Better Living Through Plastic Surgery - Part I

I was remembering, the other day, as I lay prone in my bed, with no madeleine in sight, those books in the late eighties, early nineties. The body modification books - urban warrior - or some such, the vanguard of the tatoo-piercing craze, before it became predictable to see the lower back tat peeking out of the low slung jeans, carved in twain by the victoria's secret thong, as she sips her cosmo, but I digress... Those books were to be obtained by somewhat furtive measures, and revered like porn, which in a sense they were. All those bodies, with appendages sometimes slashed and pierced then tatooed. Dude, that was some cool shit. Immitation being the sincerest form of flattery we set about "modifying" our bodies, ourselves, a tatoo here a belly ring there, thereby stripping it of all edginess prior to 1991. I got my first tatoo at 19, a sun, on my shoulder, get it. Right. My mother pitched a fit and practically signed me over at the Hell's Angels. I pierced my navel the following year. Guess which one I still have, writ large on my shoulder? Ah, the permanence of youthful indiscretion.

There are still no less than four tatoo/piercing shops in my neighborhood, the rage of the mundane continues unabated. Sometimes I am wowed by the art I see, but mostly it's oh honey, no.

Back then I thought it was hardcore, and I thought I'd take a stab at it. No. You know what's hard core? Liposuction.

All those body modifications, ball bearings dangling from nipples and testicles, branding and shit, aint nothing compared to invasive surgery. This is what I was thinking as I lay prone in my bed, trussed and oozing, through my vicodin haze. I may have garbled something incoherent about being hardcore, and I may have cackled, or squeaked, before I fell back into that strange plane of opiated dreams.

Man, it's really weird.

One minute you're on the gurney and they stick the IV in and you think, huh, that feels funny, and then they give you a shot of some really awesome narcotic and you giggle madly and are just trying to form a witticism of can I has some more, please through the cotton wool of your tongue, when you are roused, jostled, herded out to the waiting car and sped off to the parents to convelesce in the country.

Where I nap and watch Wimbledon, can't read, been to dopey, but I swore off the vicodin yesterday as I hadn't pooped in three days and was itchy.

I am livid black and sallow green, with striations of sulfur and scarlett from my knees to just below my breasts. I feel as if I have been pummeled and then pummeled again by a brawny gangster with a sack of oranges. My skin is numb in patches, eerily spongy in others. Muscles tug at odd intervals and my ankles have swollen to the size of grapefruits. The surgeon is pleased with my progress and clearly pleased with his work. I have to wear, god help me, this horrible, horrible, crotchless girdle contraption for the next three weeks ( I bought two) it zips and snaps, is nigh on impossible to bend in, I don't really walk, so much as crab along...

That is hardcore. Hardcore in the name of beauty and sustaining the illusion of youth. Am I a cutting convert, getting there. It's hard and painful and it sucks, it will be months before my body really settles.

So how do I look?

Fucking fantastic.

Sunday in the park

Today was the Pride Parade, so a giddy shout out to the gays. And a hooray for my fair city.

But I am increasingly leery of crowds, no matter how fabulous and nearly naked, so I went westward into the park.

I love urban parks, but my love of Golden Gate park is well documented and abiding, I have ambled over paths and greens, through all kinds of weather and through every season. It's been positively summery this past week, I find myself combing through my drawers in search of suitable clothing.

Out the door and thrumb through the hippies and the tourists to the Pan Handle, swing left at the Eucalyptus, past the burning man bandshell, scold self, meant to check out the festivities at the opening, up to JFK drive.

The sight of the closed road always gives me a quiet thrill, I can walk down the middle of the street, amongst the people on bikes and the people on skates. I wander over to the dahlia beds to check on their progress. They are beginning to shoot up on their sturdy stalks, then they'll erupt in gaudy stars in a month or so. Across the road I can hear the pok pok of tennis balls at the tennis club.

I notice to my left they have demolished that square of pavement where the skaters of all stripes, especially 1970's stripes come out in their wee togs to get their freak on. I wonder where they went.

I hear music at the bandshell and detour past the museum, which I think of as my museum, even though most of the permanent collection is not to my taste and the galleries are confusingly laid out, quibbles really. What I like best is the garden.

I love the bandshell, and wondering through the sandy paths in between the very old plane trees to come upon it. The Golden Gate band was playing a waltz for the several dozen grey hairs clustered on benches in the shade. I sat. They are old themselves, I wondered who would come along after they had faded into dotage, and who would play those old waltzes and marches, and how I wished that prince charming would come along and ask me to dance. When he didn't and they finished I went up to the museum which is the best place to pee in the park. You go in through the side entrance in the garden and then through the cafe. There was a jazz trio in the main hall playing beneath that dizzy inducing painting by gerhard something or other. I was admiring the boy on trumpet, because I am a strumpet - ok, I'll stop now.

Back out into the sunshine I find the where the skaters have relocated their freak flag... To the bridge, I think they must have displaced the swing dancers, I idly consider a war a la westside story between the swing dancers... Skaters win, hands down. I don't mean to be derogatory - well, just a little - but a lot of that is envy, I wish I could twirl on skates and not fall down, they were playing old school Michael Jackson and it was really hard to minimize the bounce in my ounce as the music followed me down the hill. I swing to the right to admire the waning rose garden and inhale the ailing blooms, there are couples and children and other languages and I feel suddenly very naked and very raw, and I make haste from that lovely space, but before I can escape a french couple ask me where the hell they are. And I tell them in french just exactly where they are and how to get out, but not before they visit the observatory at the museum, on a day like today you can see for miles. The thanks were profuse and I declined an invitation for a verre, I had wanderlust, you see, but I do hope that they heeded my advice.

Up the hill, just before the turn out to stowe lake there was an enormous violet pink head in the middle of the meadow... well, from the nose up. (that meadow has a loo, I do not endorse this loo)

I turn left up the access road to stowe lake, where I note they have expanded their bike, and various wheeled contraption business, and business appears to brisk, from all of the recumbant bikes that have nearly mowed me over.

I buy two hot dog buns from the concession stand to feed the ducks. Poor stowe lake, terrible algae problem, nuclear green on a good day, I worry over the ducks and the coots, and I only saw one lonesome coot, hollering forlornly amidst the awkward row boats and careening paddle boats. It's such a pretty far away kind of little promenade, inspite of the algae, bridges and chinese pavillions and waterfalls and turtles, is it any wonder that it is a favorite for the elderly Russians pacing the lake to the beat of a geriatric metronome and memories of constitutionals in sacrificed lands. And I walk on, always feeling hyper aware of the relative youth coursing through my veins as I sidestep their shuffling gait.

Back out on JFK I am starting to feel my ankle, I fear I might begin to shuffle, but I am going to power on, I take the short cut path behind the Tea Garden to get to the arboretum, nothing is in bloom, but it is always amusing to watch the squirrels, and stroke the weird tree.

The thing about people in parks in that they are unexpectedly everywhere. And I wonder, when I see people sprawled in peculiar corners what compelled you to drop anchor in that spot, in states of dress and undress and lassitude and randyness. I think I should like to have someone to preambulate with, but then again, I do love my solitary jaunts. With the sun on my face I am listening - overheard, child to mother - can I pee in the lake? mother, jesus, no. Which reminds me, the facilities at the lake are new and clean, endorsed for a pee. Which is why I don't have an ipod, I like to listen to the world, to the blackbirds singing and the omnipresent dry rasp of the crows and the sirens in the distance, snatches of conversations in other tongues and my own, it makes a lovely juxtoposition to my own silence. Makes me feel part of the world.

I'd go to the Tea Garden, but I only brought enough cash for buns and water, I am lured back to the band shell by the sound of tango. People are dancing. I sit in the shade and watch, Prince Charming doesn't come round to ask me to dance and I am left yearning, for I sorely would love to tango, even more than to waltz. I take a card, as one never knows.

Back up JFK the skaters have gotten tipsy on the sun and the heady warmth radiating from the pavement, they have moved on from Michael Jackson to early nineties hip hop, again, I struggle to contain my hips. I veer right through the tennis courts, watch a lady with good game and ass to die for for awhile. My ankle is throbbing and my pace is slowed, cursed cankle, I'll ice you when I get home you cantankerous old bitch.

The tennis courts bleed ironically into sharon meadow, known as hippy hill, skirted with further irony by the lawn bowling, and apparently there is a little known law that all lawn bowlers must wear their pants high with a belt and suspenders. It's true. Another game I'd like to learn, maybe I am just terribly nostalgic for the genteel. Gloves and hats and all of that.

Anyhoodle, the drummers are drumming on hippy hill, it is it's usual confounding cacophony of discordant instrumentalists and the stoned white girls who adore them. Frisbies fly through the air, hacky sacks are hacked, unleashed dogs maraud in packs, merchants are hawking their bud, the cops let them be. It's benevolent chaos for the most part, nobody wants jinx the sunshine, the wrath of the fog is swift and icy.

By this time in the late afternoon the Haight has been besieged by the gays, and they have brought with them a jubilee, I thread my way through the youngsters and the oldsters and all the trim, and quim and cock, to my home where I throw open the windows to listen to the bodies on the street and ice my ankle, all the while keeping my silence to myself.

and scene.

Fierce/Fragile



I made a scene tonight in a fancy restaurant, I didn't mean to. I walked in with a swivel on my hips and a sneer on my lips, I was well padded in ferocity. Right down to my lipstick and my coordinated under garments.



It's been a disconcerting couple of months, the kind of months spent akimbo where time rushes where you thought you were standing still, where every available limb is attached to an inadvertant casting reel and the bounty is categorically overwhelming. Fish and silvery scales flopping everywhere, blood and shiny everywhere. The suffocating fish and the indefatiguable fight for life, wears on the legs and the arms, I am all alone on the skip (is that what they call those little tiny almost rafts) I am alone and there is no one with a net or a cold beer.



Earlier, I pour myself into black, top the supple blackbird pie with the shiny shoes, making their debut at Foreign Cinema, it's bright and lovlely out. Second day of summer, and it actually feels like it might be. Might be endless, might be paradise, might be ephemera.



Earlier, earlier, I asked the engineer to let me be for a good while. And he keeps cropping up in my inbox, wants to know if I am well, wants to know if I am alright. I think he is keeping tabs and more incidiously I think he is keeping score. So I let him have it, I gave him the ole one-two via email (hey, it's the modern world and we all cower behind our monitors) and I allowed myself to get good and pissed off, and went off in the gorgeousness of this second day of summer to get my car waxed. I asked him what the hell he wants from me, and he came back with some pat answer about he likes to know my comings and goings from afar, at which point I spit into my palms and donned my gloves, DO NOT FEED ME SUCH BULLSHIT, YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER. I am not a fawn, I am the lady or the tiger, choose wisely frat boy.



Later at dinner, after oysters and gimlets and rose and duck salad but before I finished my constitutional frenet, M says to me, and our relationship is based on mutual recognition and contention says to me, you don't deserve love, you earn love.



And all my fierceness evaporated in the ghosts of projection of that shitty movie the Science of Sleep , though I could sleep for a millenia, and I stood up tall in my shiny shoes and lost my everlovin' shit. How could he say that to me, how could you possibly say that to me, to that stupid girl with her heart perennially on her fucking sleeve, the sleeve she wipes her teary nose on after the eleventyfifth time she's had her sorry heart ripped out. Talk to me motherfucker later, when you have been..... but I wont say that. I'll just stand on the sidewalk and weep harder, for the fact that I was just that fierce when I came in, and leave under a veil of tears, just a brittle leaf from some desiduous tree in latter autumn, nothing extraordinary, no celebrity train wreck, just a sweet ride on an itinerant breeze before the ground strikes that fragile spine to mulch.



I did tell the engineer that I missed him, because it's true.



which is why I think it was unacceptable to leave me a voice mail on Friday evening - sorry mister, I am busy losing my crackers in fancy restaurants, leave a message. I have no doubt that he wants to refute a number of accusations I leveled at him, what he doesn't know, is that is really doesn't matter anymore. It was a good run and I fell in love, and I ached for ages, but I don't anymore.

I still believe in love, but cynically, cynically. I think I fought hard for love when I was in it, which is why I exploded tonight at dinner.

Or maybe I didn't, or maybe it's just too late for love, and maybe I should just give in to the three-quarters of myself that is already betrothed to her rabbit. But do you have any idea what it is like to be rabid for kissing.... To be cognizant of that ever diminishing window for the smart girls. I grow stronger and slowly edge into the slow, slight inferno that I might supposed to be, and further recedes that dawn of love, if need be, if it's conceivable I suppose I might settle for a stable of puppies in portland, I suppose I'd be seduced by eagerness and availability.

I am officially a lecher. It's neither here nor there, it's just a future full of all kinds of promise and no romance. (please, please prove me wrong, and I'll make a happy diet of tofu humble pie, please.)

The Shoe Whore Wars

Once upon a time I had bad habits. Still in these days I have bad habits, both vile and benign. But once upon that time I had a shopping habit, as a bartender I always had all sorts of cash on hand and most of it never made it into my checking account. In the last four months I have purchased seven pairs of shoes, two today and holy fuckballs they were expensive and so totally worth it.

P and I have had a date to shop for awhile -- I had bonus money burning and she had some extra, so we hit the grands magasins downtown, starting with a lovely lunch at the Rotunda at needless mark-up, say what you will about the twenty-two dollar lobster club, there is something about honoring your grandmothers when you have lunch there, you sit straighter and wish you were wearing white kid gloves. Our friend J works there graciously invited us to lunch and pink Pommery pops which is why I had no problem buying the blue suede shoes, and why yes they are Prada, thankyouverymuch.... Which means that I have to give a little back story..... Having just come from my ex-husband's engagement, my wedding has been on my mind, in uninvited reels. Not painful and not unpleasant, but just, wow, I forgot this, and I remember this. Up in the back corner of my closet in their shoe bag is the pair of pink, silk Prada slippers that I wore with my wedding dress. Now these blue suede shoes are for my brother's wedding.... I am a bridesmaid and I'll be in turquoise, it's a lovely little dress and a color I can pull off with maximum aplomb.... but I was having issues with the shoes - black doesn't really work and I abhor metallic shoes. Silver would really be the best choice, but I just can't.

We have ten minutes to lunch and I see them immediately. pretty, pretty shoes... close enough to the color of the dress, and wedges! for a grass wedding! justifications abound! and pink champagne! sold.

I try on couture, she buys couture. I am reluctant to buy anything that fits above my knees and below my shoulders as I am about to be remodeled, but my feet are small and might I add elegant. Which is how I end up buying the three inch black patent mary janes at Sak's. The justification sounds something like this - P, perfect. Me - uh-huh. P, perfect interview shoes. Me, I 'll dine out on these in portland for sure. Because I'd drink champagne out of them, and if the right man was out there and was suitably dazzled, if he had his balls about him, he'd drink champagne out of my shoes too....

It's been one of those good days, no it's been one of those grand days, ladies who lunch with their favorite gay, good lord does that man smell good. I said to P, as we were decending the escalator, that I could smell him all over the store. Frivolous money, the post coital joy of being able to spend frivolous money, just because I AM GOING TO SET THE EARTH ON FIRE IN MY BLACK PATENT LEATHER SHINY, SHINY SHOES. ALL WILL SEE ME AND OBEY. ok, well maybe not quite so allcaps, but you get my drift.

Later, spent after the spending. We had dinner with P & M's neighbors and danced the eighties in our really tall shoes. The more things change, the more they stay the same. We are still playing dress up, it's just the stakes are higher, as are the interest rates. I can remember when twenty dollars was a lot of money, just like I remember when it was nothing at all. And I remember the bitchslap of the bubble, coupled with divorce, and twenty dollars was suddenly a lot of money again, just as most of my peers were starting to engage in the pleasure and perils of disposable income. I have never felt a more profound shame in being as positively poor as I was then. I was far too proud to hit up my family for money, and I muddled through. And I did. And just like every other human being I have a really complicated relationship with money, specifically having what I haven't earned. I think there are quite a few of us out there, trying to reconcile our places in the world... what am I ever going to do, I'll never match my father's earning power, things could change, but it's not looking bloody likely and how am I ever going to be able to pay it forward?

I could go on and on, but it's bath time.

The Engagement Party. or there are Irish in my Lightwell

No seriously there are Irish in my lightwell on lawn chairs broguing. It's true. Seamus is peculiar, according to the lightwell, lawn chair gossips, but it is time for head phones.....

It's a quarter to six, I am still on the bridge, it's still hot. I am feeling six parts spunky to three parts dread, I have got to navigate traffic, park, throw on my game face and my game shoes and get going.

It's six o'clock and I've got my left knee propped on the wheel, I am going to be deliberately late, I am nowhere near my game face, but I have just been freshly therapitized, I am feeling marginally edified.

At precisely sixfifteeno'clock I am fanning my armpits, applying that second layer deoderant, emollient on the skin, essentially trying to liquefy/con myself into a supernatural state of super heroism....

stop, she says, mid mascara application. stop, she said, and promise me you wont go crying in the corner. Besides it's kind of nice to put on your game face , and your game skirt and your game heels and just go.

So at sevenfifteeno'clock I showed up to my ex-husband's engagement party, and there at the front door were our old and beloved past, my old and beloved past. Dear friends I should have been a better friend to, the forsenic particles of my misbegotten youth, the greek chorus of my half remembered nights, those happy bodies, immortalized in substances, who were buoys to me, ports in a storm, when I was only half conscious and mostly storm ravaged, who were a sort salvation --- but enough of that. Enough of that past, here we are now, a motley assembly under the heat lamps in the garden. There they all are, there we all are in various states of parenthood or not... piecing together whatever we can to make the illusory work, and that is the very fucking bottom line and then my brain leaked out my eyeballs a little bit -- because that it what it is, isn't. It's making the illusory bits jibe with one's carefully contructed reality.

So I have decided to take refuge in my imagination, I expect to resurface after a long breath in a kinder sort of sanitorium -- again with the tangential............

So D thank you. Thank you for giving us reason to be together. And D, thank you for thanking me for being there, twice I nearly turned the car around, but mostly thank you for bringing together a group of disparate people and for reminding me, reminding me of that lovely quintet or sextet of people that I don't see enough, so are our machinations, so time passes. It's nice to know that after so much time I don't fear making as ass out of myself in front of these friends.

I have got the promise of tomorrow and it is elsewhere and it is manifold and it is manifest in the people that I think and dream about, the lovely personalities and the vile bodies that constitute all that is tenuous between me and my unwinnable bet witht the moon.

The Irish are still in the lightwell on lawn chairs, they just get louder................

The Fat Lady Sang and Other Things

(I wrote and posted this last Sunday, and then decided to take it down, after a little rumination I have decided to let it stand as is, for whatever reason the past burbled up, and my reflections on it hold true after several days of thought....)



(second update -- I am taking out the incendiary bits - I am ill equiped to deal with the fall out -- maybe someday, but not now)

1) I haven't had TV in the house since just after September 11, 2001. Where as a freshly laid off, poor girl it came down to food or CNN. Saucer eyed or starve, I chose to be practical.

I still have a TV and a DVD player and friends with cable, Very Important Friends, but I really haven't seen commercial television in years, which is beside the point, because in the void there are the internets and more importantly, the far reaching opinions of the critics, the professional to the armchair, and what I love about TV even more than watching it is reading about it.

I have only seen two episodes of the Sopranos aside tonight's finale, with that in mind I sat down to watch how it would end -- in a hail of bullets, a reign of violence, a definitive end. It was mind blowing, for it's sheer simplicity, for it's negligable quotidien, we just fucking go on. And whatever justice the universe chooses to extract it won't be wrapped in a blood soaked ribbon for the blood thirsty viewers to suck on with their saucer TV eyes. Fucking brilliant. What an indictment on us. We had all girded ourselves for a sort of romanesque (ahem HBO) bloodlettling and what we get is a girl who is having trouble parallel parking while her family dives into onion rings in an old school american diner.... the tension is yours, the tension is theirs. We all get, though we all forget, that fate turns on a dime. So eat drink make merry and all that yada yada bada bing.

2) Hating on the Haight

40th anniversary of the summer of love and the Haight Street fair.... I wake up at seven on a sunday to the music of of a wall of porta-potties being banked against the wall of my building, and even with the windows fastly sealed shut the horror of that nose hair singeing, cloying chemical sweet stench wafts through the cracks in the bricks to assault my senses just as I am rousing myself from the precariousness of my dreamland jaunts. And my jaunts these days are long and complicated, it takes me a while to shed the gossamer binds that fall across my eyeline like the fine hairs I am always swiping away whenever the breeze is slight.

I admit to loving it when it is early and everyone is setting up shop, there is an air of put-upon conviviality that I'd like to think smacks of old school carnie -- and I see other locals, wandering down the middle of the street, coffee in hand, weaving a little as the vendors pay us no heed. This morning and not for the first time, I wished I had a pair of roller skates, just to fly down Haight Street in the early morning amid the bustle of preparation for the onslaught of noise hairy hippies and too many meats cooking on too many stands and the amatures out in all their sorry glory to puke on corners and get busted buying an ounce of oregano.

Usually I flee early, as it happened this year, I had nowhere to be until 3pm. So I read, and I listened. To the Hare Krishnas, just outside my window, and the bands and the voices -- they are still strong, though slurred and strident. And I liked it. I liked being shut up in my home with half an ear cocked to the world and the rest devoted to my reading, I liked being unseen in the middle of it all, with no stranger's body trespassing into my realm of space. I get territorial real quick about space, you don't want to bump into me unless I am feeling benevolent which is hardly never. I'll adapt and make peace if I must, but I do not like to move in a crowd, at all.

3) I forgot the third.

Oh, well sure. The Engineer emailed out of the blue on Friday - to check in, after I had explicitly requested that he not contact me. I asked P what the hell he wanted and she somewhat ambiguously councellled me to think like a man, since I am not one, I have difficulty embracing the concept. I asked only that he let me be, I can only presume that he'd like to keep to fingers in the metaphoric pot since they certainly aren't in me. Infact my green streak has him three fingers deep in someone else, he did say, " I like her a lot". What is a semi-sophisticated girl to parse? Does the internets has any advice? (that said I have reams, positive reams, perhaps dissertation reams to say about lolcats and linguistics and the already codified grammar, but the internets move fast my friends and our world edges ever closer to that intellectual vortex - form of a whirlpool, and I am not so sure that our compadres didn't feel the same in 1936, but with less immediacy, therefore better pondered.) but that's a long digression and I'd have to put on my smart hat, when late on a Sunday, short of a warm body in my bed I'll probably wend my way through the maze that is free market porn, even that is a mighty effort.

I'll just dream of the fat lady, how she sang her last in private and hit that note that shatters glass with only her mirror as witness and then another dawn broke to business as usual.... But she knows, or does she? I am inclined to think that Tony and Carmella soldier on, they can't break from the criminal, they continue to justify with the limninal, the children will drive on complicated defense mechanisms, just like the rest of America, to varying degrees of coping and criminality. But then again, who am I to judge. Me and my priceless wellbeing, it begs the question, just how far would you go, whom would you sell and whom would you kill. This from the woman who captures spiders to put outside, this from the woman who last fired a bebe gun in 1987, this from a woman who knows the purring insidiousness of a certain kind of demeaning violence, but doesn't know that kind - and I ask myself, are you talking cinematic violence, because that is the only kind of violence you can articulate, can you not articulate rape (deleted, deleted, deleted)

And if you want to catch me I'll be the accidental phoenix at the incidental truckstop, you know the one with the maroon booths, somewhere in the neverland hinterland of everybody else's dream of california, you know the one, the one with the old timey salad bar and the baco bits on the hottest stretch of I-5, someone's idea of a fiefdom forever unconquered on the side of the interstate, someone's dying orchard, someone's dying dream. We pay enough attention to the price fo gas in these oil starved towns and that is all, no culture to fathom but the local wendy's and nobody wants a square hamburger no matter how hungry.....

Drink me up Sinnerman, where you gonna run to

I said rock.

And then I said not so much, and then I said harder, and then I shimmied and I quaked and in rising I said welcome to operation Emma 2.0 , in which Emma redesigns her corporeal self and lays the plans for total world domination.

It goes something like this, the Architect is not exactly happy with the notion that we might shave off our best gals in the name of brevity and the name of gravity. I told him I was sick of following my tits around, and here is the thing. It's a gift and a curse to be young and sort of beautiful and blond and very, very buxom. You spend your life fighting for the urbanity that is rightfully yours, fighting to subsume the stereotype of stupid by flabbergasting and simulataneously offputting with your less than forgiving intellect - not that I am any great brain, but I get things on an intuitive level that others percieve as my big fat brain, when it's my big fat common sense, and it's just my big fat rack that's leveling the playing field.

I am still young and dumb, I am still just as blond(possibly blonder) as I ever was. But I am just not that young and certainly less dumb, and I am too old for my tits. So I am going to divest myself of this excess weight, and I no doubt I will miss them. Don't get me wrong my girls got me into many a jam and charmed my way out of just as many. I don't want to be anybodies cliche of the florida granny, lizarded with pendulous breasts and rediculous hair....

thoughts are straying -- interlude of dancing.

right. I already have the pendulous breasts and the ridiculous hair.

alright then, more dancing.

I sort of feel some kind of eulogy is in order, dear Emma's future formerly spectacular rack, thank you for all the fish, I kid, thank you for all the trouble, thank you for giving me the wiles and the shamelessness to be able to extract myself from any number of dangerous situations. Thank you for making me so goddamn insecure. I thank you for preceding me in calamity and giving me that extra second to plot my course. You were glorious in the days before gravity, we dined and drank freely on you with a minimal amount of exposure. The boys of course were are hard wired to think you were easy, and more often than not you indulged, but not for their reasons. As crass as it is, since I never planned on suckling any babies, my big rack was my crutch, my cross, my whimsical delight, my subversive source of power, my secret manipulation, my shame.

And just like that I will halve them, in the name of vanity and in the name of I Just Don't Want to Follow You Stupid Chicks Around Anymore, I'd rather not have my tits announce me to the room any longer. Tits make room for mojo. Which is not to say that wont be fantastic, and still mine, and still get me into trouble. I still love the trouble. Wouldn't trade that silken shimmy, want more of it, wants all of it.

another Juneary

another June gloom, it's time to break out the hats and scarves, it's time to gird for the iron belt of unpenetrable fog, it's time to lay down and nap while the rest of the hemisphere embraces summertime.

My heat has been humming since the midafter-- well you know what I mean, and besides it's late. It's just plain cold out. You never really realize how much you miss, until you have fired up a particular soundtrack, and the missing comes charging out of the fog like the four dogs of Cerebus to nip agitatedly at the heels on the legs you never knew were yours.

Four legged and dogged in ways that are far better than cotton candy, I am the decider, after all, I am the flightsuitless decider, inching along, edging hesitantly towards a space some call greatness and others call due, I've got my arms laden with too many humble pies to even mouth those words, but what I have right now is the keys to the short bus, and I intend to shanghai myself and those pies and go somewhere I can't even see.

I look to the future and all I see in snow on the television, it's a great wide open. I am taking my butterfly net and nothing else, to capture diodes of light like fireflys out there in the immutable static, I'll paint the grays in shades of crimson and violet. My upturned tea cup yields no secrets, it's a future I can't read, it's a familiar that isn't mine, it's a June full of sunshine and the benevolence of summer.

It's a suprise.

Had dinner with the Hairdresser night before last. Here is what he said, as I stuffed sashimi into my face to mask my astonishment. I am sorry. I made a mistake. I should not have walked away. I miss, I miss you (us).

me: ---

me: (in french) that's very kind, you know I loved you. But it's five years later and I still love your hands but I am moving forward and I would not permit you to derrail me. You are sad, I can see that, you are turning 46 and are consumed with regret. I can see that as clearly as I can see your hands are older.

he: -- fumbles as he wants to enfold me.

It's not exactly scorn, that propels me into the cab. And it's not exactly retribution, either. It's just that is too late, like it' s too late for the engineer, like it's too late for all the ones I loved, because I loved, and I don't anymore. I am not exactly exasperated with R for coming around to scratch at my back door, I am ruefully flattered and tempted to hit it, freighting the consequences on the balance. Best not to. (really?)

(uh huh) what kind of can of worms do you want to open and would you really trade the consequences for a couple of hard won orgasms, would it really be worth it. Probably not.

Batteries are cheaper my good girl.