled threats about quitting, but not before posting videos tomorrow of him performing in an eighties rock and roll band. I'm thinking that we will check it out if we know what is good for us. Good luck, Jim!

That Lonely Texas Landscape

During my first long distance drive, my car died between Denton and Forth Worth, on the same strip of highway that Henry Lee Lucas frequented for years in his killing spree, burying dozens of girls in that lonely Texas landscape. My car had cost a little less than a thousand dollars and was a brilliant gold color that gleamed in the sun. I couldn't go anywhere without alerting people from miles around thanks to the awful screaming noise that it made while it was running. As I drove into that particular night, I could see my headlights getting dimmer and dimmer and a cold stake of fear drove itself into my body. Ever since my rape, I had the odd feeling that if I prepared for anything, it would happen so I drove around without any money or protection. These were the days before cell phone and the nearest filling station was at least twenty-five miles away. The car died and so did a little piece of my sanity. My only choice was to flag down a car or crawl into a ditch. After a long minute of pounding my head into the steering wheel, I got out and a car stopped. I hoped not to see Henry Lee or his evil twin cousin Frankie Lee or any asshole with three names. Three names almost never indicates anything good.

This story has such a happy ending I could have never written it. The man who stopped drove, I shit you not, a black Porsche. He had stood up his date so he pulled a good Samaritan move to improve his karma and drove me back to the nearest town so I could call my dad. He let me choose the radio station. "I felt so bad, but I couldn't bring myself to see my girlfriend again. It's over and she's going to hate me. I wonder if she's still at Bennigan's?" I thanked God over and over under my breath, leading my new friend to probably wonder at his luck at picking up some crazy muttering loon. I never saw the man in the black Porsche again; he dropped me off and told me not to worry about it, that he was glad to help. I would drive that strip of highway hundreds of times over the years, and now it's a lot more built up than it used to be. But there are still lonely stretches where nothing is on the horizon except the kindness of strangers and the ghosts of girls who, as they say, weren't so lucky.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out." Richard Brautigan

Cocktail Hour

Drinking documentary suggestion: Jesus Camp

Benedictions and Maledictions

Congratulations to my beloved Pistons for crushing Chicago last night!

Christmas in July

This morning I woke up dreaming that I had written a story about a lounge singer/local celebrity in her mid-fifties. The story focused on her intense grief over a long ago divorce and her inability to make a Christmas album in July. In my dream, I felt it was a really good story, the kind of thing I don't normally write, something that has nothing to do with my life. I cannot sing, cannot entertain unless you count the one dance routine I did for a dementia clinic audience which was a mercifully distracted crew wearing paper crowns from Burger King (times were hard and props had to be obtained for free) to witness my Zelda Fitzgerald moment and despite my penchant for saying, One more time for the cheap seats, I'm not a dramatic person.

But in my dream, I felt what she felt, the acute grief, the exhaustion of performing all the time, the sadness of someone who did not feel as if the show could go on. Once a friend of mine told me, I'm sick of washing my hair. So I stopped. I felt that this was an unfortunate turn of events given the oil slick her head become in a mere week and told her that she or I could pay someone to wash it for her for the time being until she felt better. But it just goes on and on. And someone has to touch you when you have your head under all that water. She shuddered. I hadn't lived long enough to understand the burden of perpetual care, how bored you could become. But my character kept getting stuck on the line, Repeat the sounding joy in "Joy to the World." For years, it's been my favorite Christmas carol. But in the dream, it became something ominous, a warning, but of what, who can tell? It's not anywhere near Christmas.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"People around here are starting to get sick of my bullshit." David Gates

Cocktail Hour

Drinking novel suggestion: Jernigan David Gates

Benedictions and Maledictions

To start, the writer always gets the worst of it in The Sopranos, one of the many reasons I love the show. And speaking of writing, congratulations to Charles at Razored Zen (www.charlesgramlich.blogspot.com) on the publication of his new book! Check it out, dear readers! And last but not least, go Pistons, the hardest working team in the NBA. They are on a streak and now face Chicago again. It's too sad to see Big Ben in that evil Bulls get-up, but the rest is fine, hell, more than fine. Happy Monday!

Girl On Fire

The worst picture I never took was an experimental shot on the part of my wedding photographer who superimposed my face over my then-husband standing at the altar. I looked like a huge looming nightmare which I suppose is what photographers mean when they talk about "emotional truth." My mother and would-be mother-in-law both looked grim and trying not to be, the adult equivalent of the forced child's smile on Santa's lap. None of the pictures from this event were particularly inspired except the one of me dancing with my father, a shot that's hard to screw up under the worst of circumstances. My dad looks happy in the picture and thank God that one didn't capture the emotional truth -- his usually stoic self took to his bed for two days and cried after the big day. At the announcement of my divorce, a day I had dreaded, both of my parents, who liked my then-husband, looked happy beyond belief. I wish I'd thought to hire a photographer for that day.

Even though photography is my favorite visual art, I have a complicated relationship with it. My friend Hank actually punched someone for taking a picture of him entering a party. He spent the rest of the night trying to figure out who he'd hit (one of the problems of being blind and hitting someone in a fit of rage, I suppose) and feeling bad about it. He pulled a Sean Penn before Mr. Penn had! That's bad-ass! He hated pictures and said that if you were having a good time, nobody ever thought to bring out a camera. But I still love taking shots (it suits my personality -- even the word choice is aggressive, taking shots) as a way of understanding things. Still, I don't know how much reality one can capture, either as the photographer or the subject. Shortly after this picture was taken, the bubble burst all over my eye. I rubbed it into my contact for maximum pain and had to take the contact out, had to rinse out my eye and cursed a long time. I'd already burned myself in the torchy inferno that was my second birthday cake trying to get the camera to capture that perfect moment of wonder and awe before the wax melted into the frosting in little pools that resembled blood. It takes a lot of work to look natural, relaxed, and happy, but hey, that's an emotional truth that I've always known.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"I came to New York to see what I could see -- and find the living part." Edie Sedgwick

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Back To Black Amy Winehouse

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Sopranos night!

How The Mighty Have Fallen

Nothing bad has ever happened to me. Okay, that's a lie! I love starting the morning that way. Let me rephrase -- nothing bad has ever happened to me that has been broadcast over the internet. But that's not entirely true either. I tell lots of stories on myself each day and post them right here for you, dear readers. But nobody has ever videotaped me in a state of slurring misery like David Hasselhoff and had the courtesy of putting it on YouTube where it could be played over and over again by assholes like myself who enjoy the occasional trainwreck, provided we're not in it. It's an oh how the mighty have fallen sort of thing -- ie, there's the man who brought us the brilliance that is Knight Rider and Baywatch on the floor, being told by his teenage daughter that there would be "no more alcohol or else you lose your show, Dad."

It's Cinco de Mayo which puts me in mind of tequila, a mostly evil substance (I'm speaking of the cheap stuff -- El Torro comes to mind) that has led to two particularly bad moments, both on this date years ago. Very few people know what the hell happened historically on Cinco de Mayo except that we are treated to an endless display of Corona commercials which somehow has managed to become an integral part of decorating along with the chili pepper lights which remain popular in Texas. I am no exception when it comes to my own Cinco de Mayo history. I can only say that I'm glad nobody had a video camera or camera of any kind. Not that I was rolling around the floor, slurring my words like poor David H. Not that I said, I think I'm going to take off my clothes now before someone pulled me out the door. No, nothing like that. Let's just be glad I didn't have a show to lose. Kit, the groovy talking car on Knight Rider, would have never made it out of the parking lot if I had been behind the wheel.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Life is short, but desire, desire is long." Jane Hirshfield

Cocktail Hour

Drinking novel suggestion: Cat's Eye Margaret Atwood

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

A Snail Without A Home

When I was a child, one of my chores was to salt the slugs that made their way to our sidewalk after a rain. I couldn't look at them because of my fear and disgust so I'd salt them in a panic, not caring how much I wasted, and ran back in the house. Don't be such a little pansy, Michelle, my mother would say. And you didn't have to use so much salt. I haven't given thought to them in years -- they have receded in my imagination into a way of description, ie, I'm feeling sluggish, until a few months ago when a child I adore picked one up and told me that she thought it was a snail without a home. The slug sat in her tiny little hand, and for once I looked at it, not nearly as horrified as I thought, although I did have my eye on the nearby salt shaker just in case I should be called on for my former duties.

She played with the slug for a little while before returning it to the dirt. I had really looked at it for the first time, noticing how intricate it was, how small. The ones in my memory were huge and icky beyond belief; I'd have died before touching one. And in the interest of full disclosure, I did not touch this one. But I felt a little sorry for it, all the vulnerability it embodied. A snail without a home. Such sadness! The moment passed as they all do; the talk went to other things. Everyone washed their hands before dinner, but the slug had left an invisible trail over slime in my mind except that I realized that it didn't have to be slime; it could be a veil or a scrim. It could be beautiful if you didn't know what it was.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"To gaze is to think." Salvador Dali

Cocktail Hour

Drinking book suggestion: The Last Days of Dead Celebrities Mitchell Fink

Benedictions and Maledictions

Congratulations to the Golden State Warriors for beating the Mavericks! I hate Dallas and am so glad they got beat in the first round -- ha! I once read somewhere that there were two times in your life you could do something really hard -- when you don't know you can't do it and when someone tells you that you can't do it. They aren't my beloved Pistons, but I'm still impressed. Congratulations!

The Dangerous, Beautiful, Murderous Streets of Detroit

When I was young girl, I'd watch my mother and her friends get ready for a night out, wearing jeans so tight that they would have to use wire hangers to zip them. This was the seventies, a time I still love, and sometimes they'd go out drinking and sometimes they'd do something strange, like go to a rattlesnake roundup or see the Amazing Kreskin. What I recall about these nights was the preparation, a few glasses of Wild Turkey and the subsequent haphazard application of mascara, gossip about who was in love and who wasn't (is there anything more important?), and a few tips about beauty, common wisdom about having to choose between your figure or your face at a certain point, meaning that if you kept your weight down, your face looked aged and if you didn't, well, you looked heavier than you had as a girl. I loved watching the women, loved thinking about love, and loved the idea of being out on the town at night. I knew I would grow up and leave my small town, go to live in a big city, and have adventures of my own.

And when I was my mother's age all those nights I had watched her, I did move to Detroit proper, renting an upper flat that eventually my landlords sold, forcing me to rent somewhere else. For years after moving that place on Courville, I had terrible dreams of being lost on the dangerous, beautiful, murderous streets of Detroit. No one knew me, and I could not find my way back to the old house, which had become an enchanted vista as is the way of fairy-tales. There was a sadness to these visions so deep that I could not shake it even after waking up. In those dreams, my face changed sometimes -- sometimes it was me as a young woman and then me substantially aged. The ghost of past and future, I suppose. My figure, though, always remained the same -- small and alone in the midst of all those looming buildings, unable to find the place I once called home and unable to give up looking. I realized it was the last place of my youth before anyone I loved deeply had died, before I had lost relationships that could not be replaced, where the days were splayed before me, like shimmering jewels, money before you spend it, all possibility, no regret.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"There is an undercurrent, the real life, beneath all appearances everywhere." Robert Henri

Cocktail Hour

Drinking cake suggestion: Birthday cake! Like the kind Baby Grouchie's alter ego is eating in the last post.

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Thursday!

Happy Birthday, Mommy!

Today is Mommy's birthday, but I do not know how old she is. She tells me not to worry, that she's a young mommy and won't die soon, but I still would like to know. Anyway, I haven't been writing lately which Mommy says is natural in the early stages. She is very smart, my mommy! And probably not that old! Anyway, if I could, I would make myself small like the little grouchie in this picture and get her a cake to show her how much I love her. As it is, I am still too afraid to leave the house. I made it to the window so far. But in my little form, I can go anywhere, even to a cake store where people in aprons would ask me what I wanted. Mommy says there's a very depressing Raymond Carver story about a birthday cake that she will read to me tonight if I want. And I want! Mommy tells the best bedtime stories, usually in very clipped sentences with lots of dramatic hand gestures. I will see if I can leave the house tomorrow! Happy birthday, Mommy!

You Killed The Patient

A woman who did not like me very much once told me, "You'd fit right in with my family. Nobody liked to have fun." This tragic pronouncement was in reaction to my deep and abiding hatred of board and card games. The last game I remember playing with pleasure as a child was Ants in the Pants. If you are not familiar with this joyful repast, it consists of trying to flick plastic ants into an small freestanding pair of pants. I also admit to enjoying Operation. I played it often during my childhood, my fellow participants wearing the anxious look of an unpopular president or NBA coach during the playoffs. One "operated" on the provided patient. If you accidentally touched anything other than the organ with the tweezers provided, you set off a large buzzing noise to let you know you had killed the patient.

Perpetually shaky by nature, it did not seem like a natural fit. After all, the organs were small and their removal and reentry were precarious at best. But like a lot of things one loves, I got good at it. I did not take my skills elsewhere, though. I did not become a doctor or board game queen. I did not take my show on the road. It was enough to remove a pancreas and not set the buzzer off; it was enough to be someone, if not fun, at least competent for a little while.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh. " Jack Kerouac

Cocktail Hour
Drinking memoir suggestion: Dreaming Carolyn See

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!

Beauty, Charm, Dance Ability, Attitude

As a little girl, I envied other little girls who had either a blue satin Dallas Cowboy cheerleader jacket or a rabbit fur coat. I had a dull beige-colored jacket that I called the camel because of its uninspired color and workman-like construction. It had no glamour and living in a relatively hot climate such as Texas, I did not value function over style. I'd see the other girls in their winter jackets and feel a tight knot of envy grown in my heart like a tumor. With a jacket like theirs, my life would change. On the playground, I'd get to be Sue Ellen instead of Pamela when we reenacted the television show Dallas. I'd get to be JR's wife instead of his miscreant brother. If I had the prized Dallas Cowboy cheerleader jacket, I'd be rooting for America's team. Either way, the camel did not lead to this road. If it said anything, the message was schoolmarm.

Years later, I would teach some actual Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders because of my vicinity to Dallas. These girls were stunningly beautiful and a little dim -- beauty, charm, dance ability, attitude and then academics were the order of their days. I was shocked to find that my envy had turned into an odd sort of affection for these girls, the way you feel toward a childhood toy that you had loved deeply for a long time before moving to something else.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change." William S. Burroughs

Cocktail Hour

Drinking nonfiction suggestion: Cleaving Dennis and Vicki Covington

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy May Day!