thoughts & pearls
October 22, 2009
This is a story —
From the mountain. The second mountain, when things got a lot easier because I had neighbors within one mile dash distance and also aged wood. [Listen do not ever try to tough out a bad winter on a mountain alone with wood heat, no neighbors, one broken hand axe and green wood. That just never goes well.]
thoughts & pearls
One of my artist dates was pulling out all my jewelry and looking at it. “Artist Dates” are a thing I picked up in “The Artist’s Way” [that is Julia Cameron stuff] and I have somehow convinced about ten people to do Artist Way as a group so I am following along being encouraging and also doing the pages and dates even if I have already done Artist Way twice.
[Forget the first time I was an Artist Way Drop Out and crashed and burned on chapter 8. That is just impolite to mention.]
I do not get to wear my jewelry very often. This is the woods. There is just not a lot of call for fancy jewelry here. So it sits. Packed in its box. Actually several boxes, probably twenty-five because there are pieces of jewelry I love so much they get their own special boxes which then is confusing when you go looking for one piece but all those boxes go in one box. And that is one of the boxes I carry with me. Along with the computers. Computers and jewelry and a bag o’ shoes. That is me.
Last time I pulled out all my jewelry, my pearls were looking dim. And I thought, Your pearls are dying without you. You must wear them.
Pearls are like that. They are living things. If you neglect them, they fade. And can just die.
So.
This artist date has been, Be With Pearls. I pulled out all my pearls and put them on. And here I sit in a pair of burnt out sneakers and exercise pants and an oversized nightshirt and pearl earrings and bracelets and necklaces all over me in the woods. It is pretty funny. But I like it. And it is for me and the pearls.
I remember my grandmother too when I wear pearls. She said a woman should not wear pearls until she is thirty. [My grandmother was strict about stuff like that.] Also she thought women should not buy themselves pearls. Pearls should be inherited or bought for them by the man they marry.
That is okay. She was older. She knew pearls had to be worn to live too. I remember her wearing them just for that. And telling me all about pearls. She got married four times too and that is pretty racey for a grandmother so I think she just wanted me to know how things should be instead of how they are.
My grandmother loved me. She is gone now but I sure love her.
I think about her when I wear pearls.
Your Life With Pearls Adams Girl
where i got the art work :
i cribbed that off anita marie’s
where that story comes from :
that comes from seemaxrun
this is so wrong
May 10, 2009
Yet still I post it.
Happy Mother’s Day.
return of mother’s day
May 9, 2009
It is the return of that dreaded day in May. And since I love this a lot I am bringing it back. Yay!
shame of eden : part i
April 17, 2009
I have been —
Watching the news. This is almost always a mistake. Watching the news too much makes me near suicidal and definitely over the edge disgusted with and appalled by human beings. Unclean. Ashamed — of what I am and whom and what I come from. It makes me want to disown my own species. Scrub my skin off.
I know the shame of Eden. And it is not the shame of Eve or Adam. It is a shame of now.
*hu⋅man⋅i⋅ty /hyuˈmænɪti –noun, plural -ties.
1. all human beings collectively; the human race; humankind.
2. the quality or condition of being human; human nature.
3. the quality of being humane; kindness; benevolence.
convos between me & kitty
April 7, 2009
Kitty : Spanky said getting in a wreck was cool because she got helped off the bus by two sexy firemen.
Me : Give me back my daughter.
convos with expectant fathers
February 20, 2009
Expectant Father : You don’t really need that much to prepare.
Me : [cue evil laughter] You have really not spent much time around babies have you?
Expectant Father : Um. No. They’re kind of independent, like cats, right?
Me : They are exactly like cats. Except they do not walk, use a litter box, or groom or feed themselves. Also authorities get sort of tiffy if you leave them home alone and people get a little alarmed if they have tails.
Expectant Father : Hey, that doesn’t sound like cats at all.
Me : They both drink milk.
were the art work comes from :
that is black cat watercolor by pam houle
[and that is the best link i can find for her]
my father’s ashes
February 16, 2009
My father is dead.
It seems like that needs to be said. And like that is too blunt a way to say it.
My father’s ashes are in the possession of an aging former beauty queen contestant.
This seems, knowing my father, somehow very fitting.
And at the same time very very wrong.
The aging former beauty queen contestant says her father owns a fishing boat and plans to take my father’s ashes out to sea.
That is definitely wrong.
My father would want his ashes dumped at a local race track.
I have read a lot of obituaries and last thoughts written by strangers about my father. And most of them are useless and not about the man at all. So. It falls to me. His estranged daughter. To say something actually real about my father.
My father’s name was John Quincy Adams. Named after his father. A man from Boston who told my grandmother no children and when she singlehandedly got pregnant walked out on her. It was not an easy name to wear. Explain. Justify. Or dismiss. As an adult he changed it out a lot. As a kid he got in a lot of fights. As a kid he also had such awful tonsillitis doctors looking at his X-rays asked if he had had tuberculosis.
He was a tall man and did not suffer fools lightly. He was often unkind. But generally fair. And very good at math. He apologized once in his life. To his daughter. He was handsome as hell as a young man. And never noticed that had faded in later age. Perhaps because he never exactly realized he had looks. My father thought for all of his life he was trading on charm and never got most people only put up with him initially because he was so damned good looking. And never understood the difference between charm and sarcasm.
His forebears include two presidents, many revolutionaries, a movie star, a train robber and song writer, twin vaudeville performers, a Scottish missionary and the founder of Richfield Oil. His great uncle is buried in the last crypt of the Hawaiin royal family. According to legend my father singlehandedly initiated the People’s Park riot.
He hated children. He said they destroyed lives and potential. This is what he told me. He may have had other tacks with people who were not his children. He definitely had other tacks with women he pursued who had children.
He liked and generally drove small sports cars — whether or not he fit into them. [And he mostly did not he was 6' 5".] His apartments were always horrific and contained many hard water stains. Fortunately he generally did not spend much time at home he spent the majority of his time at work. In bars. Or at the homes of beautiful women. The one time he had a fancy home it was a house boat but he lost that to the Italian Mafia and chose never to live anywhere extremely elegant again. [As legend has it, he won that house boat in a bet. And lost it backing up a friend.] He liked beer in green and brown bottles — and preferred green. His best friends were hard scarred men who laughed like they meant it, wore overly ornate loafers, carried concealed weapons without permits and talked about everything except war when they were full of drink. And one woman who despite her looks and breasts he treated like a man — which in my father’s terms means like an equal — and I have never exactly discerned why but it must have been something big and probably involved gunfire and emergency vehicles to garner that kind of respect on his part because in general he did not consider women equals. He had a weakness for pretty women, especially stupid pretty women — and horses. And considered both equally intelligent but horses more trustworthy. He told the IRS he made his income writing. But brought most of his cash home from the track. You could always tell when he was really sick because that was the only time he did not show up at the track. He did not tell jokes well. He did tell anecdotes well. And he had many. His favorite books were huge tomes written in Japanese and translated into English — and he found it hugely amusing discussing them with women, especially discussing them with unintelligent women. He hated his mother, never knew his father, loved his grandmother, feared and loathed his wife[s], disdained his step-father and abandoned his daughter. He was a horrible father. Which might have changed if he had had a son but he was cursed to be a man who distrusted women and then accidentally sired one. Aside, however, from being a misogynistic prick, he was a decent man. The world is probably shorter for the loss of him.
— John Quincy Adams died January 21, 2009
voices
February 5, 2009
A memory :
I wake up in the back seat of a car. I am very small. The car is on a strange street. I am alone. I figure my parents are probably in a house somewhere on this block. Also they are probably coming back. I AM in the car. But. I am alone. I do not know where I am. I am too small to knock on doors doing a survey for parents. That is dangerous behavior. You get sent away when you do dangerous behavior. I wait.
A memory : I wake up in a car. I am on my back staring up at the driver’s seat. This is not right. I hear a yell. I hear footsteps running. A flashlight’s light hits the windows. The driver’s seat lifts away. A man reaches his hands down to me. Take my hands, he says. I take his hands.
A memory : I wake up in a car. I look out the window. All I can see is sky. Out every window. I stare at it. The car is on an incline. It is very steep. I have been in two cars already that turned over at odd inclines. Seeing nothing but sky out the window at that angle scares me. No one understands why I am afraid. And I won’t tell them. I wait.
A memory : Voices in the next room. As long as I can hear the voices, no one can disappear and I cannot wake up in an upside down spinning car strangers will have to pull me out of. I drift off.
where the art work comes from :
that is from james at mannequindisplay.com
abby is that you?
January 28, 2009
I met —
My aunt for dinner the other night. We went to this restaurant Dar Maghreb that is Moroccan and very fancy with a fountain and they pour rose water over your hands before you eat. The rose water ritual is tricky the person pouring rose water does not stop until you take your hands away so a lot of rose water got poured before I snapped maybe he needed a signal from me that was enough. [Wow were my hands clean.]
You eat with your hands and that is tricky for my aunt because she is left handed and tradition says you eat with your right. But we made it through and it was fun.
And there were belly dancers.
The head belly dancer is Mesmera and a friend of my aunt’s [my aunt is a real mover and shaker with belly dancers] and came up and talked to us. And this head belly dancer Mesmera is the spitting image of Abby from NCIS. Except with red curly hair and a belly dancing costume and no goth stuff. She even sounded like Abby from NCIS. So the whole time she was talking to us I was just staring thinking, It is Abby from NCIS!
[Probably she thinks I am the "special" neice since I just sort of stared and did not talk much.]
[Abby is played by Pauley Perrette btw.]
i remember this moment
January 10, 2009
I had gone to —
A party.
A friend’s brother gave me a ride home.
I was fifteen.
He stopped the car a ways from where I lived and kissed me. This was awkward to me, this friend’s older brother trying to kiss me. Grope me.
I said, I have to go home.
He said, Everyone in this town knows your mother doesn’t give a damn about you nobody is waiting up to see when you get home.
