Fame, Fortune, Your One True Love

My friend Hank loved Halloween, and I have a picture of him on the bulletin board above my desk holding a plastic orange skeleton on his lap near a small Christmas tree in one of the many single-girl, one person Christmas tree because what's the point of setting up a full-size one apartments I have lived in over the years. Like many people, he dressed a little on the Halloweenish side all the time and so for the big day, he'd put on a pair of fangs and a trenchcoat -- voila, a vampire gangster! He'd often play the blues at some dive bar for the holiday, the scary Robert Johnson blues, the I sold my soul at the crossroads stuff, the late night, ain't no blues 'cept between a man and a woman that's in love blues.

A lot of blues songs revolve around the idea of selling your soul to the Devil for something on earth -- fame, fortune, your one true love. But the way I see it, we sell our souls a little at a time in increments so small that we hardly know we're doing it. I once knew a woman who drank gin out of the cap of its bottle every morning because she felt that pouring it into a glass would mean that she had become an alcoholic. She called them her "wake-ups" because they stopped her hands from shaking. And so it is. The Devil gets his due, whoever that asshole is. For those who don't believe in evil, well, that's the biggest deception of all. We tell ourselves that we're okay and that we're not going to ever end up at a crossroads, that the crossroads is as far off as death or the next thing we agreed to do that we don't want to do. But that day comes for all of us, the day of temptation and reckoning and whether we mete out our fate in capfuls or straight from the bottle, and we will drink.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"The face of fear I display in my novels is not the pale specter from the sunken grave, nor is it the thing that goes bump in the night." V.C. Andrews

Cocktail Hour

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Halloween!

Something To Do In Bed

Dear readers,

Today, Thursday, and Friday, I'll be posting the new installment of my novella. I'll be back tomorrow with a special Halloween post, of course! Happy Devil's Night from Detroit!


Something To Do In Bed

On the last night of the car show, I watch one of the pregnant kitchen workers slug down glass after glass of leftover champagne. David Levine, that miserable prick, has granted us our choice of all the leftovers as we help clean up the horrors of the week behind us. I take off my heels and catch my reflection in the mirror above the sink, my eyes lined with black rings that have started to bleed through layers of concealer.

"I can’t believe she’s drinking," Kara says. "Does she know how bad that is for the baby?" She tugs at her yellow get-up, her ample breasts threatening to spill out at any moment. The pregnant girl looks our way and her friend says, "Don’t listen to that uptight bitch. Baby be a little bit happy, is all."

I hope to hell that Karen gets her breasts in order and we can finish our work without her saying anything else. Kara and I, both graduates of Marygrove and being social workers, have a lot in common, but Kara has the fervor of the true believer, a strain of social worker that burns out fast, which is fine because Kara is engaged to a medical student and wants to have a bunch of children to stay at home with. In three years, she’ll probably be pregnant and we won’t have enough in common to constitute five minutes of conversation, all her passion channeled, her single life a distant dream of sorrow and mystery.

We all pick at the platters of food, none of it looking good this late in the game, but food nonetheless. I decide to have some flat champagne as well, my first drink in a week. Kara’s fiance picks us up tonight, thank God, because my car died. Despite periodically dumping oil into it, it won’t start and isn’t worth getting fixed.

"Can we leave?" Kara asks no one in particular. "I’m sure Rob is waiting." She chews at a nail, ripping a strip of it off and spitting it on the floor.

In a few minutes, David Levine comes in and tells us what a wonderful job everyone has done, how this is the best group of people he’s ever worked with at the car show. He’s doing good cop, trying to secure loyalty to being exploited yet another year and by giving us access to all the leftover food and booze the real people didn’t want. We are finally being asked to join the corporate family, the sweetness at the end of a long abuse. The small kitchen teems with weariness and relief, the relief of being at the end of a hard, cold week. I look at the pregnant girl, asleep on the step, covered with a windbreaker draped like a blanket. I wonder if the baby is happy. Someone should be.

Kara and I ride back to Grosse Pointe Park with her fiance, the man training to be a doctor who bitches through the entire ride about the fact that he had to circle the building, not once, not twice, but three times before he saw us. Kara makes him pull over several times so she could vomit in the snow, and my nose started to bleed again as it had done off and on all during the car show, prompting much speculation about a cocaine addiction, one of the few things I‘ve never tried. Even as bleak as everything seems, the ride makes me wish for a close female friend, something I had never valued or been all that good at. I feel the good kind of contempt well up for the fiance as my blood dried and caked around my nose. Kara, beautiful and smart, allows an awful man to treat her like shit. For what? Because he was going to be a doctor? I think of all the doctors of my childhood, the men my mother was forever revering and hating, the one I knew she was having an affair with. I never thought much of doctors one way or another -- just someone else delivering God’s bad news. Not my idea of a good time, no matter how much money they make.

At the end of the ride, Kara hands me her number and tells me to keep in touch. I know I won’t, but I appreciate the gesture. It has been delightful to have a companion for a week, a friend so untroubled and beautiful. Even her darkest secret, that she had been molested once by a family friend and decided not to have sex until she was 21 as a result, strikes me as mild and innocent. I nod in sympathy and refrain from saying anything. What is there to say? I put her number at the bottom of my purse where it will mingle with all the other forgotten receipts and crumbling mints, the debris from a life that does not get much attention.

Control The Night

One of the most mystifying ads I see while driving through Detroit is a billboard for Seagrams gin with the caption "Sip, Sip, Snip, Snip." It shows a cartoon scene (think cover art from Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up" album) of a woman drinking and cutting a man's hair. This strikes me as a horrible combination, much like eating gum and nuts at the same time or a horrible cheese I tried once in Frankenmuth (a strange little Christmasland a couple hours outside of Detroit famous for chicken dinners and waiters wearing lederhosen --what's not to love?) -- chocolate cheddar. When combined with the other gin ads that they run -- Control the Night and Make Him Tell You His Secrets makes for an interesting triumvirate: an updated Samson and Delilah in the heart of Detroit with a propensity for gin. If you love me, Delilah said, you will tell me your whole heart. In modern times, all she would have needed is a lot of booze or a bag of heroin, and Samson would have gladly hopped up into the barber chair and asked for a buzz cut while telling himself that his strength didn't matter all that much and that he could always get it back, the lie we believe for as long as we can when we have given too much away.

Gin is not my poison of choice -- it makes me giddy, then depressed and usually black-out drunk, not something I aspire to, no matter how much I love John Cheever's writing. It goes down way too easy, the taste of a Christmas tree on the tongue. As for controlling the night, it's an idea that I love, but could never buy. As much of a handle as we might have on ourselves, it's tentative at best, a thin veneer that is always in danger of cracking. The night is outside us and inside us and reflected in neon puddles by a moon that is always full. And with our blood full of things that will kill us, we will never die, but merely be covered by black leaves, the kind you see in magazines and window displays advertising Halloween decorations for children and adults alike.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic." W. H. Auden

Cocktail Hour
Drinking novel suggestion: Perfume Patrick Suskind

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Monday!

Charlie Brown Isn't Used To Winning, So Thank You

When I was a little girl, I had a 45 record of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and in the summer when I felt like making myself cry, I would lock myself in my room and play it over and over again, the melancholy voices of the children singing against Vince Guiraldi's famous jazz tune and transport myself into the season, that even as it is deemed for children, was tinged with sorrow. Reading David Michaelis' biography of Charles Shulz, I'm again reminded of the complicated, subversive, lonely quality of Peanuts. Much has been made of this complicated portrait of the most important cartoonist of the last century; his deep longing for his dead parents, his tendency toward coldness in regards to his wife and children, his phobias about leaving his house for any length of time, his affairs, his obsession with his comic strip to the exclusion of everything else. Like every other genius, he sacrificed nearly everything at the pyre of art. If read carefully, the comic strips document his internal state. And he could imagine doing nothing else. Like many talented people, he understood his brilliance, but he distrusted it and lived in fear of losing his success. When asked what he would do if he wasn't a cartoonist, he answered simply, "I'd be dead."

In an age when children's television is full of thinly veiled "message" characters like Dora the Explorer ("We found it together! Teamwork!"-- Does anybody who remembers childhood actually buy this?) and mind-numbing lessons like "Blues Clues," I miss Charlie Brown and the gang. The perpetual loser, Charlie Brown stands for all of us in our longings, both as children and adults. We see our sadness writ large and also the ability to rise from the ashes -- I had forgotten that when Snoopy's Van Gogh burns up in a fire, he replaces it with an Andrew Wyeth. When Charles Shulz received his first big award, he accepted it saying, "Charlie Brown isn't used to winning, so thank you." And Christmas is coming way too soon now, with all its Charlie Brown Christmas trees that aren't spectacular but just need a little love to become so, enough to bring a person to tears in any season.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." Andrew Wyeth

Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: Otis Blue Otis Redding

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Sunday! Grouchie will be visiting his first art gallery on Halloween! He's been having panic attacks this week, but promises Mommy he will leave the house next week to see the brilliant new photography exhibit at the DIA East.

Happy Halloween!

Here's the Halloween pictures for Saturday! Hope you guys enjoy the weekend! The skeleton in the background was my Halloween present from my dear friend Shawn. Thanks Bamms!

The Next Story You Write

The other day I overheard someone with a shrill voice complaining about not hearing human voices anymore. It's all the technology, the e-mail, the war, she said to her companion. I was trying to focus on the work at hand, but found myself beset by their conversation and unable to concentrate. The small modicum of pride I had about being able to write despite distraction flew away, and I found all the advice I give students about making a space for yourself was useless. And thinking that dreadful thought --my best stories I've already told. But maybe that's not true, though, maybe my best story is waiting for me like a UPS package on my porch, waiting to be opened. Maybe I'm going to revise an old story and find something even better underneath, a lost world of memory and love. Maybe, I thought, you need to go home and watch reruns of Charmed to get the creative juices flowing, steal a plot line or two, work from there. Whatever the case, I needed a spell to make the two people with extremely loud voices who never heard human voices anymore go away.

You want to write, but there's a part of you that you cannot love. You want to be devoted, to live the life of the true believer, but part of you wants to waste time watching bad television and drinking Big Gulps. One of my teachers always said that the key to writing was to induce a creative trance. What this meant I cannot entirely know. There's a lot of waiting involved and nothing comes naturally. Just like love or drugs; you will have to suffer for what you want. You will have to give yourself over to it, that suffering and by the end, you will have something. What you do with it is the next story you write.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!" John Irving

Cocktail Hour
Drinking biography suggestion: Schulz and Peanuts David Michaelis

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Friday!

It's The Great Pumpkin!

Dear readers,

Halloween is soon upon us, as is the full moon. So things are extra-crazy! In lieu of my usual two paragraph rant/story/anecdote, I'd like to ask you what your favorite Halloween traditions are. I like watching "It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown." Part of me always believes that the Great Pumpkin will arrive, no matter how many times I see the show.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"I have great luck. I'm used to people dying and going away. Not used to it exactly - but I expect it. Like, whenever people go off on a trip, I save their phone messages because I think they might die." Rose McGowan

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: Grindhouse

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!

Those Who Are Of The Night

After Tennessee Williams' lover Frank died, he spent seven years in a deep depression, unable to write well or enjoy himself, overmedicating himself with a cocktail of alcohol and pills, a great tragedy for someone with such a brilliant and generous spirit, someone who manages to make both Truman Capote and Gore Vidal look lovely in his memoirs, someone who wrote the beautiful prayer for those who are wild at heart trapped in cages. Which damn near says it all, those beautiful spirits whose pictures adorn my walls, people who brought great joy to others while systematically destroying themselves in the process, exacting a huge psychic cost, a bill that ultimately would be paid in blood, both their own and the people they loved to the point of distraction and madness.

I once met a woman who had known Janis Joplin. She said, "Well, she was great when she was on, but you wouldn't want to live with her. She spent a lot of time either self-destructing or reading." We set on a course, but seldom count the cost. I come from a place far far away from where I am now, not geographically so much, but emotionally. And like anyone coming off a plane that has taken you somewhere so fast that you don't have time to catch your breath, I feel a little off-kilter, like I'm in two time zones at once. The Catholic Church got rid of purgatory or limbo last year, but I still believe it exists, that sad place where Tennessee Williams found himself trapped for so long, and where we all find ourselves every now and then, unable to shake the sadness of our heart and move onto the next thing, whatever that may be.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"In my beginning is my end." T. S. Eliot

Cocktail Hour
Drinking literary journal suggestion: Gargoyle

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!

The Letter We Write To The World

A dear friend of mine was talking to me on the phone as I cleaned out my basement, that great repository of the past and many, many outfits that I cannot part with no matter how outdated, and we began to discuss people we knew and their various mental afflictions, a favorite subject to be sure, and my friend pointed out that often we love our sicknesses, that they define us in some fundamental way, a letter we write to the world. I don't know how I feel about this, but I suspect there's a lot of truth in what she says. She's of a religious mindset and pointed out that before Jesus healed anyone, he was always asking them if they wanted to be well, thereby positing desire as a prerequisite for change.

As a rule, I don't watch reality television, mostly because I think most fiction narratives have more truth to them. But I have a confession to make -- I love Danny Bonaduce and will watch him do damn near anything on television from shooting himself up with steroids to downing Vicodan and vodka, from begging his wife Gretchen for sex, to playing with his kids. It's all equally compelling because he comes from a place of such self-torture and sickness. One senses that his entire life is the camera; he becomes real in front of it. And thereby he embodies a fascinating paradox -- he's both completely authentic and always acting. During the last few episodes of Breaking Bonaduce, Danny went through a conversion experience and subsequent baptism. It wasn't that surprising; he's always played the extremes. He's unwell and well all at the same time. He falls and redeems himself over and over. This is what makes him the train wreck we love to watch. Does he want to be well? Not really and most definitely. And so we go to the well with him, waiting for his next move, the endless fight between desire and downward spiral becoming something that try as we might, we cannot deny.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I hate acting. I try to be." Joaquin Phoenix

Cocktail Hour
Drinking poetry suggestion: The Door Margaret Atwood

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday! And many thanks to all the support and input I received when I began writing what eventually became the extended version of "The Ceiling Or The Floor." The Iowa Review accepted the final version (December 2008) so I can't reprint it here, but thanks to all my readers who went along for the ride when I wrote the first two paragraphs of it.

Food You Don't Touch

You fall in love, preferably in a place where the light is kind, where you can't see the future with all its impossibly steep switchbacks that will leave you gasping for breath. There should be drinks that you gulp and food that you don't touch. You should be wearing something beautiful for the date and well, it doesn't really matter what he wears, he looks good in everything. You should not talk about your exes, not right away. Make no mistake -- they are in this story as well, hungry ghosts dying to make their presence known. When asked why you broke up, you might say, We were just such different people instead of he fucked my best friend and told me the night before my birthday when I had the flu. After all, this is your narrative now. At least you believe it is and that's all that matters.

Some culture leave food out for dead people at certain times of year. As a child I once knew a man who set a place for his dead wife and scooped a modest amount of food onto her plate every night (even in the afterlife he assumed she'd still be on a diet). And someone who bought her dead son gifts every Christmas, scores of them after he'd died in a car accident coming home for a visit. A little obsessed with death myself, I found these gestures touching and sad. And then I fell in love and understood. You leave the date and you know, you know that something will happen; your life will change. And you long for the old life and long for the new and you find yourself doing a post-mortem on the past, scanning it for clues, like old newspapers microfiche, one headline after another. You feel you're getting closer to something, to some sort of saving knowledge. And you stay for a very long time until you become a ghost, and you hope someone sets out some food and presents for you even if you aren't in any position to enjoy them.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"In love there are two things - bodies and words." Joyce Carol Oates

Cocktail Hour
Grouchie's Afternoon Cocktail!













Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Monday!

Can Make-Up Hide The Wounds Of Our Oppression?

"Not much is on the level here," a friend commented to me as we were examining costumes for Halloween. We'd been glancing through the women's selections, most of which catered to fantasies of being sick and helpless (the classic nurse/candy striper) to the sexy through domination (cops) to the outright bizarre, particularly an Alice in Wonderland outfit that bordered on mild society-sanctioned pedophilia. As an adult man or woman, you can dress up like a baby which brings to mind a period of time when adults were often seen carrying pacifiers as fashion statements. I looked at a fair number of tights, one of which offered the wearer a version of scarred legs, an image so jolting in this age of self-mutilation that I had to back away. In the spirit of full confession, I did buy the ones with a barb-wire design on them. As for make-up, I didn't need any -- my every day make-up is very Halloweeny and whenever I get my nails done, the woman doing them inevitably is shocked by my choice of black as opposed to the predictable palate of neutrals that most of my companions pick. Going to a Halloween party? the last one asked to which I said, My whole life is kind of a Halloween party.

Which is true. One of my students suggested that I dress up like a vampire cheerleader for the holiday this year to which I replied that I wanted to do something that wasn't so close to my regular look. I once saw a picture of a woman carrying a sign that read -- "Can Make-Up Hide The Wounds Of Our Oppression?" I thought about that for a long time, thought about the ways we try and hide all of our pain, to tamp it down, make it okay for everybody else. But on Halloween, we can wear it on the outside. We can be whomever we would like to for the moment, no matter how sick, no matter how transparent. Our desires and fears can consume us for a little while in front of everyone else. We can be sexy or scary. Or if we're really lucky, we can be both.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose." Langston Hughes

Cocktail Hour













Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Sunday! Watch this section for the debut of "The Holy Pear" and Grouchie's first visit to an art museum next week! My condolences to my fellow midwesterners who had to endure any "Sweetest Day" garbage yesterday.

The Old Miami

Here's some pictures from the Old Miami, a fantastic bar in downtown Detroit. Happy Saturday to all!

Pain From An Old Wound

Autumn makes me nostalgic for other autumns, falls to which I will never return and the whole world is dying, the leaves surround us, so beautiful in their final hour. I would take such loveliness over the spring given my nature -- I long not to be renewed mostly because of my own moral failings and laziness -- growth is a lot of work and often painful, but to be reminded of other times. And I suspect I am not alone in this -- most of the spells that show up in books and that people search for are about making lovers return and about remembering the past or forgetting it, presumably because it is too painful to endure. The present often doesn't hold up -- we are too close to it and need too much from it. Only sometimes can we see it for what it is and then we lose it by the very act of observation.

We are thoughtless in the fall, the season of pumpkins and mischief and the colored lights that line the windows, the witches that have flown into trees. It's the time of masks and spells and costumes; we can hide ourselves, lose ourselves in nostalgia, which began as a medical term meaning pain from an old wound. The trap of nostalgia is that we cannot return to the place we long for -- it is time and memory and doesn't exist. The leaves crunch under our feet, so brilliant in their hues. We can collect them, of course, press them into photo albums, take pictures of them to our heart's content, but we can never capture the abundance.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cocktail Hour
Drinking literary journal suggestion: Gertrude

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Friday! And happy birthday to my mother and a toast for when I see her again, together in Heaven.

Black And White Pictures Of Each Other

In high school, most of my male friends were gay, not out, mind you, but most assuredly of the love that dare not speak its name, at least not in Mineral Wells, Texas in the late eighties. It wasn't that hard to hide -- this is the decade that embraced George Michaels as a straight man in his teeny-tiny white shorts dancing with his old school chum in video after video imploring us "to wake him up before you go go." I spent a fair amount of time sitting around exquisitely decorated bedrooms of my buddies, talking about movies and art and whether Morissey was superior to the The Cure. One of my friends said that we should call ourselves "the funsters" (if this wasn't a tip-off, I'm not sure what would be) even though all we ever did was dress up, take arty black and white pictures of each other, and pick out ensembles to wear to Captain D's when we got to go to the big city of Ft. Worth. I said we should be "the gloomsters" (given the music we were listening to, those dreary longing-filled songs that sound so good now -- just like big Texas hair and Members Only jackets -- here taste gives way to nostalgia) but that never stuck. The funsters it was.

My straight male paramours were of two minds about my friends. While understanding instinctively that they provided no sexual threat, they also understood that they would be sized up under the funsters' ever-watchful eyes and often found wanting. That guy is a jackass, one of the funsters would proclaim about Boyfriend A. I miss Boyfriend B, one might lament. He could do cartwheels. (I often dated gymnasts in those days and their athletic prowess awed the funsters.) I can do a cartwheel, I'd exclaim, but they did not care. I'd been doing cartwheels for years. No one gave a rat's ass even when I learned to do back flips. But I couldn't complain. I had great friends who would sit around and talk. I never had to do anything to impress them; they accepted me completely, my total dorkiness and all. As for back flips, those would come in handy later -- as I got older and my romantic relationships demanded more time and attention, sacrifices that I would have never imagined making in my younger, idealistic days, I'd think back to the back flips, how hard they were to learn and how if you didn't keep doing them, you'd lose the skill completely and have to start over from the beginning.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones." Stephen King

Cocktail Hour
Drinking memoir suggestion: Waiting for Daisy Peggy Orenstein

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!

Welcome To Hell's Kitchen

As a child, I loved the soap opera All My Children -- damn near everyone in my family watched it at some point depending on work schedules, and because of its noon time slot, my dad would come home from work to eat his lunch and enjoy the pleasure and torments of Pine Valley along with everyone else -- my great grandmother, me, my sister. I loved the Jenny Gardener (played by Kim Delaney) story-line -- a beautiful girl from the wrong side of the tracks in love with the perfect boy whose family hated her, forced to live with her male African-American friend Jesse (always platonic -- daytime television was not ready for anything else in the late seventies) in New York's notorious Hell's Kitchen to escape her abusive father, the hysterical bad seed hillbilly named Ray. The show always tried to make Hell's Kitchen look like a pit of damage and decay full of wailing sirens and dumpsters which made it all the more attractive to me. Of course, she and her goody-goody boy would eventually wed (corndog city!) and she would die in a jet-ski accident, keeping her young and beautiful, forever tragic. Despite being a wildly popular character, Kim Delaney felt the need to move on, trying to get away from being typecast.

Years later, she'd play Jimmy Smits love interest on NYPD Blue, a charismatic, sexy, alcoholic police officer. The real Kim Delaney was all of those things in her own life as well (minus the police officer), going through detox and rehab more than a few times. I loved watching her on screen -- in her thirties, she was far more interesting than her Jenny character and times had evolved enough to give her a Latino love interest. Okay, I confess -- I enjoyed watched Jimmy S. most of all. That's why all the nudity on the show went to his umm, less than attractive partner, Sippowitz. It was a world of deflated expectations, just like life. But Kim was really something -- troubled and vulnerable and slightly ruined, someone on television to which I could relate. Once someone said I reminded her of Kim Delaney during a particularly tense moment in conversation. It was a sweet attempt to change the subject and put me at ease, and I have to say it did. I cast back to all those conversations that Jenny had on All My Children when she was living with Jesse in Hell's Kitchen, all the times they imagine what might happen in their lives, their television lives. And of course, Kim would return to the city again as a woman on a different show with a different man and a different set of problems, but they would be closer to her own and not that far from mine. I had ended up in my own version of Hell's Kitchen and while it was no Garden of Eden, I liked it just fine.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"You have to find what makes you stable in the storm. Then, no matter what's happening round you, no matter what the hype or the publicity, you can still manage to make leaps in your work as an artist. "Jimmy Smits

Cocktail Hour
Drinking Halloween nail polish suggestion: Black Onyx by O.P.I. -- I wear this year round because it's the blackest shade I have ever seen.

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!

Focus On Past Attachments

A friend of mine recently told me that the first girl he fell in love with had three missing fingers and beat him up as a child. His mother still talks to her mother and says that her daughter remembers my friend with great fondness. With a start like that, how could I expect things to be any better than they are? he asked. Which got me thinking about love maps, the term some psychologists use for the way we form our ideal lover early on, explaining the people who have a "type." My friend Hank's type, much to his horror, was "small, crazy, dark-haired dramatic women." He dated a gorgeous blonde with a square jaw who people did not like very much ("that square-faced bitch" was something I heard often in conversation about her -- I didn't have an opinion as my only dealings with her consisted of a long car ride where she decided she was going to read me a Pam Houston story, offered me half her M&Ms, and halfway through "Cowboys Are My Weakness," fell asleep on my shoulder, drooling all over), and a kick-ass red head whom I adored -- she had lovers of both sexes, two wonderful little sons, and a propensity for dreadlocks and combat boots. The small, dark, dramatic types, well, those were his unobtainables for which he pined, his love map if you will. I never had a physical type -- I dated lots of people who others considered reasonably attractive to those who were not in the eyes of the general populace -- I cannot tell you how many times I heard the old "Beauty and the Beast" line by people who thought they were the first to bring it up -- clever and funny, ha ha! I also think the fairy tale is one of the most obnoxious ever; you are physically flawed and I love you and you become lovely. Also, I hate Belle who seems like a sap. I'll take the Velveteen Bunny over that one any day.

My ex-husband had an excellent, strong jawline -- one of my friends liked it so much that he said he thought about cutting it out and using it for himself. So maybe like Hank, I was drawn to men with strong jaws. But by and large, I don't think a love map has to be physical although it can be. I know men who date women who look exactly alike all the time which is kind of cool and creepy all at the same time. One of my friends stated after many glasses of scotch, I wish I could stop falling in love with all these psycho bitches. He said it with great wistfulness, like he didn't have a choice. And I suppose maybe he didn't. The bottle was almost empty.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people." Dorothy Allison

Cocktail Hour
Drinking short story collection suggestion: Trash Dorothy Allison -- the newest version has a great introduction titled "Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories"

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday!

Emergencies That Strum The Heart

I once saw an epileptic teenage boy named Lawrence jump off the high dive a the swimming pool where I worked. He had a seizure between the diving board and the water and hit the cement and then slipped into the pool where the lifeguard on duty grabbed the backboard and pulled him up to the surface. The ambulance came and took Lawrence away, blood all over the cement to mop. Lawrence's best friend, a boy with a cleft-palate that everyone used to call Hairlip John was inconsolable for a few minutes and then went back to jumping on other swimmers' heads. The pool was a place of both joy and sorrow, much like the world of sex. It was no surprise that I read Fear of Flying that summer bought for one dollar at a thrift store by my dad who thought it was a sweet young adult novel written by an "adorable Jewish girl who really is scared of planes."

I always hated those commercials that utilized the diving into the empty pool and ending up with a broken neck motif as a way of expressing danger -- don't do drugs, don't invest poorly, don't neglect getting check-ups. The ads never showed the end damage -- just the empty cement and an ominous warning. Some of the especially adventurous ones showed the person mid-dive, right before coming to reality with all that cement. I already had dreams of drowning; did I need this bullshit? It didn't matter if the pool was full, half-empty, or drained. I dreamt of Lawrence's ill-fated jump often. I dealt with water day in and day out, but it still haunted me. Sometimes I guarded the pool at night for private parties -- the mosquitoes would come out then and begin to eat you alive. The people in the pool looked like shadows and light and you were never quite sure when they'd come up for air.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out." David Sedaris

Cocktail Hour
Drinking Detroit band suggestion: Groove Council

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Monday!

Do Something Different With Your Look

Starting talking to friends about advice I'd been given about men, thinking the strangest was to get a toaster. Men, one of my friends assured me, love toast. My mother had set the groundwork with this little nugget -- Men like change. You have to keep them guessing and do something different with your look. At least change your hairdo. Men get bored easy. As a staid, boring do the same thing over and over type, I couldn't incorporate this advice any more than I could ride a unicycle. I have had the same haircut for years, the same one that all of Ted Bundy's victims had. I grow frantic when my lipstick shades are discontinued -- Dark Side was a real loss. From my laconic dad came this one -- Men don't like rejection. A little abstract, but oh so true. And from my grandmother -- Better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave.

Woman sit around and talk about men ad nauseum, advice and all. Put spyware on his computer. Don't let him venture too far out of reach. And a rule that I have tried to stick with over the years, not because of any morality issue, but a practical one which is never live with a man to which you're not married. All of the bad parts of marriage, none of the good. Of course, everyone I know agrees with this one in theory. But no woman I know, myself included, has been able to avoid it at least once. And of course, there's the division of the things at the end, the sense of life sucked out of you, and the hopeless business of starting over. So I guess I can manage that one. I also have a toaster, a small white one that isn't at all like the groovy retro model I'd like. But it makes toast. Of course, I haven't used it yet, but I suppose that's a different matter.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"But I ended up having the ability to appreciate this strangeness I found, an ability to use it for something better." Augusten Burroughs

Cocktail Hour
Drinking tarot card suggestion: Tarot of the Saints Robert M. Place -- This is a great tarot set that uses a lot of the Catholics saints as the major arcana.

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Sunday!

No One But You

Here's the Saturday pictures! In anticipation of Halloween, here's some love charms.

Blood All Over The Page

In my entire teaching career, I have taken one course dedicated to teaching. Taught by a lively eighty year old woman who still did ballet exercises every single day, she tried to take us through all the new-fangled methods of positive reinforcement and so forth, all the while stifling her impulse to say, Get the switch, if things weren't going our way in the classroom. While I remember my teacher quite well and the essays we wrote for her (this was my very first attempt to write about my rape which resulted in some terrible melodramatic garbage on the page to which she responded very kindly with things like "how appalling!" and "such are the depths of misery in men"), I can only remember one piece of advice. Never ever grade in red. It upsets the students, she said, according to new research. They need to feel loved. Blood all over the page is not love. Try green or purple.

It wasn't much to go on, but I held onto whatever thin reeds I could. All my preconceived ideas about teaching were knocked out of me by my first two classes, all plagued with the usual problems and a stalker of epic proportions that saw Victim written all over my forehead. These were the days before Columbine and all the school shootings that were and will be to follow, before disturbed meant "heavily armed" and before students started reporting creepy, squirrelly behavior in all its forms. My teaching has changed a lot over the years, but I still don't use a red pen. I don't have any green or purple either, but black works just fine. And with my teacher of yore, I would agree -- there's enough blood on the page without adding to it.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” Toni Cade Bambara

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: The Apartment

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy birthday to my friend Tim in Texas! And many happy wedding wishes to Charles (of Razored Zen) and his new bride Lana!

Consider The Danger

I was sweeping my kitchen the other day (a very rare occurrence -- I try to avoid my kitchen altogether as a rule, using it as a storage space for Dr. Pepper and Halloween decorations) and found a fortune in the bristles of the broom -- Consider the danger when things are going smoothly. There's a lot of voodoo superstitions involving brooms and scissors, things about getting people to come to your house, leave your house. I thought about the fortune, that thin slip of paper that I must have liked enough to keep and how it ended up with all the other debris of living. I'm not a person for whom things "go smoothly" as a rule. As for considering danger, that's pretty much all that I do. Occupational hazard, I'm guessing. Writers are not paid for their happiest most ecstatic moments, their smoothest dreams.

So I'm cleaning the space and the eating disorder documentary Thin is on in the other room (thank you HBO on Demand!), and I'm watching these emaciated girls, most of them who look ill and a little on edge, a little strung out. And the most crazy of all is one that looks pretty normal but details her daily eating plan (no more than 200 calories a day, all written out -- one bite of chicken, two grapes, etc.) and she says, If I have to die to be thin, so be it. It's all I've ever wanted. And I think of all the normal situations that have gone from fine to snafu to fubar without any warning. Once I was at a lunch with friends, all in varying degrees of crisis when one expressed her desire to live in a storage unit so that nobody could find her and things would be easier. What does one say to such a plan? It's like the one bite of chicken, two grapes idea. It's not very practical! It doesn't make sense. But the heart wants what the heart wants. The mind can get as sick as the body and a whole lot faster. I left most of my food on my plate that day. Appetite is a strange thing -- it comes and goes according to mood as much as anything else. When I got there, I was starving. But someone came along with a broom and swept it all away in the time while I wasn't thinking about anything, not considering the danger at all.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before." Gloria Steinem

Cocktail Hour
Drinking book suggestion: A Lifetime of Secrets Frank Warren

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!

The Road May End In Detroit

I moved to Detroit ten years ago today with the help of my dearest Angela who drove the U-Haul filled with all my earthly possessions for almost all the way here (she made me drive for five long hours in which I thought we might die at any moment). Upon entering the city, it was gray and rainy and a man stood on his front yard, urinating in what passes for broad daylight in this gloomy time of year. Nobody could understand why I was going -- my boyfriend had moved here for work, but he wasn't offering any ring for joining him, my family and friends lived in Texas, and I'd been told tales of lawlessness and debauchery about the city proper which thrilled me to no end. I'd never been to Detroit, but Ang had, several times to visit a boyfriend who ended up moving to Texas to be with her. You don't have to stay, Michelle, she said, optimistically hoping I'd change my mind. But I didn't. And she understood given that she was the only person in my life who gave me any help whatsoever with what everyone else thought was a "fucking retarded decision brought about by the devil" (Hank) and other assorted opinions along the same lines, too numerous to list here. We had to stop and refill the U-Haul with gas about a hundred times, and we'd always get some yoodle talking to us, asking us the same question, Why are you going to Detroit? To which Angela, ever the romantic, would answer, For love!

That was the correct answer, of course, but what I didn't count on was falling in love with the city. I watched it out my window every morning and night (what else does an unemployed writer in a city with no friends, a boyfriend at work all day and night, and nothing but time to write do?) and thought about my life. I'd gotten through some hard things, but those things had passed, leaving me in a rare period of rest where I didn't worry so much. Now that I was in what is routinely billed as the most dangerous city in America, I didn't fear for my safety, didn't jump at every noise, didn't worry about harm coming my way. The closest I got was when I went to buy Thomas Merton's Seeds of Holiness and almost got mugged going into my house, but the mugger slipped on ice, leaving me to enter and shut the door on his ass with great rapidity. Thank you bad Detroit weather! Detroit proved to be every bit as difficult to navigate as some had predicted, but I loved it so. Some of the worst things in my life have happened here -- my late twenties and early thirties did not prove to be the smooth ride those first few months were. Don't stay there too long, one of my friends said. You'll start to look like all those Yankees. By which she meant hard and worn, she said. But I've always loved that look. I see my face and see that I indeed do have a different look than when I came. George Orwell says by fifty, we have the face we deserve. But I would put it a little differently -- I have earned my face. It's a bottom-line face, a face that wouldn't launch a rowboat much less a thousand ships, but it's my face, you see, and I love it.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now." Paul Simon

Cocktail Hour

Detroit Hustle

one shot of Hennessey

one shot of Scotch

Pour over a glass of tonic water and ice.

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Wednesday! Thanks to all for the sweet comments and e-mails. I'm behind on my correspondence, but will get caught up very soon. And to the wonderful Totall, the books are in the mail! And sorry about you getting kicked off the Christian board on account of my writing. I'm a deeply religious person, but not a traditional one. No matter what your belief system, we all need to come together in love and respect.

Nobody Noticed Anything

Years ago, I remember bitching to my friend Erin about my family's intrusive nature, mainly about food, but about other things as well. She told me a story about a friend who spent entire evenings watching television, doing leg lifts and vomiting into a Styrofoam cup. Nobody noticed anything, she said. You're lucky. Of course, one never feels lucky. One feels a bit suffocated at times. Make no mistake -- I was glad not to be carrying around a Styrofoam cup or anything, but I had already become way too aware of my own mind and the way it could serve as a trap even when no one was watching, a sort of mental claustrophobia. I already took a sick pleasure in feeling kind of empty and dead, telling myself in every painful situation, I will not feel anything. But I fell in love easily which ruined my strategy of coldness.

On the night before my wedding, the night that I spent in a one bedroom apartment sleeping on the floor of the living room with my bridesmaids, Erin offered to, um, sleep with me in that other sense of the word. She was my friend Hank's great love, albeit a mostly unrequited one, and that jarred me out of my stupor, and I said, I don't think so. Erin was no looker to put it kindly and if I was going to go that way, I'd had other offers that seemed much more attractive. Not to mention Hank would stab me to death. My other bridesmaid slept soundly on the other side of the room. I knew that I shouldn't get married and that this latest in a string of signs did not bode well. I thought about the girl doing the leg lifts that night, an old story by then, and wondered why she could not stop once she started, not even when really bad television shows came on, shows like Hart to Hart and other real corndog material. But once you begin, how can you know where you should stop? As a child, I was so terrified of missing my bus stop that I often rode to the end of the line because I couldn't figure out where the closest place to home was. My bus driver, Mrs. Bert, would say with great compassion, You still here, little one? Let's get you home. Don't worry, you'll figure it out where to get out soon. And eventually I did.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
“Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.” Christian Morgenson

Cocktail Hour
Goodnight Kiss
Champagne with campari and a dash of bitters. Pour over a sugar cube.

Benedictions and Maledictions
This is for my old friend Mark Mortenson who died yesterday. I remember him well in the last office I worked in at the University of North Texas. His students adored him, as did everyone else. He was forever making people laugh with his crabby attitude and told me ten years ago this month, "Don't move to Detroit, Michelle. We can find you many middle-aged men here that would be equally inappropriate." His stories about living in Milwaukee made me want to go there immediately if not sooner -- dying industrial city, hell yeah! He had the attitude. Many condolences to his family and friends. And this from Catullus, the great poet of unrequited love and grief: "And forever, brother, hail and farewell!”

Surface Tension

J.D. Roy Atchison, federal judge, now dead by his own hand, as they say, hanging himself after getting caught travelling to Detroit with the intent to have sex with a five year old girl whose mother was pimping her out over the internet, but in fact was a Detroit cop posing as such, now has not garnered a lot sympathy. The details of the case are lurid -- on his flight, he carried a Dora the Explorer doll, some cheap hoop earrings, and a jar of petroleum jelly. There could be no mystery to his intent. Some of the articles I have read say that he was a good father, a girl's soccer coach (shudder!), a loving husband, that he did a lot of good, put a lot of bad guys away. That now he won't be remembered for anything else except the Dora doll. Which leads me to wonder how often we'll see this fall from grace -- people in positions of power, the camera on us while they do their evil in the dark. How strong the desire must be for someone to risk everything, to believe that they had found a mother willing to sell her daughter (make no mistake, there are plenty of those out there, but to trust someone on the internet about this seems to be the height of stupidity), and to fly from Florida to Detroit to fulfill his fantasy.


I can't say that I'm surprised he killed himself. His trial would have been vicious, the sentencing no doubt would have resulted in his death. Judges don't fair well in prison, nor do pedophiles. This is a man who spent his life judging other people, sentencing them for their sins. What's sad is that I can't imagine that people didn't know about him. We always knew the pedophile in the neighborhood -- ours was the next door neighbor who was a mortician. After a long time, he went to prison for abusing his granddaughters. Nobody had the moral fortitude to stop him. In AA they say, We are as sick as our secrets. But what if it's an open secret that's gone on for a long time? A friend of mine used to say about someone repellent, There's nothing wrong with him that a good hanging wouldn't cure. I suppose sometimes it's a mercy to others when we fashion the noose ourselves and spare the court system the trouble.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" Jeremiah, Chapter 17

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Monday!

In The Clear

People seem to be taking a peculiar delight in the fall of Marion Jones, former Olympian, an unbelievably fast runner, holder of many, many gold medals, and user of a human growth replacement, known as "the clear." Rumors have circulated about this practice for years, and now the time is nigh that such sadness is visited upon her in the form of public humiliation, confession, repentance, and possible punishment. She lied about it for years, said one indignant sportscaster, as if all the other athletes who doped told everyone right away, sent little cards out to friends and family, like wedding invitations. Actually, Marion did send apology letters to many people which might prove to be one of the damning points of evidence in her case. Once the world's highest paid female athlete with endorsement deals reaching into the millions, she's had a complicated personal life, has squandered and suffered much, is in danger of bankruptcy. From all her efforts, she's reported to have less than two thousand dollars in her bank account. Which, now that I think about it, doesn't sound that bad unless you take remember she worked for years to become who she is and won't ever be it again.

One of my favorite quotes is from the great Jimi Hendrix, the one about if he seems free, it's because he's always running. I don't run too fast or too far, but I get it. I've been running for as long as I can remember -- from trouble, to trouble, from messes I've made. I confess to using any number of performance-enhancing drugs -- by any means necessary, right? The race is a long one. Most of it you do on your own, no matter what help you have. For a little while, Marion Jones was the fastest woman in the world. What that must have been like! To run and run and beat everyone in your path. When you're going that fast, you don't notice anything. The world falls away. And isn't that the point of any drug?

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I never thought of losing, but now that it' s happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life." Muhammad Ali

Cocktail Hour
Drinking novel suggestion: Desperate Characters Paula Fox

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Sunday!

Arlington Midwest

Dear Readers,
Here's the Saturday pictures! These were taken outside of Arlington Midwest, a war memorial dedicated to the Iraq veterans, inside the city of Detroit. I met some new friends along the way -- these young men graciously offered to pose for the camera before continuing their night. One of the last Tigers games was playing out its ending a few yards away.

The Walls Of Jericho

Silence disturbs a lot of people, that slate of blankness that sometimes descends upon us when we, to paraphrase Bill Murray in the oft-ignored, deeply underrated Groundhog Day, we reach the end of ourselves. This uncomfortable silence happened a lot during those epic conversations in college about everything that always ended in the words, Does anybody know where we can get more beer? My friend Hank said there was an old belief that an angel flew over a room every twenty minutes and that's why conversation would dry up for a few seconds, to give God that particular space. The white space on the page, the margins. And Lord knows I knew about the margins. I had started on one and would end up on another. Of course, I didn't know that then. All I knew was that I wasn't anything special. That's a lesson I was always learning in those days, one way or the other.

I often contend that it's one of the great injustices of life that we seldom get credit for the things we did not say, the things we could have said that would have been cruel, unkind, deeply stupid because when we slip up and stop biting our tongue or taking our medication or drinking ourselves sick, we often say the something that wipes away all that good behavior. And so much of what we say sticks and hurts people, makes them uncomfortable, takes away their joy. I myself am gifted with an almost Jesuitical quality when pondering what has upset me. It's strange how I can forgive almost anything until I can't and usually it's a small injustice that disturbs me most. The big ones we have to forgive or we die; we carry them around like dead bodies and they break our backs. So we dump them by the side of the road. But the small things, we pick at like sores, taking a perverse joy in the reopening. Let that thing heal, my mother would say, when I wouldn't leave something alone. I recently heard that it was the silence of people that brought down the walls of Jericho, not vocal effort. Which isn't such a bad thing to remember when we come to the end of ourselves.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I always sings too long and too loud." Leadbelly

Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: Center Stage Jamiroquai

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Friday!

You Take What You Can Get

One Halloween I sat at a cardboard table covered by a gauzy purple curtain dressed as a gypsy with an amputated fake hand in front of me, a realistic looking piece that oozed a sort of weird oil, and told fortunes until we heard gunshots across the street. I grabbed the fake hand, leaving the mandatory rat doll (a must for Halloween decor) and ran inside my friend's bedroom to huddle with all the other girls as we tried to figure out what in the billy hell was happening. Nobody shot anyone in that neighborhood -- my best friend happened to be rich which is why we always had the parties at her house -- she had real stand-up arcade games and pinball machines. Her mother bought us Dairy Queen shakes every single day after school. Money to burn! Sometimes I felt the peculiar ache of poverty combined with jealousy, but most of the time I just slurped down the shake without thought. You take, I thought even then, what you can get.

Across the street, things had gotten a little tight with the de rigueur single mother (in those days, there weren't that many and she inspired great fear in some of the bored married women around who talked about her in earshot as if she were deaf to their unkindness) and her daughter and the mother's boyfriend. The daughter had taken her mother's gun and was swinging it around, threatening to shoot the boyfriend to death, yelling "You know why I want you dead, you asshole." He only took a bullet in the foot, though, a flesh wound at best. He stumbled out onto the street, bleeding and someone called an ambulance. Once my friend's overmedicated mother decided it was safe, we got to stand out on the street and watch. I set up the fake hand on my table and adjusted my peasant skirt, a few sizes too big and held up by a rope. The ambulance lights swirled on the table, and I looked into my friend's crystal ball. The shot dude lay writhing on the ground. Even though I was no fortune teller, I kind of could tell even then that he'd gotten a little of what he'd deserved.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it." Tallulah Bankhead

Cocktail Hour
Drinking novel suggestion: Sweet Ruin Cathi Hanaeur

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!

The Dead Came Down With The Rain

I had a friend, who when asked where we were going, would always reply, To Hell if we don't change our ways. This always made me laugh given that I do believe in hell, the hells we make for ourselves, and the ones that are visited upon us. Growing up in a the heart of the Bible belt, I heard a lot about that fire and brimstone business, but it didn't scare me. The shit that scared me was all around -- loneliness, lost youth, spent dreams, a tremendous inordinate excitement for the new Wal-Mart and McDonalds (until I was in high school, I'd look at McDonalds as a big-city luxury, one you'd drive an hour to get to), and those sticky school day minutes that never seemed to pass. Lots of people had gone bad to drink, to crystal meth, and to all those other demons that appear, innocuous looking as baby powder. Baby powder shaped into straight lines by razorblades and served on mirrors.

One of my favorite anecdotes from Tennessee Williams' Memoirs involves his sister Rose, the obvious inspiration for many of his mad, enduring heroines. In and out of mental hospitals, she had few friends save for a parakeet that Tennessee had given to her. She loved her parakeet and made Tennessee visit her pet each time he came to visit her. But one day, she did not want him to see her friend. "She's not feeling well." He learned from the nurses that the bird had been dead for five days, but Rose wouldn't let them take the body. In his typical wry understatement and inherent kindness, Tennessee wrote that Rose wasn't good at accepting death. But sometimes she'd say, The dead came down with the rain last night. She never really recovered her mind, never really was functional. I think about her often, trapped in her own little glass menagerie, surrounded by reflective surfaces, but unable to look at herself. Of course, nobody I ever saw snort meth or cocaine off a mirror ever could either, not with the those mirrors anyway.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go." Tennessee Williams

Cocktail Hour
Drinking cookbook suggestion: Domesticity: A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love Bob Shacochis

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!

You Forget How They Look

In a field of actresses who make a living playing beautiful young things or the requisite older female character, fill in Diane Keaton or Meryl Streep, (there doesn't seem to be a lot of in between), Ashley Judd has become something of an anomoly, shedding her good girl roles of yore and becoming an actress who plays complicated, troubled women in their late thirties who are hell bent on slow death, self-destruction, emotional pain, and the dreadful pockets of grief that have replaced youthful hopefulness with damaged men, substance abuse, and in her most recent effort, Bug, a furnished apartment in the bleakness of Oklahoma and an attachment to a crazy dude who convinces her that the military has injected him with a bug-like virus that will kill them. She's being stalked by her ex-husband played by a very convincing Harry Connick Jr. who has shed his piano bar allure for something far more real. He and Ashley have this ability, to make you forget how they look on screen and become something rougher. Even so, Ashley carries the movie with a fragility that makes the viewer cringe. I've read a few reviews of her latest efforts in which the reviewers are disdainful of her choices, calling attention to how depressing and unchanging her characters seem. I have to say that's what appeals to me the most. Who in God's name wants another life-affirming story about anything? Okay, maybe some people! People I don't know. The fringes, where things are coming apart no matter how hard we try to keep them together, that's when something can happen.

Part horror movie, part love story, part emotional trauma center, this movie is just in time for Halloween. Nothing is scarier than crazy love, nothing more isolating and claustrophobic than our own minds. It's enough to do almost anything and when you come to the end of the day, you'll turn to whatever is around to make it go away, your thoughts like bugs inside you that you can never ever remove, merely medicate enough to give you a little peace unless you're willing to burn yourself up for love.


Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life." Lyle Lovett


Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: Bloodlines Terry Allen and the Mystery Panhandle Band

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday! And happy birthday wishes to wonderful Cheri!