Broken Doorbell

My doorbell is broken; a wonderful way to avoid solicitors. I tried to fix it after moving in. It requires an App, of course. I couldn’t get the doorbell to sync, and gave up, but I still have the app on my phone and now I get neighborhood alerts. I avoided adding neighborhood watch apps because I don’t want to read about petty grievances with messy front yards or someones trash cans, so I ignore the notifications from the doorbell app.

My cat comes-and-goes as she pleases. I won’t see her for two weeks, but then she’ll saunter in at 2am, meow loudly, making the dog run laps in excitement that is wild older sister is visiting. She jumps on my dresser and stares at me with such intent, I don’t know if she wants me to pet her or she’s plotting an attack.

In June, she must have taken to another family because she was gone. I thought she died, and was worried sick that Geoffrey would have a broken heart. I decided I’d just pretend she was alive, and I’d never tell the kids because they’re gone half the week, and will never notice. When Geoffrey leaves for college I'd retire the food dish. But my boyfriend and I were enjoying the Saharan heat one afternoon on the back porch and we heard her meow. I grabbed a flashlight and was convinced she was stuck under the deck, bending the chicken wire, telling him, “I see her!” I swear I saw her green eyes glowing in the light, but we heard another meow, I turned around, and she was walking towards us through the overgrown backyard like a tiny panther. 

I think she is mad I freaked out when she brought in a dying baby bird. She dropped the bird at my feet and instead of praising her, I swept it out the backdoor and dumped it over the fence. Or maybe she’s pissed I raise my pets Christian Scientists to make them strong. I keep her food dish above the kitchen sink, and I refill it every couple days, so I know she’s eating at night.

I received a notification from my doorbell app for a found cat, and I thought it could be her, so I decided to check it out. It was a different cat. Then I scrolled, and I saw more postings about found or missing cats that weren’t Midnight, ending on a video post of a mountain lion walking through someones backyard at 1am. I shut the app, and said, “This is why I don’t look at this shit,” trying to wipe the video from my brain.

In June, I told my sister about the cat’s disappearance, and she remembered how she lost my mom’s dog. My mom moped around crying and depressed, the entire time subtly blaming my sister for the dognapping. Then a month later, the dog showed back up, tied to the front door. My mom was overjoyed, but one morning while drinking coffee, my sister came in from working her overnight nursing shift, and my mom said, “You see how the dog is hiding his genitals, I think he’s been sexually abused.”

I wonder if my mom manifested her dog’s return. It reminds me of when Kiki was four years old, and we went to Vancouver. She left her baby blanket in the restaurant, and the next day she was devastated. We called the restaurant, and it was closed. When the taxi driver picked us up to take us to the airport we told him the story, and he said, “That’s where my son works! He’s probably there now.” And he called his kid, who said they had the blanket, and we picked it up a few hours before flying out of the country. I always think, "Of all the cabs!"

The blanket mysteriously disappeared after my ex-husband starting saying things like, “She’s too old to be carrying around that filthy blanket.” 

She became very secretive about her blanket, and would cram it under a pillow if anyone not related to her was around. Remembering the blanket, I got pissed off, and sent him a text that said, “Did you throw away Kiki’s baby blanket or just hide it?” 

He wrote back, “What blanket?” 

I replied, “The pink one. Her prized possession that you thought was making her weak and pathetic."

I’m blaming it on the heat, but I got caught up in negative thinking, so I decided to start listening to self-help audio books. It helped. The audiobooks are reminders for me not to boil over in rage when thinking about something that happened five years ago. Keeping those thoughts at bay are critical for opportunities that come knocking, otherwise I'm distracted and they’ll ring a broken doorbell. So I’ll refill my cat’s dish each morning, and not worry about a baby blanket thats been gone for five years. I’ve got more important things to do, like not think about mountain lions.

Secrets to Success

My mom called me very excited, and she reported, “You won’t believe what I just heard!”

“What?!” I said on the edge of my seat.

“They’ve found a common factor behind the super successful like Bill Gates, Steven King and Elon Musk. They drink Diet Coke all day long. Or Diet Pepsi. Either one will work.” She said proudly, obviously, having just discovered the secret to success.

I’m reading my annual parenting book. Parenting books are not my cup-of-tea because it’s hard to stay focused. I’m forced to re-read pages because my mind wanders into a daydream. It takes forever to get through one of them. I can’t remember what made me start this parenting book, it was so long ago when I cracked it open. Maybe the kids going back at school, or the intense closeness of summer. It's called The Conscious Parent, and really embraces the spirituality sold on Oprah, complete with the Tolle and Dalai Lama endorsement smacked on the cover. I’m digging the hippie-let-your-kids-be-themselves vibes.

As a parent, I just try to be present, and listen. This usually means leaving my phone in the other room. I impart my wisdom best I can, and unfortunately this can involve scare tactics. Like Nancy Reagan, I stand at the frying pan and demonstrate “this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs” for my kids. Standing in shorts that are too small for me, and holding a spatula I just sang Rain On Me into, I remind my kids, “You have to take life seriously!”

I’m so worried about my kids being introduced to drugs I’ve implemented a “Just Say No” campaign in my house because I’m from a hippie town in Northern California called South Lake Tahoe. Yes, the international tourist destination. If you live there though, it’s sort of a bleak landscape, after you erase the beautiful landscape, because you see the peace-love-and-happiness intentions to self-destruction. 

I have no idea if this label is PC, but it's for a character whose done so many hallucinogenics their brain doesn’t work properly, and Tahoe is ripe with them. They are called The Burnout. They’ve taken a plunge into psychedelics they weren’t able to fully come back from, and spend the rest of their adult life working jobs with a crew of high school kids, never noticing the growing age gap, and regaling the new-to-adulthood audience with stories from their wild partying days.

I met a bunch of burnouts in my youth. At the time, I thought they were cool, free-spirits, lighting the world on fire with their lack of inhibitions. But as I got older, they were unchanged. I remember going over to a coworker’s house, and she was dehydrating banana peels next to the heater vent because she planned to scrape out the inside of the peel and smoke it for a new trip. I thought what ingenuity, but a few years later when she died of a drug overdose, I could make some associations between drugs and living up to ones potential.

It’s cool when people report of a singular psychedelic experience that changed their life because they felt an energetic connection to all life, the power of the mind, and a sense of reality being malleable. However, from my experience, this is few and far between, and I have to take a hard line because the nuance of drug use can't be conveyed to children. So I tell my kids that drugs are for losers! Yes, I said losers. You can put a red hat on my head, and a fish filet sandwich in my hand, but I care about my kids. So much so that I’m willing to read the most boring books, and let them drink Diet Coke at breakfast. Or Diet Pepsi. Either one will work.

A Boy's Best Friend

 

“Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom.” Wakes me up every day. It’s either the middle of the night or the early morning. My son doesn’t walk into my room, he stands in the doorway and says “mom” from a whisper to a quiet yell. If my son is at his dad’s then my fur-son wakes me up. If I don’t wake up by sensing his moist nose an inch from my face, he sticks his tongue out and licks.

After waking up, I start the prepped coffee pot, and drink my first cup while staring at the ground, watching the carpet move in a psychedelic wave because I have thick sleepy residue coating my eyeballs. If it’s time with my son, we go through the rigamarole of him asking me to watch YouTube and play Fortnite. After he pouts, I seriously ask him, “Do you know me at all?”

Then he sings me songs that would get him suspended from school, and I low-key laugh and tell him he can’t ever say that stuff in public. He tells me to look up stock prices, we look at graphs we don’t really understand, and he tells me all the things he’s going to buy when he’s old. My coffee kicks in and I daydream about giving future interviews on Geoffrey to Biography Channel, “When he was a kid, he loved money and hated loosing games… we actually had to ban them because he flips game boards, cries and breaks things when he gets the sense he’s not in the lead, and his sister runs aways screaming, ‘He’s giving me anxiety!’”

When my dog wakes me up, it’s a quieter journey from sleep-dream into daydream, but after the dog notices my face is unfurled, he’s ready to go on an outdoor adventure, also called the Max Poopfest. He starts his series of bowel unloading at the same spot. I tie that bag off and leave it at the top of the first hill we climb to pick up on the way back. From then on, I leave tied off poop-bags right next to the desecrated spot, to swoop up on the return.

When the dog poops, I stand next to him and look at whatever house we're in front of. Usually the dog is obscured by some hedge planted in the 1970s, and my unanimated face takes in the house like Mike Myers standing in the street. I have yet to see someone in a window looking back at me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the person flips me off and dramatically throws the curtains closed.

On one stretch, the front yards of houses are separated from the road by a foot-wide strip of tiny white rocks. When the dog poops on this, I feel bad because I have to scoop the rocks up in the bag since they are disgusting and shit-covered, but I figure they’d prefer that when I justify their cost of replenishing the stolen property.

The house that starts this stretch is perfectly maintained. One time I left a bag of poop next to the mail box, and kept on running, but before I made it far, the owner was yelling at me that I forgot the dog’s poop bag. This man actually picked up the bag and because I had headphones in and didn’t really know what he was saying, he was throwing a pointed finger to the bag of shit. I yelled, probably very loudly because of the music blasting in my eardrums, “I'm getting the bag on my way back.”

I think the guy felt stupid, and I don’t really blame him, but maybe he has a problem with people leaving tied off bags of dog-doo next to his mailbox. I didn’t get too close to man because my dog’s reaction to anyone who is not within my inner-circle is to assume they are a psychopath trying to kill me. It’s down-right embarrassing, the dog’s unconditional love, but I shrug it off like I’m out with a pre-schooler asking inappropriate questions.

At the top of the second hill is an elderly couple’s house. After our first chat she told me, “You can call me Grandma,” and I politely declined, since I don’t know her at all. Even the dog had issue with this possible-serial-killer-posing-as-a-harmless-old-lady, and he jumped back and forth from her feet, barking incessantly through the entire encounter. She didn’t seem phased, and asked me if she could give him a treat. I told her, “You can try, but he prefers dirty underwear.”

The four mile walk/run/stand my dog and I go through was an everyday occurrence in June because my kids were gone most of the month. My kids went on a trip with their dad the first part, and after they returned we had a nice four day stretch before they went off to my parents’ house to attend a Vacation Bible School. What really sold me on this summer camp was the cost, FREE! 

Over the week, I was home with the dog happily working away, picturing the kids crafting, singing and playing games with new friends. My son refused to go the last two days, and spent that time following around my mom (not a surprise). I didn’t understand why he was so against the camp, but it all became clear; the price tag was a trick to sequester children and tell them  loads of crazy shit.

The last day of camp ended with a performance for the parents. Now I love Jesus, and Jesus songs (Father Abraham - it’s banger), but I wasn’t familiar with any of these songs. One song was about God’s creation of man and woman. The messaging was clear, there’s just two boxes that can be checked, male or female. My son refused to do the performance and stood cross-armed in the back. I sat in the front row, saved face, nodding my head to the beat and video taping my daughter.

The performance ended with a big barbecue. My sister and her child army were there too, so we claimed a picnic table by throwing all our crap on top of it, and got in the buffet line. When I returned to the table, balancing three plates, there were five other people squeezed onto the table with us. It was uncomfortably tight, but we couldn’t be rude, so I just side whispered to Becky, “What the hell?” And Becky looked at me like, “I know!”

There was a man and woman and their three kids, the youngest one sat right next to me and coughed on my plate the whole time. My son was still getting back at me for sending him to camp so he refused to eat, and scowled at me. The woman picked up the pile of crafts her kids made, and said, it was all heading straight for the trashcan. Becky laughed, and told her, “I do the same thing.” And I looked at Becky like, “You lie! I know you will be scotch taping this shit to your walls upon getting home so you can admire your children’s art.”

The camp leader came over, and I said thanks. I told her, “Were Catholic, but I’ve been thinking of going to the big Christian church in our neighborhood because it has a much more of a fun vibe.” She told me, we’d be better off at the new church because then we’d actually learn scripture. I gave a half-smile and looked into her eyes that gave me the impression she was insane. When I told Becky that I feared the lady in charge of our kids the last five days was coo-coo-bonkers, she said, “Naaaahhh!”

After camp ended, I loaded up the car with the suitcases, and my exhausted mom waved goodbye. We drove up the mountain, and hit a wall of traffic. In the four hours it took to move the wreckage of a semi-truck that crashed and caught on fire, the kids filled me in on all the lessons they learned throughout the week. Luckily, I was able to have this one-on-two time to undo any undoable damage. Hopefully, when they’re in therapy at 40, the remaining will be sorted out.

They told me one of the camp counselors said her parents are Buddhist and it makes her sad to know they are going to hell. My daughter recently got over my brother’s kid telling her that her parents will most likely rot in hell for eternity because of our divorce, so I had to double-down on that conversation, and for the sake of my daughter, I assured her repeatedly, “Your dad is going to heaven.”

Then we got into the musical numbers they performed, and I explained to them that the “God made male, and God made female” song seems to have a relevant social agenda. When I sang, “God made man,” my voice was low and I raised a clenched fist, and when I sang, “God made female,” my voice was high and I flipped my wrist. Kiki understood, sort of. She said, “Ohhhh, it’s racist!” I said, “Sort of, it is like gender-racist because some people don’t want to be called male or female.” And she made sense of it all by saying, “That song is very gender-rude.” I agreed.

The last thing they brought up was evolution. The entire week they were told evolution isn’t real, and given loads of kooky arguments to support the claim. Something about the amount of salt in the ocean was the most compelling argument to the kids. I explained to them my thoughts on the entire evolution debate, “The fact that anyone can be so confident about what the world was like 100 million years ago blows my mind. In either case, it is on such a macro level, evolution has zero affect on the human experience.” I really don’t know where they stand on this, and to my point, I don’t really care.

My son made it clear he didn’t let the messaging seep too deep into his brain, but my daughter will need to revisit this conversation 700 more times. I told them, “You’re better off ridding yourself of religious dogma. It’s sort of like a bag of dog shit you have to carry around with you, and even if you set it down, you still never forget it’s there because someone is going to point at it and yell at you, even if they look really stupid.”

Then, like a stroke of magic, the traffic started to move. I thought about church. I love going to church, it's an hour I think about all the people in my life, but I considered the call-and-responses throughout the hour, and how I've spent a lifetime saying, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you," which is the exact opposite of the self-affirmation I have scotch taped to my bathroom mirror. It reminds me of Helly R in Severance, when she is hooked up to a lie detector and has to say over and over, "I am sorry, and sorry is all I am," until the polygraph shows she is telling the truth.

I started to feel sad, but then I heard the kids laughing. My son moved on from resenting me and started singing one of his songs, lyrical cheap thrills to get us home. 

Smuggling Frozen Lasagnas

Last month I got in trouble for going into my ex-husband’s house when no one was home. I wasn’t going through their underwear drawer, I was saving my frozen lasagna from defrosting because my freezer stopped working. I was with my son who needed to get his cleats for practice. He used the keypad to get in, and I’d usually sit in the car, but I thought, if I don’t do this slightly invasive but perfectly harmless thing, my $15 lasagna is wasted. I’ve got enough food-waste guilt. I felt really uncomfortable when he made me walk upstairs with him to show me his hamster. I said, “I feel weird, let’s get out of here,” and right after we were back in the car, his dad’s girlfriend showed up. The timing was perfection.

At G’s practice, a text came in: “Please don’t go into our house when no one is there.”

I got ready to text-fight, but lost my passion after my reply, “Like I want to steal your HomeGoods bull-shit,” didn’t warrant a response.

My kids leave Wednesday for Italy, and they’re gone for two weeks. I hope their absence doesn’t send me into a depression, but rather a melancholic-creative zone of productivity. I haven’t been away from them for that long, and it’ll be way less abuzz around the house.

They’re going for their dad’s wedding. Who knows what compels someone to inconvenience everyone in their life by deciding to get married halfway around the world, but what’s the point of waxing over that now?

My kids’ dad had covid last month and he decided to quarantine twice as long as the CDC recommends, so the kids and I had a really long stretch of uninterrupted time together. I inevitably gained five pounds from constantly cooking food. When my kids are at their dad’s, I’m fueled on toast. It’s purely out of laziness. I don’t see any sense in dirtying plates when they’re away.

I’ve cooked proper-food-network-type of meals for my kids, but they’re so picky, its proven to be a total waste of time. Repeatedly. Last week, I boiled noodles and poured a jar of tomato sauce over it, and they reacted like I made a steak, mashed potatoes and a cherry pie. Such praise, and I didn’t even make them a side dish of toast. Really, they don’t like me to overthink things when it comes to their food.

I’ll miss their low expectations for dinner, my daughter's negative attitude and my son's impulsive insult-jokes resulting in some restriction that doesn’t seem to rattle him. My boyfriend and I will get to watch all the movies we’ve put off. We’re definitely caught up on TV shows. We're in the Second-Wave of the Golden-Age-of-Television and there’s a plethora of excellent mini-series! I wrote a friend of mine a few weeks ago, and couldn’t even list all the TV recommendations because it’s too much. We’ve watched Hacks, The Afterparty, Super Pumped, We Crashed, Candy, Pam and Tommy, The Dropout, I Love That For You, Russian Doll, and many more.

All of this while keeping up-to-date on all AEW storylines. Where do we find the time? I have no idea, but I think we could both use more sleep. We also watched the first two seasons of Killing Eve. It started off great; an exceptional first season. Once season two kicks off, it becomes clear we’re no longer in a cat-and-mouse thriller between an MI6 agent and an international assassin, but were watching some fifty-shades-of-grey-BS for the sex-deprived housewife. The story took a plunge into titillation, but it’s well acted by the two main leads. The suspense of season one, will Eve finally catch Villanelle, morphs in season two to, will Eve and Villanelle finally finger-bang each other while listening to Crimson and Clover? Erotic fiction has a purpose, and if it keeps women from going out and cheating on their partners or yelling at store managers, than titillate away, but I don’t need it.

Speaking of sexless marriages, I do wish my ex-husband all the best. I’m happy my kids have another loving home; a home I can rely on for for my kids’ stability and frozen lasagna relocation. I encouraged their dad to take the kids out for some one-on-two time to assure them he’s always got their back. The specific words I used, “They need to understand you’re in an alliance with them,” as I was engrossed by the latest reality TV show craze, #CircleFam.

The kids are excited, and I’m excited for them. They’re off to see the world, and I’m off to watch movies with my boyfriend whose made Killing Eve unessential viewing.

Alien Judas

My backyard was overgrown, so I went to Home Depot for a weed whacker. After I tied the dog to the fence because he was hell bent on getting a Glasgow Smile from the whipping twine, I slayed the overgrown grass. Toward the end of the spool, the twine got loose, and came out much too long. So the whacker had an 8 inch diameter. When this started, shrapnel flung about, and my legs were cut up. The small gashes on my legs, and the quick accompanying pain wasn’t completely unwelcome. It was sort of invigorating.

It reminded me of this stupid thing we used to do in high school. First, we’d rip the safety out of a Bic lighter, then light the flame and hold the lighter upside down so the metal heats up. Once the metal was hot, we'd take the metal and smash it into our skin, branding ourselves with what looks like a smiley face.  A barbaric practice, but I don’t think it was really like “cutting” because there was nothing therapeutic or shameful about it. It was just crazy young people stuff. Maybe we did it to forget how bored we were.

My daughter was sent home from school last Thursday because she had allergies. I didn’t realize this was something that warranted a nurse’s visit, but I enjoy the company, and my kids’ sick days are really the only way we have one-on-one time. On the drive home, I asked her to go on a walk, and in a raspy voice she said, “I need to be inside because of my allergies.”

I replied, “I think you need more exposure, Kiki, thats why you’re having this sensitivity.”

She told me allergies don’t work that way… she sounded pretty confident, so I believed her.

My daughter wakes up every morning like she’s going off to a work camp, not elementary school. She gives very colorful speeches, about the campus and students. A personal favorite is when she screamed from her bed, “MY SCHOOL IS FULL OF HOBOS AND IDIOTS!!”

Between 6:30 and 7:30 am my daughter forgets all the perks of school, like free lunch and free counseling, instead she focuses on the awful. Ironically, she finds their “Positive Thinking” campaign to be a load of horse-shit, and laments in a mocking tone how they respond to any complaint with a blanket statement, “Think positive.”

It warms my heart I don’t have to give her a discussion on toxic positivity. She innately understands Buddha’s quote, “Life is suffering.” I’m not against positive thinking, and encourage it, but I don’t think “positive thinking” is an indoctrination, and it certainly shouldn’t be attributed as the root of success.

A few years ago, in a statistics class I taught, I started a project with the students about positive affirmations, but I had to stop the project because I read studies that showed this is very harmful because it encourages the belief that their lack or crappy circumstances is the result of their own thoughts. These are young adults, only 18-21 years old, so they are still reeling off the tides of their upbringing. It is not the same as life-coaching a thirty year old. So students in financial hardship, or dealing with family issues, are led to believe that these are the result of their own shitty thinking.

Wallowing in misery is also ill-advised. There’s no benefit to negative thinking, however, once you acknowledge feeling sad is sort of normal, then it makes feeling good great! Besides, I really believe great things are accomplished by interior suffering. That’s the Catholic in me.

I watched YouTube videos from people who micro-dosed shrooms. This was all first-hand accounts, and there wasn’t any science to it. The videos were entertaining enough, and the influencer discussed how after they took the micro-dose colors seemed brighter and there wasn’t any sadness in their heart.

I thought, “I’ve got to try this shit.” So we got a shroom chocolate bar that came in an Wonka wrapper. I ate the smallest dose and watched TV. It wasn’t any more enjoyable than watching TV after a gummy, and in the end I got a massive headache. So micro-dosing shrooms wasn’t some sadness-ridding ritual for me, but maybe I should have done something more meditative than four episodes of Shark Tank.

The kids and I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory recently because G read the book in school. We were deciding which characters from the movie we’d all be. G is Mike TV, Kiki is Veruca Salt, and I thought I should be Charlie. They both nixed that idea straight away, but when I told them that I would share my birthday chocolate bar (traditional chocolate bar here) they countered I’m more like Violet because I punch them when they’re bad. These are not actual punches, I’d like to add. They are playful, non violent punches, but obviously Charlie doesn't embody such jest.

Geoffrey does like to go on walks with me, and we generally talk about Minecraft. The mosquitos have been out lately, and after we came back from a walk he counted five bites, and feverishly scratched them. I almost came at him with a punch, but stopped, and just said, “Stop scratching those bites.” And sounding like a Christian Scientist I added, “Leave it alone, and trust that your body is healing.”

On this walk Geoffrey and I were talking about aliens, and we carried on the chat at home. With Kiki in earshot, Geoffrey told us he watched a YouTube video about a Tic-Tac shaped UFO. I said I saw a YouTube video about a cube-shaped UFO that shot out of the ocean.

Kiki was silent and wide-eyed, then she looked at me and asked, “Is the front door locked?”

I believe aliens exist, and will tell any available ear about a dream I had where I was sucked up by a beam of light, and then felt terrible pain while something was digging though my organs. When I woke up, my body hurt, and I thought, "Could it be?!”

It didn’t scare me, actually it was the opposite. I thought, “Holy shit, I’m important enough for aliens!”

But, when I looked at my daughter, and her heightening anxiety, I told her, “This is all baloney, Kiki. Aliens don’t exist, never have, and never will!”

I sounded pretty confident, so she believed me.

Groomed

 

I took my dog Max to a nationwide pet store for grooming, and after they checked his vaccination record (dogs have been doing it from the start) the groomer came over to meet him. She went to pet him, and he hid behind my legs and started barking. I apologized, like an embarrassed mom, and said, “He really is a great dog… he just assumes you’re evil.”

She continued the meet-and-greet by reaching her arm underneath him and brushing up against his penis. He nipped at her hand, and she stepped back with an appalled look on her face. My face went confused, and she said, “So yeah, we actually can’t see your dog because he shows sign of aggression.”

I replied, “But you just,” then whispered, "grabbed his penis! Does any dog pass this test?”

She shrugged, and I realized there was no convincing this dick-grabber my filthy dog who was stinking up my house was desperate for a shave. I left and made him an appointment at the other nationwide pet store, where they didn’t grab his wiener, and he got the needed haircut.

My aggression’s been tested lately by looking at stocks I bought after I sold my house in June. All of them went up shortly after purchase, and I thought I was a psychic stock exchanger, and should quit my job because I was about to become a millionaire. My daydream turned into a daymare, and all of them have tanked. It is depressing to see these stocks sitting well below half of what I paid for them. I decided to stop looking, it would be stupid to sell them and take the significant loss, and now I have to hope one of them will turn into some Forrest Gump gold mine when I’m sixty.

One stock is the most upsetting, Electra Meccanica. I decided to buy it after I saw a model in the middle of Arden Fair Mall. A single seater electric car that came from the future. I thought it was genius, but after watching the stock’s line graph’s steep downward trajectory, I wonder if there really is a use for a single seater car. Who is that accepting of their lonely life, they’ll buy a car for just one person?

If the car is intended only as a commuter vehicle, then the mileage isn’t sufficient. The battery can’t even get you from Sacramento to San Francisco in one go. I sent them an email, since I have invested interest, suggesting they make a two-seater model that looks like a Suzuki Samurai or a Geo Tracker. These cars are compact and absolutely adorable — it’s auto fashion forward under the guise of making a better tomorrow. We'll see if I hear back from them. I don’t need any credit for the design idea… I’d just be grateful to see their stock sky rocket from hip youngsters buying these vehicles to carry around their pet bunnies and hydroflasks.

My refrigerator broke this week. It's not even eight months old, but it stopped working, and after eating the approaching room-temperature food, I decided I needed to deal with Lowe’s. I must have made the purchase when Mercury was in retrograde because it was a headache from the start. It took weeks, two credits and repurchases, to just get the damn thing in my new house. The kids and I lived like Europeans with a mini fridge that kept me from shopping at Costco and producing any food waste. Calling Lowe’s is a minimum of one hour on hold, there’s a good chance they’ll transfer you and then have another hour-plus hold, then there is the likelihood the representative is training and has a “drop the call” panic attack. I endured, and the technician is coming tomorrow between 8am and 4pm.

Thursday is our only “activity-free” afternoon and I live for it. Geoffrey started Lacrosse, a foreign sport to me, that I’ve only seen in movies. After going to a few games and all the practices, it is a great fit for my boy since they spend an hour running around and beating each other with long sticks. I’m in awe watching the kids chuck a ball across the field where someone on the other side catches it with their tiny butterfly net. I don’t want to seem in such shock that I find this exchange borderline impossible, but I tell him to practice A LOT.

The games are fun, and the enthusiasm from the parents is next level. This east coast sport migrated over to sunny California, and the crowd cheers like were ringside to an AEW match watching Sammy Guevara flip off the top of a ladder with perfectly sculpted hair while wearing purple leopard print briefs. One mom’s passionate yelling sounds like she's in the bedroom; loud screams and moans, followed up by her kids name. Hilarious.

Kingsley finds the practice and games to be inconvenient. She roams around whatever park were in until she finds some other bored sister to play with, which entails chewing gum and talking about the injustices of not having a sister. I don’t get the pleasure of stewing in this misery because I have two sisters, but I downplay it. I haven't told Kiki that nothing tops getting loud-mouthed drunk on Silver Bullets with your sister. Ah, the good ol' days.

In the morning I get up 15 minutes before the kids to have coffee and write in my journal. I start by writing dreams I had down so I don’t forget them, and then I get into whatever shit my mind’s brewing on. The other morning I was fixing breakfast and Kiki came up to me and said, “You had a dream you were talking to Pops about moving to New York?” 

“Oh, you’ve been reading my journal.” I’ll start writing about how much I miss my sisters to deter her from continuing this invasive practice.

The last few weeks have been isolating, hence the uptick in dreams where I chat with dead relatives. I’m not about to purchase a one-seater vehicle, but it's not a good sign I hope the fridge technician likes to talk. My usual Wednesday morning meeting with Love Horrors has been cancelled. We make scrambled eggs and sourdough toast, discuss fun ideas, projects and jokes, then have a weekly cigarette. It's a slumber party packed into a couple hours. 

    I talk on the phone a lot, but it’s exhausting when the call is dual stream of conscious chatter. I gauge how close my period is based on the tolerance I have for these calls. If I only make it five minutes before hanging up annoyed, then I’ll probably spend the next day eating a box of Reeces Puffs cereal and then tell myself the cure to my upset stomach is an animal-style cheeseburger and French fries.

I take to the streets to socialize, walking my dog. There are the power-walkers who give a wave, but then there are the meandering. If I give myself time, I can turn the walk into quite the social adventure. I recently met 82 year old Will, a widow, retired from the LAPD. We talked for an hour yesterday. I told him about the dog’s Petco visit. He's a cop, and bored out of his mind, and even he thinks dick-grabbing is lousy way to make an introduction.

Max

Graphic Novels and a Revolution

 

I bought Kiki a new comic on Amazon. As I pulled the graphic novel from its package, I announced its arrival and she came running around the corner to get it from me. On the cover was the title, “A Girl From the Sea” and on the back was a drawing of two girls kissing.

I groaned, “It’s about lesbians.”

She said, “That’s okay, I love lesbians. You’re the one who hates lesbians.”

“I don’t hate lesbians, I didn’t know if you’d be interested in a romance story,” I retorted.

She snatched the book from my hands before I could add, “I love lesbians too… I agree with Germaine Greer,  for Pete’s sake, but I’m just too much of a pussy to commit to the revolution, and I feel like a betrayer of my sex every time I bask in hetero post-coital pleasure.”

It seems revolutionary for kids to be such advocates of the sexuality spectrum because it’s about sex. By the time I was their age I already read The Joy of Sex, and leafed through Playboy magazines, which likely contributed to the construction of my sexual self, but if there’s a rating scale, my early exposure would be G rated compared the what the internet provides.

We were driving around the other day and Kiki announced, “I don’t know if I’m straight yet, so that’s why I say I am bisexual.”

I gave a heavy sigh, and didn’t know what to say, although my instinct was to shout, “You’re asexual. Alright, all ten year olds are asexual.”

The internet is the only thing holding me back from ever wanting to buy my kids cell phones. It was in fifth grade I came home from school, and asked my mom, “What is a blow job?” She looked at me and said, never say that word again.

“So, it’s one word!” I thought to myself, as I pranced upstairs to my older brother and sister who told me exactly what a blowjob is. I don’t even remember thinking, “Blowjobs seem weird.” Actually, I can’t remember thinking much about it after they told me.

Social media is scientifically proven to be awful for young people’s mental being, so it seems like a no-brainer to deny them the time-vacuum of scrolling through meaninglessness. Young boys have uncontrollable, wall-punching, rage when their cerebral cortex isn’t being hijacked by screens, and girls are lured to cut all their hair off, dye it green, and make everyone call them by a chosen name, like “Pickle.” The green hair and name change are a lot less terrifying than untethered aggression.

I wonder how long it took for gender theory to trickle down from academia to now being on the forefront of young people’s radar, and how Greer’s theories never seemed to make it. I suppose The Female Eunuch has to combat capitalism, and the gender spectrum embraces the free market, since you can buy a t-shirt at Target labeling yourself as fluid.

I have a t-shirt that says, “I’m the Boss.” My t-shirt lies, and I don't wear it often, mostly on laundry days when I’m down to wearing crotchless panties and twenty year old stained sweatpants. My laundry’s been elevated lately after buying amazing fabric softener beads at Costco. I’ve steered clear of fabric softener the last eight years because my sister told me, “Fabric softener causes vaginosis.”

“Say no more. Vaginosis sounds horrible, I’ll stop using it.” But the little pink pellets added to the wash make it smell amazing, and there hasn’t been a medical side effect yet.

I’m going off social media for lent, and we’ll see if it decreases my anxiety. I’m not a stress case, but I’m no poster child for calmness either. I’ll give my boyfriend an early birthday shoutout before I make my non-Irish-exit, because he’ll appreciate it. Reading comments on his active social media accounts sends my anxiety through the roof because I read some of them as creepy desperation from people slobbering at the mouth over his key strokes. They’ve ruined the internet for me, and I guess I should thank them, but their strange inclination to insert themselves into a person’s reality makes me consider them wayward soldiers. Consider if they put that energy into the revolution, or anything progressive for that matter.

If Greer’s plan to abolish monogamy for the sake of the revolution didn’t trickle down, I’m grateful because it’s nice sharing a bed with someone, and late-night planning the inscription on our massive shared tombstone. I missed him when he left town last weekend for work. I had big plans to walk around and fart freely, but it was boring at night. The kids were excited for his return too. When he was back he played Barbies with Kingsley, and was directed to play the Barbie whose hair is all chopped off and colored with a permanent marker because she lost all her Ken dolls. I told her I turned some of my Barbies into Kens too, when I was a kid. They even used the proper pronouns and called the desecrated Barbie they/them. 

I received a terrible phone call this week that my Grandma fell over in the parking lot in Carson City, and is in the hospital recovering from a fractured pelvis. I told Johnny, and he said Geoffrey asked him to get three tickets to watch a King’s game, so they could take Grandma J because she loves basketball too, and it made me feel so proud of my little boy and his beautiful heart.

I told my kids about their Great Grandma, and they were relieved the news wasn’t worse. I said, “Always have the thought of Grandma’s healing in your heart, and picture us all at her 100th birthday party.” I want her to be a great-great-grandma one day. She is so close because that’s what happens when you get married at 15.

Greer would despise her life, but she’s a perfect example of living without stress. A non-technological existence, she never has to worry about announcing to her kids, “I have to take a poop,” bored, during a zoom meeting, not realizing her microphone is turned on. 

My reliance on technology isn’t all bad. I get embarrassing joy playing Sudoku on my phone, and I told my boyfriend I play to get comments, “You’re faster than 95% of players” or my all time favorite, “You’re brilliant!” And he told me he gets the same joy from playing golf on Xbox, and lately the commentators have been calling him “The greatest golfer to ever play the game.” 

With our growing dependence on technology, a part of me advocated for Ted Kaczynski in the new biopic, and I wondered if he’ll be viewed as a revolutionary in 100 years when the people of the world abandon wearing t-shirts with labels and slogans for the sake of saving the planet. 

Like Ted K, I’ve convinced myself there’s a war to wage on technology, but I haven’t conjured up a plan. Given my lack of tenacity with last year’s lent, making it one day in before I thought, fuck it, I’m eating gummy worms, I doubt I will be able to do much more than stave off depraved google searches from my kids and learn never to read comments on social media posts. A very small revolution.