A Wild Scent

I surprised my daughter with the news she gets to attend a small morning camp next week. She is thrilled. Her vacant eyes indicated she'd withdrawn in the anticipation of seeing friends after 2 months of family. She grabbed her backpack and started gathering things around the house to accompany her on this long awaited girl-club time.

She picked up a tiny perfume from a kid cosmetic set, and asked, "Do you think I should wear perfume?"

Her excitement was intoxicating, so I said, "Yeah, why not!"

Then she said, "I'll wear a scent that drives the counselors wild."

My boyfriend sent me a text that an open mic is resuming next week, and then I felt the whirling stomach my daughter was just describing. I sort of enjoy the tiny bubble I'm existing in at the moment, and the idea of returning to normalcy gives me the sensation every speck harboring in my intestines is about to immediately evacuate from my body.

I remember a nonessential errand we ran before the shelter-in-place. We went to the carwash in Midtown. In the lobby, my boyfriend read his phone, and I watched some sporting event on the communal TV. When I say watched, I mean it was a nice scene to lock my eyes on, as I withdrew. The place was pretty crowded, and everyone was engaged in some variation of individual entertainment. When a woman stood up and walked through the lobby, we were all brought into the present moment. She plunked a couple coins in the automated massage chair, which was positioned in a theatrical way, where everyone had a vantage point. This woman laid back in that massage chair, closed her eyes, and had an orgasmic experience in front of a live car wash audience. Everyone then alternated between thumbing their phone and watching this woman's invisible lady boner grow to unbreakable strength. Her husband quickly tuned in to the display, and dealt with it like any partner would, he walked outside and decided to go without complimentary coffee and the pungent smell of mingling air fresheners, that might actually drive people wild.

There's so much to look forward to, that goes beyond eating and drinking on a restaurant patio. I woke up with a cold sore yesterday, which means I actually bookended this shelter-in-place with my overactive anxiety's physical response to change. Pick a side, Alicia. Do you want to be a cozy homebody or be a smiling scenester?

I don't know, I guess I want to be both. I do know that the carwash lady is living the right way; live like everybody's watching, and you don't give a fuck. It's more powerful than perfume.

She's So High

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As I scroll through Instagram, I get food envy from all the people out there flexing their culinary skills during this quarantine. I've consumed 50 quesadillas since the beginning of March. I hate dishes too much to start cooking like I believe processed food is poison, but I’ve written a decent amount of fart jokes.

A few days ago, I got high for the first time in almost a decade. It was a THC concentrate tincture. I took it an hour before an interview to do social media for a magazine. It's a volunteer position, so they can't be finicky about a person's recreational activities, but I started noticing it kicking in the last 10 minutes of our chat, and this made me feel uncomfortable nervousness I masked by incessantly talking.

The next day I had a horrible headache that lasted every waking second. It could have been from the THC concentrate, or maybe from watching 7 hours of TV after taking it, without my glasses on. I grew up in Lake Tahoe, so weed is a very normalized part of the culture. However, I stopped smoking pretty soon after high school because I made the conscious decision that I don’t enjoy crippling paranoia. 

I spent many an afternoon in a dense cloud, paralyzed on a couch, convinced I was reading everyone’s mind. These are not fond memories for me. A lot of potheads like to tell me that all I need to do is smoke more weed, in order to overcome this uncomfortableness. It just seems like a lot of work, when I’m already really good at lounging around and watching movies while eating quesadillas.

Thankfully, my kids were at their dad's that day, so I didn't have to homeschool with a headache. My homeschool strategy is to work as fast as possible, get it out of the way, because I have my own work to do, and I need some time for cooking meals that require minimal cleanup and writing fart jokes.

My kids are a good source of material though. My son asked during his writing assignment, "Mom, how do I spell 'do'? Is it D-O or D-O-O?"

"Well babe, it just depends how you're using it."

We watched a dinosaur video on YouTube, and I did not need to be high to think, "OOOOH WOOOOW, Dinosaurs are fucking aaaamazing!"

But, I am grounded enough to think the timeline for dinosaurs sounds like a load of horseshit. I emphasize to my children, "They are trying to tell us that that bone is 60 MILLION YEARS OLD?!"

I expand my argument on why they should question this theoretical timeline. “We haven't ever found a lawn chair capable of surviving a single Sacramento summer. The people of Pompeii were buried alive by Mt. Vesuvius erupting was 2,000 years ago. Now lets consider multiplying that by 30 MILLION!!"

My kids were probably like, mom, you sound high, but they don't have that sort of vocabulary. Just like how I don’t have to capability to translate to them that 60 years ago academics were recreationally taking LSD.

I gave them a probable scenario. Dinosaurs are enormous lizards that live inside the earth’s layers. Air bubbles within the planet allow them decent living spaces and access to water. These dinosaurs die, and their remains work themselves up to the surface. I came up with that L. Ron Hubbard shit, and I’ve never even done LSD.

The other day I drove by Starbucks, and saw a drive-thru line a mile long. I imagine most of those people don’t have any hopes or dreams, but I understand the need for high impact caffeine. Making coffee is the only culinary skill I can flex at home, so I can enjoy it while working on flatulence humor.