Ever Late to the Party

I missed my own anniversary, damn. Wait a minute, now that I am looking at the date, I have not missed it -- I thought it was the 27th, but no, it is the 26th... which would make me right on time, but still a dollar short, always a goddamned dollar short.

Since the occasion demands I would like to thank the person responsible for a years worth of oft incomprehensible noodlings.

About a year and a half ago I received a postcard in the mail from a friend I had not corresponded with in 15 years. Our mothers had received Fulbright exchanges and back in the way back of 1986 they were packing up their adolescents for a year abroad. I met D.W. at the orientation in San Francisco, he was from Detroit, I am from a small town. I thought of Detroit as an extremely urban city, begrimed and begritted, full of cars and snow, I still have never been there.

He went off to Switzerland and I went off to an even smaller town than my home town in the South of France, initially, I was very much chagrined. We met again that October, I think, in Paris. But after San Francisco we decided to write letters, I think we were drawn to each other for the promise of trading pithy seventeen year old barbs, also, I really needed someone I could write to who was not my home, not my best friend, not my boyfriend, and for sure, not any member of my family.

And we wrote, constantly. I looked forward to his letters with a sort of ravenous anticipation, to reading and responding, he made me a better writer, because I rose to the challenge, I hoped he would find me witty and intelligent, as witty and intelligent as I found him.

And so the year passed, and it was a very big year indeed, but I returned to my small town to finish up high school and hurry-up-and-get-the-fuck-out and he went home to Detroit and letters became infrequent and then not at all, we were teenagers and life swept us up in the rushing, swooning momentum of early adulthood...

So then this postcard.

I had often wondered what became of DW from Detroit. I wondered where he was, if we crossed paths would we recognize each other, in the intervening years I have sported all wonder of different hair, what if anything, we might have to say to one another.

My old friend DW resides in Austin, a city, that according to Google is populated by bats and college kids, in other words, a pretty cool place, I admit to regarding Texas with a certain wariness that any certifiable (yes) Californian lefty would. Rather than writing letters we began an email correspondence. Timing did, as timing will, intervene. Shortly after we began corresponding I was surreptitiously dumped by R, and I was hugely heartbroken, and again I wanted, needed to write out, not to my best friends, certainly not to my family, but he encouraged my voice, and encouraged me to write.

So I began. I really don't know if I am that much of a writer, but I like words, and I like the ritual of sitting down at the computer where there is usually some form of beverage and a pack of cigarettes near by. Many of the people who read me know me outside blogland, except, thank god, my mother. This has been, and will continue to be my exercise in writing out. P said once, I caught up on your writing but it's hard for me to read, it's like a raw nerve. And I thanked her, that's what it is meant to be, the part of me that etiquette dictates I keep down, the part of me that is kicking and screaming, maybe not the best part, maybe sometimes it is my best part.

DW called from Texas a couple of weeks ago, and again he was incredibly supportive in my venture of caterwauling over the internets. He said I write like the Pixie's sing. I like that.

Briefly As C's Pot Brownies are Moist and Terribly Potent

But hulee mother of jeebus, Polyphonic Spree rocks me and rolls me, and I can hear my upstairs neighbors, the ones that haven't mastered the whole rug thing, the one's that don their clogs at 7Am and clomp, clomp, clomp, but now all I can hear is hey, here comes the sun, and it makes me smile.

And I have tatoos on my hands, a boot for walking for smoking, a mermaid for drinking, and hey, here comes the sun and it makes me smile, bada bump pum, pum, bada bump pum, pum. And sometimes though the hour is late and your shirt smells of liquour, sometimes the disco ball caresses your face, sometimes you dance with abandon with your very dearest friend and the crowd swells and fists pump the air and everyone shouts, hey now it's the sun, and it makes me smile. And they do, and you do.

The Unfortunate Marriage of Sake & Sauvignon Blanc: A Cautionary Tale

Because evidently if you blend the two you get something like see previous entry... You spew flaming nonsense onto the internets, you think to yourself, God-Damn Emma, what in the good lord's name were you thinking.

jesus.

On Politics and Site Meters, since we speak of birds of a feather

and really lets forgo all of the politicking for the birds, peacocks, plummage and whistling terns, and turns and turns. Dove, dove-tail, parrot, parrot and then again, blackbird sing, blue jay, jaded green, great heron, mima bird, crested heron, sea gull, jonathon livingston sea gull, robin red breast, the wild parrots of telegraph hill, a toucan, a dove, dovetail, messy politics, birdshit, big bird, wild pheasant, wild turkey, the chicken, the cock. Crispy fried duck.

And though I have buttoned my sweater into a super hero cape, I honestly can't bring myself to write about politics, I am not so well informed, even though I sit here is my periwinkle woolens ready to take over Gotham in a great sheet of somnolent hues of blue, fear not, narcoleplsy girls is poised to take the helm, would you mind terribly, no, nudge her, well, of you must, here is the sledgehammer, that and the disco tune ought to get her engine humming...

yes, well that engine, we don't speak of the rudders that no longer churn, we ride the swells indifferent, we have become dumb to the pull of the tide, and the waxing and wanings, we hear, only the hungry call of the gulls, high on masts, masticating if they can as we sway, attached to our orange buoys, as the call of the sea laps at our stern...

And praise be to the euphemism, parse it as you will. Parse it well.

And now we will pause our regularly scheduled program of slightly immoral turpitude for a movie critique, takes slug of wine after donning critical dunce hat.

After much hemming and hawing on the part of the erstwhile critic, I went to see Sideways with K and R this afternoon. I left the movie thirsty.
Oh, and it was so frightenly real. The truth is that I am one of those effete wine snobs, I nearly threw a montrous fit at Viansa once upon a time. I have mentioned worn saddle leather in decribing wine, but when I was on fire, and going for a good sale on a wine I wouldn't pay 15 bucks wholesale for, I would tell the man, always the man, this line doesn't work on women, I would decribe whatever overhyped whine, I would say that it tasted of desultory cherries, and I would fucking nail them everytime, you drop desultory in conversation with a man that gets the definition, and, baby, he is yours, or at least he's your mark.

And so the site meter.

Yes it's true, I have allowed my credit card to be charged a nominal fee to satisfy my ego. Sadly, my rapacious ego remains unsatisfied, Emma readers, come one, come all, hit me baby one more time and all that... Holy shit, has it been a year, I think it has nearly a year, should not I throw a party, should I not get good and drunk, I think I might need some celebrants, shall we not all end up in the warm corners of forsaken alleys with our sumptuous bottles of ninety-nonetywhatchmacallit with the fancy pedigree, hoping, God, only hoping, for the slightest bit of company, for the slightest bit of hyperbole.

And then another birthday

It's still raining, it's still raining in the anemic morning hours, when I awake parched and stuffed. It's still raining when I fetch coffee, it's raining buckets, nay it's pissing rain when I trudge to the salon for my waxing which I endure, knowing that my landscaping will go unnoticed, it's still raining as I dress for B's birthday.

And then it quits.

So there are gutters that are rivers, and oxygen in alleys, and ruthless people selling streetsheets when I am trying to smoke in peace, and then candles and flourless chocolate cake which is so good that you'd like to immediately expell it from your person. And there's a vodka drink, a whiskey drink, a watermelon drink, and there is the bobbing and weaving in the back seat as we wend our way to the next destination, which just happens to be the Zeitgeist. The asstute reader (since I have no idea how to link back to it, but if you must, see the beginning of November) will remember that I lost my phone after I knocked my noggen on the floor of the bar, and later, ridiculously, made out for hours with my first boyfriend. Where was I? Oh so, on that November evening it rained as well, though not quite so copiously, I digress.

So tonight before I laud the tar black, black ice black top. Before I praise the red light snaking down 17th street, before I vaunt a fleeting reflection from the back seat, perhaps I ought to laud myself, just a little, just a little.

Picture this if you can, a mini park in a city, paved in quartz gravel, motorcycles, a patronage of the dubiously employed, cheap drinks in pint glasses, park benches, pink elephants. Picture that under the pelting rain, a bayou at the base of the stairs, a rippled swamp.

And there under the rain, there across the bayou, the churning muddy water, and the lashes of rain there is a pint glass, lonely and half full and rising. I have got it my head that I need to retrieve this glass, this is fortified by the semi-cute glass half empty boy who dismisses me.

So what does Emma do? Emma goes after the glass, the gauntlet has been thrown.

Picture the newly blondied girl in the red trousers and the slippery boots, picture her with refreshed lipstick (as it was) and freshly waxed (as she is) and her coat is missing a button that she hasn't had the time to mend. And the sort of cute straight boy disputed my claim that the lone pint glass has filled in 45 minutes, and therefore I resolve to fetch it and fill it again.

Which means that I hand over my purse to T, skate down the slippery beams to the edge of the burdgeoning pond, jump the beam, navigate the picnic table, nearly fall, grab the glass in triumph, bask as my friends hoot and holler, make my way to a safe haven, drop the glass, retrieve the glass, fall on my ass, make it to safety, impress the everlovin shit out of the straight boy, decline the drink he offers. Am wet, matters not, danced in the rain, danced in the rain, am wet, danced in the rain, danced in the rain, danced in the rain.

4F

Here I sit gobsmacked, and my cd player has given up the ghost.

15 minutes ago: We are driving up Fell, my arms are wrapped tightly across my chest, I have tucked my legs into a vice. The cab driver is having an animated conversation in Arabic, with just enough English to keep my ears cocked.

The rain is undecided, a smattering on the wind shield, the wipers screech slowly on the glass, the cabbie chatters on, and my protective arms squeeze tighter, I call to my limbs, and so we retract, the heedless cabbie chatters on, and the wipers complain, and the street shudders from green to yellow to red. It's not late enough, I am not drunk enough.

25 minutes ago: We are exiting Claude, concede a kiss, quell a parting shot.

15 minutes ago: Street lights for shadow play, I keep watching the shadow of my taught head play across the passenger seat, and again, and again. I suppress a giggle at the metaphor, I do not wish to disturb the cabbie. I take a breath and pause to reflect at the high comedy that is the Crush That Refuses To Go the Way of the Dodo. I have resorted to any number of Shakespearean banishments, get thee from me, out, out damn spot, and just when I think that I am free, a warmed palm, and so I keel, there I silently keen, but for the fleeting warmth of a hesitant palm.

57 minutes ago: The banter is flowing as freely as the booze, every thing is loaded, everything is loaded. Hands to shoulders, an accidental, on purpose graze. At this juncture I am played, \I am such an eager, eager puppy.

The Present: The eves are singing O Discordia, and drops are pinging off of the trash cans, I am wearing someone else's glass of wine, pulling on a nearly extinct cigarette, and keeping my thighs clenched. I cannot shed you, try as I might. There you are in your jacket, bat-winged and broadchested. Damn you. Damn you , damn the drink.

Terms of Endearment

I had a subheading for this post, something along the lines of being discreet about removing a troublesome bit of lobster from one's teeth, and something about keeping your claws in, but before I could reach the laptop, and after I had flossed, I had to sit on the edge of the bathtub and shed some fat, yearling tears of disillusionment, and then I had to open a bottle of wine.

And I logged in and wrote an anemic paragraph and put on some music and now I am going to light a cigarette and stare at the screen for a good ten minutes before I write this sentence.

I came home and unsheathed the skirt, unzipped the boots, peeled off the fishnets, shrugged off the sweater, unhooked the bra, shimmied out of the panties, stepped into pajama bottoms, pulled on an antiquated tee shirt, slid into slippers, turned on the heat, turned down the sheets.

If I am being deliberately vague it's because I am astonished that I should be crushed by a single word. They called one another Babe. That is all. They called each other Babe.

I had dinner with my ex-husband and his girlfriend.

I realize that there is a paucity of terms of endearment in language, you've got your honeys, and your darlings, and other terms that you wouldn't give voice to anywhere but swathed in sheets. I simply hadn't anticipated being floored mid-forkful of righteous tea smoked cornish game hen, I didn't expect to become irrationally proprietary of a word when my molars were working furiously and it was suddenly difficult to swallow.

Then again, I have a peculiar policy with terms of endearment, I retire them like jerseys when the relationship has ended. I think it must have something to do with being a Taurus, and my bullish loyalty, but there will never again be a babe, or a cherie, or a chouchou, or a sunshine, because I could never say them without a quick feint to the original signifier, perhaps I am being misguided (wouldn't be the first time) maybe there is honor in the allusion to all the babes I've loved before. Maybe I'm getting tangled in semantics, maybe I'm just tangled up.

He is happy, I can tell. Truthfully, though I didn't look too hard, I could not fault her. It would not be easy to have dinner with an ex-wife who is on her own turf and closely flanked by her dearest friends. She demonstrated remarkable chutzpah without cluelessness, she is sharp and charming, for being all of twenty-five, I doubt I would have displayed the same acumen. She is also, of course, quite lovely... and this is where the demons start their dance macabre, and they are dancing on the table and upsetting glasses and flaunting misshapen pudenda for my derangement, and they are reminding me that I have a whisker on my chin, and they are pointing at my belly and laughing, and I am doing my utmost to ignore them and contribute to the chim-chiming flow of conversation, even though I am shrinking and my chin is jutting and though no one can see it I have become the honored crone at table. All that is missing is my pointy black hat.

That and the broom stick, the one that will whisk me to the embalming warmth of my bath tub. Up, up, up and away, into the static silence of the looming thunderheads, into the thick womby clouds of the impending storm.

D. I know that you will be reading, I am sorry, it was harder then I thought it would be. I would never begrudge you any happiness, if I came home and cried tonight, it is only for the want of a term of endearment, and a remnant of regret. Goddamn Valentine's Day tomorrow, I have a date with my dirty laundry.

Friday's random selection of one sided emails I've sent


*Keerist, flogging a long dead horse.
remember when you were in first grade, in my case I insisted on wearing flouncy dresses with dolphin shorts underneath, so I could swing on the bars - like a monkey! and you thought some boy or girl was cute, rather than admit that you called them funny looking.
I was really, really funny looking by the time I hit 5th grade, picture the early eighties perm, the braces, with headgear! all gangly limbs and nearly erupting chest... The boys were ruthless.*


*Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for flying Air Oscar the Grouch.*


*last night on my way to Sephora to buy ridiculously expensive mascara I was accosted by a gay, thank heavens for the gays, I hear a honeyed "honey, that hair is fabulous" a girl can run miles on a compliment like that...*


*it's unfortunate that you missed the pink elephants on parade.
go ahead and mock me for being mawkish, I care not.*

*no I just happen to be a passenger on the metaphorical train they jacked, I am running forward at the speed of inertia, I fear it is not quick enough.*

*I feel like a gyroscope*

*man, just when I think I have reached the apex of apathy the players on the cuckoo von nutsville team do something so confounding that my jaw falls open and I shake my fists helplessly at the sky... blow my nose in anguish as it were...
Korea's got nukes! remember them, the third wheel on the tricycle of evil?
and then there is Frank Rich, bless his curmudgeonly heart.*

*v. good
do you think that a consequence of Saturday may attribute to my current despondence?*

*most gorgeous sunset ever. The Farallons in perfect purple mountain silhouette, the sun a wildly flaming peach, the bay mirrored and placid like seventies sunglasses.
some day I am going to miss this view.*

*Domaine des Etats Rouges
Crepescule du Craptacular
Chateau Asshat (a fine accompaniement to ritz crackers and cheez-whiz)
Chateau L'Estaing Vos Dents Verts*

*I just read the article in NY Times about French women... made blood boil,
what a load of preposterous dookie!!! It's all in the walking, it's all in
the 7-10 espressos they drink, it's also all in the cigarettes!!! Having a
number of French girlfriends I can assure you that they fret over la graisse
just as American women. I'd like to slap that lady!*

*can't you just see it, P and I, swell in our frilled aprons and dangerous heels, pill addled, furtive martini in hands listlessly pushing a giant hoover, P. having accidentally sucked up Ava as she awaits M, the breadwinner (bwa ha ha)
I of course am a sad old spinster, a divorced pariah, possibly loose woman...*

*Introducing the Togolese, a tasty new snandwich at your local Togo's. Tasty Jerked Goat garnished with dried grasses on flat bread, comes with a side of military coup! mmmm - delicious!*

There She Goes

Sheepishly contemplates own navel...
Somehow I got cagey and managed to disable the breathalyzer all McGuyver like and I escaped. I did not stay within the confines of my yard here at les bons mots, where I can play on my see-saw, which is hard without a second body, but I manage. No, I hopped the fence clutching a virtual vodka bottle and went skipping over the internets dropping comments hither and thither like a gleeful lunatic from the asylum, comments made possibly in latin. Yes, I said latin.

So if in my wanderings during, the wee hours, when a more reasonable person should have retired her drunk ass, I bumbled into your yard and left some incoherent, slushy comment, possibly in latin, there I do apologize.

As my punishment I am going to seek out the nearest classroom and write "I am a pretentious git" one hundred times on the chalk board.

Then I am going to see Luna's last show.

Which inevitably means rinse and repeat.

And Saint Thomas Doubted

And he probed his fingers into the wound, and it was soft and not yet supperating, and he was cloaked in darkness and in fog, and his fingers came away bloodied and in the same instant a tidal grief flooded through him and leaked out his pores.

And centuries later a monk thinking that the path to purity lay in pain wove himself a shirt of horse hair.

And centuries later a fictitious heroine injested arsenic at her prie-dieu.

And centuries later another heroine kneels at her lap top to fling her far flung aches across the invisible reaches, language to language, country to county, to text on a cell phone in Katmandu... remember when the world was still large enough that the very mention of Katmandu was a curious signifier for some greatly exotic local that may or may not be a pinpoint on any map. Something mythic, something ancient, full of mysteries and deep secrets, come to find out it's just another teeming city with cultural variations on architecture, full of people who live, love and die, scrabble for money and food. Same as here, same as anywhere.

Like Babylon, just another ruin, trampled by Marines, just another myth defeated. Saint Thomas doubted, and his fingers were bloodied, Christ was just another man, another charlatan, loaves and fishes a tremendous sleight of hand.

And the good Commodore says to the media, it's fun to kill people.

And kind ladies and gentlemen, let Emma remind you that it is the season of the pink heart, little bucking pink hearts everywhere, cherub's, moribund cubits dangling from asbestos free ceiling tiles, neglected and forlorn, spinning in infinity. It's the season of boyfriend oneupsmanship, lo to the poor fucker who sends his girlfriend carnations. It's the evening that waitpeople and bartenders universally dread. Oh, the fights, the tears, the shitty tips.

Full disclosure, as much as I spurn the marketed trappings of VD day, that's venereal Disease day to you, I cannot help but feel like some kind of mutant because I have never received roses on that day. And for the third year running I will be the only dateless wonder at our venereal Disease party, and as much as I would like to resort the cavalier and insouciant, it's sort of dispiriting to be the perennially dateless wonder. And to be quite frank, I'd rather cut all of the awkwardness of a first date and cut to a mutually gratifying hop, hop, hopscotch in the sack, and dispense with all of the vagaries that accompany "getting acquainted".

anywho. that could be the aimless gnatterings of a 33 (last quarter) tepid dish water blond in deep need of highlights and highly undersexed woman without a cat, who is very shortly to meet her former spouse's lovely new girlfriend.

Gah. (side bar to D, I jest of course)

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to MM in the farthest reaches of Maine for validating my dreams of possessing a gineormous cock, thank you for making me feel less freakish.... we should compare notes. Thanks to Vinnie for confirming the existence of rock candy, which makes me think of your sister, who lent me the Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Steigner -- which I still have.

I have got to find me some rock candy.

And for anyone who is looking for a book, may I recommend John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, I usually gobble books like devils food and I have been savoring it. P asked me why I hadn't finished it and I said it was like looking at paintings in a long gallery.

"Glowworm trains shuttle in the gloaming through the foggy looms of spider-web bridges, elevators soar and drop in their shafts, harbor lights wink.

Like sap at the first frost at five o'clock men and women begin to drain gradually out of the tall buildings downtown, grayfaced throngs flood the subways and tubes, vanish underground.

All night the great buildings stand quiet and empty, their million windows dark. Drooling light the ferries chew tracks across the lacquered harbor. At midnight the fourfunneled express steamers slide into the dark out of their glary berths. Bankers blearyeyed from secret conferences hear the hooting of the tugs as they are let out of side doors by lightningbug watchmen; they settle grunting into the backseats of limousines, and are whisked uptown into the Forties, clinking streets of ginwhite whiskey-yellow cider-fizzling lights."

The entire book is like that passage, it is a wordsmith's wet dream

You know you are a bleeding woman when...

You have lapped up the sad travesty of the remake of Shall We Dance like it was rock candy, all sweetness on a stick, and the rhumba made you shed tears of self pity, and now between words you are attempting to tango and your phantom partner can't bare (bear? grammar lapse, blame my hormones or the wine) your weight.

Do they even make rock candy anymore, that crystaline sugar delight, or am I showing my age again...

Overheard two bankers:
banker 1; blah, blah, blah, vice president, blah, yeah I just turned 28.
banker 2; blah, blah, fast track, my wife, blah, I just turned 29.

And there I had to stuff my lolling tongue back into my face and choke on my surprise, I've got a good five years on these boys and they seem so much more adult than I...

Funny thing I saw on my way back from lunch. There was a pigeon with his chest inflated and his cocky gait, and my eye wandered to the object of his desire. It appeared to me that the cocky pigeon was trying to seduce the UPS man in brown shorts. And I thought to self, self, now we have seen everything in San Francisco, when the pigeon is trying to pick up a straight man you know the times are trying and the end is nigh....

I chortled all the way back to the office, only in San Francisco.

I watched the great orange sun list into the Pacific, the bay was flat and glassy, a willing mirror to the sky, hues of azure, drifting fey lavender. The East Bay windows set ablaze. Silhouettes of churches in purple mountains majesty and there I am on the forty-sixth floor feeling heavy and disconsolate on such a perfect evening, and the days are growing longer, and I had caught a glimpse of a blossoming cherry out of the futherest corner of my eye from a bright yellow cab this morning.

The sweetness of the promise of Spring steals over the senses like an opiated lip balm, shedding so many layers of clothing, like so many layers of chapped skin to walk down to P's on the first of February, an oasis in winter. The stars are such bright pricks of white in the deep, blue night. The night blooming jasmine is stirring.

Then again, on the way home, a good pigeon shat upon me. Am a beacon for bird shit, a better poet would find a suitable metaphor. I'd rather let it dangle.

That is my photograph of my West Coast, my California, my landscape, my city, my mantle. A far cry from where I spent last week the mystical city of New York.

Long before I had spent any time acquainting myself with such a tangle of streets and brick I had read Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities", and it might be a peculiar device to turn the world's most visible city into an invisible city, but I always thought that New York would be all things to all people, and would disappear, then thrive in it's invisibility, always all things to all people.

This was my first experience with New York in winter, and jesus, mary and joseph, my delicate, sunny Californian constitution was completely unprepared. Pinpinette saved my flesh when she lent me a proper winter coat, as it was we left the charming restaurant in Tribeca and the temperature had tempestuously dropped and the wind picked up, and the assault on my being was truly awe inspiring. Tears froze on my cheeks, snot froze in my nose, the chill set about gnawing on my extremities, my lips froze in a rictus of complete surprise, I was evidently able to utter s-s-s-scotch and was conducted to the Soho Grand for a warm up.

Amazing, though, just how fast a body will acclimate to the cold, truth be told, it was a bitter adventure, and since my meeting ended up being canceled, I spent five days navigating the bright sunlight, broad boulevards, narrow neighborhoods, gray snow and frozen digits with frequent stops in grand old bars for warm ups, nothing like a mid-day scotch (funny, I am not such a big scotch drinker, but no other libation appealed to me, only the amber fire spreading across my palette and through my limbs -- with the exception of a particularly tasty watermelon martini, or three, that washed down the particularly tasty chocolate cupcake from the Magnolia bakery)

I did not meet with any grievous bodily harm, nor did I fortuitously hook up with any French men, any men at all for that matter. Although, after a grueling trudge through the East Village through Nolita, Little Italy, China Town and down to the Fish Market (mind you, I traversed back and forth) I called Pinpinette for a good spot for a warm up and she recommended the Hudson Hotel. So if you saw the three-quarters blond girl in the borrowed shirred mink reading John Dos Passos thawing her fingers with a fortifying finger of Laphroig, you know the girl who was watching the room fill and left her fast map Manhattan when she left. That was me, if you picked up my map, I'd be happy to furnish my address. Though, truly, my crowning achievement this trip was mastering the subway, I must say, I think San Francisco has the ratio of crazy to sane on public transportation totally down. Then again, I have never really been to Queens... but just last week there was a crazy BEARDED lady on the 6 Parnassus. Top that Manhattan.