Christmas Story

Sunday

I've never been so scared in all of my life.

But there on the ground slithered and oozed the remnants of four years, fifteen dye jobs, and one ridiculously ill-advised set of bangs. She even shaved my neck. My head feels like it is floating above my body in some transcendent halo the likes of old catholic iconography. I am the Madonna of dyke haircuts.

There is a freedom here from the expectations of the feminine. No longer is my hair my greatest glory. No more will I shut my locks in car doors, or bind them up in Pollyanna braids like some fetishized virgin. This winter, I have no fear of it freezing into a straight ponytail because I slept in and had no time to use the blow dryer.

Of course, I feel more exposed without a nest of frizzy ginger to hide in. My neck curves a long, swan line down my throat and between my shoulder blades. I spend inordinate time at the bus stop fingering each cervical vertebrae and scoring my fingernails along the insubstantial line dividing the nape of my neck from the spiky sprouts of shorn roots.

Note to self, buy hair color.

The afternoon commute would have remained in freshly trimmed euphoria if that jackanape on the bike hadn't clobbered me in the crosswalk. I spent the entire episode of CSI Miami picking detritus out of my forearm. Time to bust out the goth sleeves and make this new look as emo as possible.


Monday

The back of my head defies gravity. Someone should call Stephen Hawking. I was forced to use inappropriate products to get the damn thing to flatten out. I expected longer prep time with the new 'do, but I still barely made the 419 Crosstown because of my arm. Eight band aids! A pox on all wayward cyclists! Man was not meant to wheel about like a moron!


Tuesday

Sick again today. I thought leaving work early yesterday would have knocked it out of me. But I barely managed to call out before crashing again. I did succeed in dragging myself to the diner for nourishment in the afternoon. Muse is such a sweetheart. She brought me honey for my tea and only charged me for the soup. I'll need to put her on the Christmas cookie list, provided I can force my feeble limbs into baking positions again. I think I was delirious with fever for a while, because I saw the strangest things crawling along the floor and up the walls.


Wednesday

Note to self, never take the bus while sick again. Just pay for the damn taxi. Avoid the unpleasantness of ralphing out the window along Madison Street. The doctor gave me a work excuse for a few days, but no real help. I forgot to ask for them to dress my arm properly, but dealing with oozy scratches is on the bottom of my list of priorities.


Thursday

Shoot me, please.


Friday

Mom asked if I was pregnant. I told her I was gay.


Saturday

And like that, the fog has lifted! I lead a charmed life if I can take a week off with the plague and still salvage the weekend. I don't know if words can adequately express the relief of being healthy again. But I am a writer of some passable if melodramatic talent, so I can't shirk from a challenge.

Considering the days of illness behind me, the best comparison to be made is that of a fortnight of nightmares. Time stretched and frayed beyond temporal tensile strength, shedding pieces of moments, edges of seconds, and dropping them all willy-nilly into my once-properly linear circadian rhythms. I became a creature of some other world, howling at the light in the windows and dreading the chill of night. A pulse of something ancient and vital filled what lucidity I claimed; a heartthrob, dubstep beat that lingers like a commercial jingle in my ears even now.

For fuck's sake, I just cleared out the nest I made in the closet out of bathrobes, my senior prom dress and the batting from my Martha Stewart Collection Bedford Flowers comforter! Comfy? Perhaps. But clearly the work of a madwoman with stylish, if overpriced, taste.

But tonight, my head is clear and my hair is amazing. I'm hale, hot, and hungry. It's time for this temptress tart to take to the streets. I've waited long enough to debut the new me. The real me.


Sunday

Note to self, stash the flats before hitting the club. These boots aren't made for walking, let alone the walk of shame across town. But blisters are a small price to pay for a night like that.



I can't remember what happened.

I am here and I am safe. I do not need to be afraid. These are my fingers. They press and mold against the gentle curve in each key on the keyboard. Pressure bounces down against hidden spring's tension and snap a gentle rhythm of clicks and clacks as long as I keep typing. I am here. I am home. I am safe.

My cell phone is full of blurry pictures and incomprehensible texts, but that's par for the course my Saturday nights. Nothing incriminating has popped up on Facebook yet, which is not. I'm suffering no hangover either, but my body feels a gentle weariness, as if I've danced too hard or run too fast recently. There are no marks on me where I can see. The girls are tender, but they always are during my period.

This should be the hallmark of good time, but I have no memory whatsoever after leaving my apartment last night. I can't even remember the interior of the building I left this morning, let alone the face of who I spent the night with there. An hour on Google maps hasn't helped me recover where I came from.

I am here and I am safe. I do not need to be afraid. I can feel the raised notches in the home keys slide against the tiny whorled ridges on my fingertips. Cool air sucks between my teeth each time I breathe and gusts over my hands when I exhale. I am here. I am home. I am safe.

Oh fuck this.


Muse kept me in coffee the rest of the night. She's such a comfort. After the boss left, she changed the radio station for us. I feel a lot better now. No one is peeking in the windows or shuffling under the bed anymore. I think we talked through her entire shift. Her stories are wild and often stretch credulity, but what can you expect from the ex-wife of a Hell's Angel. The way she talks about her ex, though, between crazy monster stories and sexcapades, I wonder why she left him.

In any case, I've reclaimed a decent measure of sanity and a quality dose of humility. Losing a night like that means I was abusing a potent substance. I'm lucky to be alive. The scene will rock on without me for a long while. I need to have myself tested for STD's, out of respect for myself and any future partner I may have. I am an intelligent, capable woman. I should know better how to protect myself.

Muse gave me her pepper spray, even though I promised I wouldn't be going out again anytime soon. She stuck it on my keys herself and told me it was a practical good luck charm to keep jerks from both worlds out of my way. I'm assuming she means bikers.


Monday

Shoot me, please, if I ever take a week off again! My inbox has no end. I worked straight through lunch and then stayed as late as I could before they had to lock the building. And the whole time I'm spurred on by guilt that my absence has injured my coworkers and my boss somehow. Office politics dictate that no one risk douchebaggery and actually say it aloud, but I know they despise me for being gone and suspect I was deceiving them.

For all the staring, no one even mentioned my new haircut. I feel rancid.


Tuesday

I couldn't bring myself to make dinner tonight. Nothing is appetizing. Muse threatened to beat me with the menu unless I made up my mind. In the end, she brought me soup and refused to let me leave until I ate the entire portion. I appreciate her meddling, even if I find it obnoxious. It means someone cares and that abates the loneliness for a while.

Tonight she told me a story about her ex that seems worthy of being penned, though I realize she hasn't told me the whole of it. It begins with a young man, a bike, and a desert to cross. He is baked by a merciless sun and forced to slake his thirst at a dusty bordello. Other thirsts follow and he indulges his time in the company of a native woman who hides her stretch marks and makes him howl. On the next morning, he cannot force himself leave her side. There are duties to perform and a simple wage to be earned, curves to be engulfed in and nights to twist and writhe in her sheets. His great journey stalls out for the sake of playing house with a red-skinned hooker.

One night he dreams of a great storm tearing the firmament in twain. He sees the earth gape open and lightning spear the gulf. When he wakes, he knows he must complete his journey or risk dying in this place. Breaking her heart is no easier than escape, because he no sooner tells her than she walks out of the bordello, over to his motorcycle, and proceeds to eat the entire thing.

I asked Muse if she meant for me to believe her ex-husband dallied with a prostitute with an vehicular appetite. She swore on her iPhone that the story was true.

Unable to claim the loss of his bike as anything resembling an act of God, he seeks transportation with the steady flow of truckers through the bordello and, eventually, completes his journey. Years later, when he has ascended to a higher standing in his gang, he returns to the bordello. Muse didn't say why, or give much detail other than statistics. Fourteen Hell's Angels rode onto the property and only two left alive; her ex and his brother.

Muse goes on to say that her onetime brother in-law never confirmed the incident, but the man she knew never got back in the saddle and spent the rest of his days eking out a living on disability in Reno. Of course, then the story shifted to the year she worked as a waitress at a cafe attached to a bordello in Wells. I suspect she was trying to take the sting off her campfire story.


Wednesday

I can't work like this. Everyone is watching me and the air is rank with disapproval. The back of my neck stings with the prickles of judgment. My face is swollen and hot and I can barely see for the tears. I constantly seek refuge in the bathroom to shore myself up against them. I don't know what it is they have discovered, but I can't escape it.

Drinking during the business week was a habit I happily dropped back in college. The mental battle I waged in front of the cooler at the gas station rivaled Grecian epics. Returning home dry, I turned on my heel and went back out. Muse looked at me like I was the crazy one in this pair, and brought me a Zinfandel with dinner.

She took a picture of my forearm tonight, which is weird. But she was all upset when I rolled up my sleeves and showed the scratches I picked up last week. It is rather disgusting, and I felt embarrassed when she brought attention to it in front of the other customers. I'll have to remember to put on band aids to protect myself. I can't expect them to heal if they are under constant aggravation, after all.


Thursday

Someone followed me home! I know it, I know it! The same car that passed me at the bus stop is making circuits through the neighborhood. I've closed my curtains and barred the door and windows. Muse's pepper spray lives in my pocket. My cell phone is charged with 911 ready to dial.

I am here and I am safe. I can hear the soft hum of my computer and feel the vibrations in the floorboards whenever someone walks down the interior hallway of my building. I have nothing to be afrai Fuck, I maced the super.


Friday

At last, the weekend is here! Oh God, spare me a week like that from ever happening again! I supposed I earned it with my dangerous exploits last weekend. Well, no worries. I'm planning on remaining close to home and hearth. I have a new season of The Office to distract me from the ills of my life. If I can just convince these cramps to submit to the will of Midol, then all will be well. I may even order a pizza.


Saturday

Fucking doctors are fucking useless. I'm not supposed to have flow like this. I went through two tampons in the WAITING ROOM! I know my own body! You've never had a cunt, how do YOU know what is normal menstruation?

At least he gave me some Vicodin. I don't want to be awake any more.


Sunday

I am here and I am safe. This is my room and this is my bed. The sheets are twisted and tangled and sweaty and warm. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears and taste it in my mouth. Sunlight dapples leaf shapes over the curtains and I can hear my upstairs neighbor vacuuming at this ungoldly hour. Dreams are not real. Dreams cannot hurt me. I am healthy, hale and whole. I am home and I am safe.

I'm going out.


For the sake of what remains of my sanity, I will not set to page the dreams I had this morning. But I did tell them to Muse and she is very concerned. I find it surprising that she has been spending the effort to pay this much attention to me, but apparently I am the subject of her text message conversations with her ex. After I finished my salad today, she came out of the kitchen with her phone and asked me blunty if I had been paranoid at lately. I told her my work environment was replete with suspicion and mistrust, and she went back to texting furiously.

And then she set my world on fire.

I am safe. I am home. This isn't real.

Muse said her ex is hunting a demon. I told her not to believe the wild tales of her biker beloved, because he clearly is trying to impress her by taking advantage of her gullibility. I mean, who eats a motorcycle? She told me to watch my mouth.

"There is shit in this world you don't know, Mary,' she said. "And it wants to fuck you."

I am only retelling her story. I don't believe any of this. I am safe. I am home. I am safe.

Before the evolution of man, and possibly before the dinosaurs and trilobites and any of that, the earth was inhabited by great monsters. Creatures that spanned entire ecosystems, beings of vast intelligence and unending hunger, all writhing and rutting and spawning and eating each other. True Pandemonium reigned hell on earth. But the time of the ancients came to an end, or was forced to end to make way for the new age. Most perished, but some escaped to nearby realities, hiding just beyond the pale. And there, they wait for their time to rise again. And all the while they watch us, hating us for our existence, desperate to devour the entirety of our race and birth a new lineage of horrors to set upon the world they deserve.

Further, the prisons which bind them from this world are faulted. While too small to allow escape, the permeation allow the monsters to pass their influence into our realm. Lesser monsters and creatures attempting to breed evil on earth. Anything exposed to these impossible beings is poisoned and defiled. Any hapless person who touches upon the elder creature's influence is sheared from all sanity and twisted into some bare semblance of who or what she used to be.

She thinks I'm crazy. I am not crazy. I am safe. I am home. None of this is real.

After Muse dropped that bit of wisdom on my plate and refilled my coffee, she proceeded to tell me that the Hell's Angels hunt down those lesser beings that escape into our world. Or at least, the bikers her ex rolled with do. I imagine he recruited the baddest motherfuckers he could trust into his war on the supernatural. Well no, I don't believe any of that, but it sounds like a reasonable plan of attack after some whore gobbles your ride.

I don't believe any of this superstitious bullshit biker religion bullshit bullshit. I am safe. I am home. I am safehomeandsafe I'm safe I'm home I'm going to take some Vicodin and get to sleep now


Monday

I am safe. I am home. I am safe. I am home. There are things that I feel and I can't think of them right now but I'm typing and I can see the words on my screen and they make perfect sense when they are lined up on the screen like that. What happened today? Oh yes, I heard voices in the bathroom at work. I was hiding there, trying to staunch the endless flow of blood and meat from my body. At first I thought I heard my supervisor talking about me and telling her friend about her suspicions of my poor behavior. I twitched every time I heard my name. Mary. Mary? Mary! Marymarymarymary and my name stopped being my name and just became some endless litany of my questionable credibility.

Then my supervisor came into the bathroom and the voices stopped.

I think there is something inside me.


Tuesday

My doctor referred me to a shrink. I want to quit my job.

It listens to me when I think. It kicks and shoves me out of myself. Mary is draining away like motes of sand from her broken glass womb. I think I'm going crazy.


Wednesday

They sent me home. Medical leave. I don't believe it. Not their concerned faces nor gentle, false platitudes. Get well soon. What a wretched nest of lies! They must know the truth about me. I can't be certain how, but perhaps some underdeveloped part of the lizard brain fires a few synapses whenever they see me, waving instinctual hands in the air in warning. They know!


Thursday

I never knew clarity could come at the bottom of a bottle. I am suffering for it this morning, but I feel more myself than I have in a while. I need to record this while I can. My general sense of stability is wavering and I must take advantage of the time I've been given.

Muse told me to drink and I did. She sat me in the corner of the restaurant and kept my glass full until the boss went home and she turned out the other patrons, locked the front door and killed the lights. Then she introduced me to her ex.

Should anyone read this in the future, please understand that I am not all that attracted men. At least, not often. Accepting this variation in my life has not been a simple or pleasant task. Despite my experimental sexual history, I am content in the label of homosexual. Lesbian. Yes, these work much better for me than the anything-goes nomenclature the term 'bisexual' entails. I've crept from the closet and done as little as I can to draw attention to myself.

So please understand that when the man stepped from the shadow into the narrow slats of streetlight, I was not prepared for the overwhelming surge of lust to hit me. I wanted that man the way the body wants food, full up of blood and cravings and merciless pangs. Desire knifed me in the stomach and it was all I could do to not spread on the table in front of him.

He was tall where Muse was short, lean where she was pleasantly rounded, and that's about all I can actually remember of the way he looked. He didn't shake my hand, didn't touch me at all, but I felt his appraising gaze lick the length of me. I hid my face in my napkin.

"Yeah, it's coming for you," he said. "Got you good and worked up. Takes about three weeks to make the changeover. Lucky you don't live closer to the mountain or all kinds of swinging dick would be crawling over the hills after you."

"I told you, I knew a Stinger when I saw it," Muse said. "Why is it you always doubt me?"

Her ex looked at her. I saw a glimmer of a greater history and a story that did not have a happy ending. And then I saw myself sprawled and moaning under him on the table and made myself finish my drink while they traded low, sharp words.

"Well, you done good getting her sauced," he conceded. "If that bastard found her again, there wouldn't be enough left to bring back. Then she'd start eating folk and-"

"I know well enough how to keep that from happening," Muse interrupted him sharply. "You go on ahead. I'll bring her back into the kitchen and you can get started."

What followed in the industrial environs of the kitchen reminds me of the three witches in MacBeth and the brew they used to cloud his mind with truths and visions of a grander future. Bubble, Bubble, toil and trouble. But Muse and her ex fancied more Jim Beam and less eye of newt. Though there was something that looked like a lizard that went into the mix, along with a handful of herbs that I did not recognize and imagine aren't legal in this state. Also, cherries. Which is nice, I like cherries.

Surprisingly, very little of it made it into my mouth. Instead, Muse anointed my head with ladelfulls of the concoction and then shooed her ex out of the kitchen and used a wash rag to scrub my arms with it. She got under my shirt and I was happily reminded of my predilection for girls. The greater saturated I became, the more lucidly my thoughts arranged. I stopped fantasizing about her ex in a shower and instead followed an entertaining daydream about rockabilly biker chicks.

"Better?" Muse asked after some forgotten amount of time.

"Yes," I answered. I smelled like death, booze, and cherries. "I can't believe I let you do this to me."

She wiped my face with her rag. "Ain't the first time I heard that."

I've been cognizant and calm ever since. Muse drove me home in her ailing hatchback and I didn't even care that her ex trailed us on his motorcycle. I've been told that the mixture is blocking the particular pheromones I'm emitting, so that I cannot be tracked by the creature that stung me, nor can the unnatural emissions from my body drive me mad. I've been warned that, should my thoughts begin to waver, I must give myself another dousing. I have a thermos prepared.

I just wish I felt cleaner. The liquid has dried to a sticky film and it adheres to everything, especially my most comforting blankets. I'm going to see about getting some sleep while I can.


Friday

Unlean! I'm soiled and infected! Oh god, I can't get the taint off my skin! It's inside me. I woke to the voices again and they keep screaming my name. Mary! Mary! Mary! The shame of it cripples me. I have to regain control.

I am safe. I am home. I can feel the endless tug of a thousand tiny mouths and their sharp, grasping teeth against my skin. I can see my heartbeat in the pulsing light at the window. I am Mary and I am safe and I am home. I am safe. I am so goddamn itchy! I can see the scored lines of my fingernails up and down my arms, but there is no surcease.

Fuck it, I'm taking a shower.


The man in the window keeps staring at me. I can hear him inside my head. I feel like a motorcycle desperate to be ridden, or perhaps consumed.

Mary. Mary. Mary. MaryMarymarymarymary MARYMARYMARYMARYMARY MARYMARY MARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYma



Saturday

Shoot me please

Tuesday

From the aftermath of Borders, I made my first Vegas friends. In trying to write about them without using any actual names, I've decided to go with the placeholders Martha and Stewart.

Both Martha and Stewart are very pregnant presently, and were much too gravid to accompany me on a recent shoe shopping adventure. (Very rarely does reality allow such a thing to occur in nature. I needed backup.) Words fail to describe how much these two ladies mean to me. I opened the doors of my house for Martha, and she stuffed it full of people and presents and owl-themed decorations for her baby shower. (It was epic, dear. I hid upstairs for decent portions of it.) And so it was that Target.com flubbed my order for Stewart's registry, and I came to her more modest shower event with a Halloween-sized bag of Skittles with a bow on it. Stewart chewed her way through half the rainbow before I met her mother.

I was entertaining Stewart with sprightly impersonation of Martha when a series of texts hit my phone. And in the center of a baby shower, I learned one of the old Borders crew was dead. Not only that, but a young lady we all came to love during the Borders store closing, barely a month gone by. One hired by Stewart's husband, who kept a tender presence at the shower, mostly by Stewart's side. Did I mention they are having twins? Stewart hired me to Borders a year and a half ago and I knew how desperately she wanted children by the end of the interview.

It was all just pink and blue for a while.

But it was the sight of Martha's confident waddle down the sidewalk, laden with pastel parcels and trailed by her stalwart husband under his own load of gifts, that gave me strength that day. I claimed a seat of honor at the end of the gift handlers line and stacked a fort worth of baby clothes, toys, organic diapers, and Martha's two homemade, crocheted baby blankets. Zoning out was entirely acceptable during discussions of baby diapers and the size of any discrete parts of mom and/or dad.

Many people better than I are acknowledging and commemorating the gentle soul who passed on. You can't write this kind of tragedy. I certainly don't want to.

Guilt blunts the edge of new job excitement and looms over the countdown to my parents' first visit. At the same time, a splinter of cold fear inspires new thoughts. I realize how quickly it could all be over. And as suddenly as that, I've let fear keep me from marrying the greatest partner I've ever known.

I have a problem with that.

crisis managed

I closed Borders. It was unpleasant, but not without entertaining acquisitions, like a filing cabinet, or a box of Oregon Chai. I enjoyed a pleasant bout of genuine camaraderie among my fellow booksellers amidst excessive slacking. Also bowling. And then it was over.

But not before a large moving truck full of Russians delivered a billion rotting cardboard boxes that hadn't seen the light of day since last Easter. My former life caught up with me in one tremendous rush, just in time for my job to end and a gigantic celebration of baby-making to possess my house.

After that, I took a week off to play the entire Quest for Glory series as a Paladin. Then I got two jobs.

I didn't realize how damn fulfilling it would be to tutor my 5th grader. Nor how lucrative.

Somewhere in there, Barnes & Noble hired me. Now that my sense of competition is six feet under, B&N provides a natural evolutionary stage for Bookwench. Besides, I like my e-nom de plume.

My 5th grader has a thing for Borders, specifically the coffee shop. It's all he wants to talk about. Whenever he gets confused about a math problem, I put it in terms of muffins and lattes. It inexplicably works! Of course, now he's very pro B&N and wants to know exactly what baked goods stock the cafe. I feel like this kid and I have similar priorities.

One Less Mouth to Feed

Airing dirty laundry seems the purpose of the windswept blogsphere. Last week, Martin and I returned the Simple Cat to the cat welfare organization we adopted him from. I feel like something stuck to the bottom of a tourist's shoe after a night of heavy stumbling down Fremont Street. Animal rescue dominates much of my life, and while there have been tragedies, never was it born of surrender on my part. I've aided wayward cats, wandering puppies, trapped birds, erratic bats, abandoned ducklings, injured rabbits, confused geese, and one very dizzy squirrel. Every single cat I've owned has been a rescue, most notably my attention-whore Ryoko, who lead me a merry, meowy chase for half an hour to catch her, while secretly locking me behind a razor wire fence and forcing me to find escape through the repair center and lobby of a car dealership while screaming at the top of her kitty lungs.

But Fritz, for all his goofy sweetness, made life miserable for every other living creature in our house. Grown much larger than his kitteny size, Fritz beat up the other two cats and bullied them out of their routines. He bombed anything made of cloth, including any discarded article of clothing, the chairs and the couch. Too stupid to learn, he habitually jumped up on the kitchen counters, even after being soaked with water to deter him. And if we were unconscious, he would stalk over my bedside table and steal my jewelry to play with until making enough noise to wake us up for cuddles.

We fostered that cat for seven months of surprise urine stains, mortal kitty combat, and partnerless earrings. We adapted our own lives and routines to reduce poor behavior, like locking all our clothes in the closet and putting a lid on the laundry basket, (which he then peed on.) We adjusted his litter box to reduce smell and make it more appealing to piss in. I cleaned off my entire bedside table, hid my jewelry and stabilized the structure so it wouldn't rattle when he jumped on it at night to wake me up. In response to the latter, he pissed on my side of the bed twice, the second time just after we changed the sheets, disinfected and rotated the mattress in response to the first.

Once I saw that cat jack a twenty from Martin's pocket and run down the hall with it clutched in his teeth.

So Fritz went back to PAWS, a local group that adopts out of Petsmart. Giving up on him just about broke my heart. I feel I've acted contrary to my rescuer nature, taken one gigantic step backwards in the betterment of this world, and forfeited all that banked good driving karma. Because Fritz, despite whatever frustrations drove him to irrigate our afghans, was living a good life here. He was stupidly sweet, followed me everywhere, drank out of the sink, loved being made into the bed, and couldn't resist a tummy rub. He was a great, big, dumb, loving, beautiful tomcat.

And I am scum.

It pains me less now, at least. Now my kitygirls can roam the house without fear of sneak attacks. Eowyn is bringing us crickets again, (and eating them.) Ryoko is gradually aligning herself with the patterns of mommystalking long established before in Ohio. Martin and I bought another bottle of cat spray cleaner and have eliminated spots all over the house, reclaimed the couch for making-out, and happily leave our clothes wherever they fall. I've avoided the Petsmart on Charleston for fear of seeing Fritz, interpreting his behavior as anything to prick my sense of kittyguilt, and bursting into tears.

Vocab

That's my word for him. Overweening. Doesn't that sound magnificent?

4eva

As a child, my first exposure to the concept of infinity did not relate to math, but faith. Crunching on the idea of an afterlife spent in heaven, I asked how long we would live there. Forever. A lot of daydream time was spent wrestling with that. First, I felt mild anger at the idea I could never leave heaven. As a child, I hated the idea of being stuck anywhere overlong and I didn't think heaven was like languishing bored at some church social, trying to find amusement with the little kids without getting scolded for making them cry. Beyond that, the idea of never-ending spun me. Thinking of it made me dizzy and sick. I couldn't fathom forever.

But I was always drawn back to the concept to grapple and spin out. I learned how to make a mobius loop with a strip of paper and traced the unending spiral with a magic marker. Infinity became a concept in my science fiction novels, attached itself to mathematics, and gradually tempered beneath reason and use.

The week before I left Ohio, I tread the awareness of an unending unknown. My life to date was about to end and the afterlife would be something I could not possibly conceive of. I get these flashes now, since that time of delirious joy and anticipation, of how unbound I really am. I step aside from my day-to-day tedium, the banked anxiety, a hard drive full of old mental programming, and I see the infinite potential of my life. There are no barriers. I am boundless and free.

Heaven is me. I am infinite.

I carry this knowledge with me everywhere I go, and the world doesn't sting like it used to. I'm not helplessly stuck somewhere forever. I don't have to give up on my dreams just to survive. And the place I am now, I chose to be in. I can go anywhere I want.

This is my justification, btw, for leaving work early.

I'm Out

When I was in seventh grade, the kids of World Harvest Christian Academy found themselves drafted into one of the church's public dramas. The outside world may not know much of this, but as a devout Christian child, you were required to tell strangers about God and persuade them to stave off damnation by converting to Christianity. Once I performed with a gaggle of other adorable ten year-old girls with matching dresses and palm fronds at the capitol building in downtown Columbus. Now, chubby and twelve, I and the combined talents of 7-12 grade performed a pantomime to Carmen's The Champion.

I was a demon. That meant lots of writhing. Pantomime was a big deal at World Harvest because of the head of the program, Mark Abatti (now known for this famous living statue career,) trained as a mime. Lithe and bendy, he instructed the lot of us how to cavort about like the angels of heaven and the demons of hell while Jesus and Satan duked it out kung fu style. I drank deep the heady draught of melodrama. The performance date couldn't arrive fast enough.

We were amazing. But I was high on ego and Jesus, so my memories are suspect. Consider the polar opposite of a flash mob, and you get the idea. I do recall the emotional crash after the final synthesized strains faded and the demons scurried down the sidewalk to break character. And then, it was time to proselytize to the assembled masses of bored downtown workers who found their lunch breaks interrupted by a bunch of clumsy teenagers and their kickin' dance routine.

I hate witnessing. I fear confrontation and an absence of approval. I was not known for style in my argument, but rote questions and verse-quoting rejoinders, the latter of which flew from my panicked mind the moment I stammered the former. So while all God's awkward teens ambled about to press the crowd about their eternal damnation, I hid behind the colonnade and watched one potentially lost soul shoveling chow mein at astounding intervals. At one point the Devil (whom I dated my senior year,) popped over to ask if I had talked to my guy yet. I waved him off, sighed, and asked the opener between my mark's heaping mouthfuls.

"If you were to die today, where would you go? Heaven or Hell?"

Laws of time and space be damned, I want to talk to that fat seventh grader and tell her not to be afraid of judgment. I want to tell her that no one cares about the persistent, cyclic thoughts in her head and she doesn't have to be ashamed of them. She doesn't have to hide her need to step on sidewalk seams evenly, or fear being caught out for pulling a fistful of hair out of her forehead. And next year, when the fits take her before church and she wants to hide in the closet, just tell mom and dad you are getting nothing out of church but anxiety and fear of social and divine rejection and stay the fuck home.

I want to tell her I don't believe in Heaven or Hell and neither should she.

For anyone reading this far, this is me coming out. I am an Atheist. I have decided to back science, reason and philosophy. I reject the notion that some greater being can read my thoughts and judge me for them. I do not embrace my moral standard out of fear of eternal damnation. God did not give me my anxiety disorder for some greater purpose. I am not a shining jewel in his crown.

I am sorry. I still love you. I don't hate religion. But it isn't for me anymore.

Braindump

Hopped up on Rockstar to keep me awake during inventory, I find myself surfing around the ole internet when I decide randomly to look at websites regarding divorce and remarriage. I should have found a divorce support website for women to address my own issues, but instead I merrily googled a few related terms. I clicked away at the results and found a lot of Christian websites discussing Biblical rulings of the whole marriage thing.

Wow. Adultery was a buzz word in my church-going days, but never in regard to remarriage. My father divorced his first wife because she cheated on him, although the crazy, self-destructive behavior didn't help matters. My mother wasn't allowed to wear a pretty white dress or have a big wedding when she married my dad, because the Episcopalian church they attended considered the event an embarrassment. And that's the issue I see bandied back and forth on the battlefield of the internets. Is it a sin to divorce, and is it adulterous to remarry?

To be honest about my own perspective on the matter, I don't give a flying fuck about the whole adultery thing. I was desperate to punch my V-card in college, and I spent the next ten years confusing love and sex, and not seeing much good in either. I married to bolster our finances, (and wasn't that a kick in the teeth?) and both of us engaged in sanctioned extra-marital affairs. On the other side of it, my greatest concerns regarding marriage are how to forgive the institution for my ex.

I find it astounding how wound up, and divided, Christianity is about divorce and remarriage. One website went to far as to declare that the institution of marriage was designed by God to "stem the decay of society." It is implied that marriage is not an act between two people, but a choice to embrace social responsibility. Thus, a married couple supports social balance, and divorce unbalances everyone.

Can I say how much bullshit that is? We as individuals, couples, and families are beholden to society to support it by being charitable, respectful, and loving. Marital status matters naught to your ability to help someone in need. Squeezing out children does not stabilize society. Raising them does. If you need convincing, go spend a day in the waiting room at your local Children Services intake office.

I realize I do not have the benefit of raising children of my own to add perspective to this argument. My marriage was a matter of two until it ended. Further, I benefited entirely from my stable, two-parent household, and consider it a blessing. But my parents don't owe society anything. Their marriage bore no taint from my father's divorce. In fact, it could largely be assumed that my father was better off not being married to his first wife, embracing the scandal of a second marriage, and making a happy, loving family.

Nope, my parents are not adulterers. Their union is blessed.

If you assume marriage is a vehicle for social stability, then it is no wonder alternatives to the so-called traditional marriage appear so threatening. Poly families, single parents, unmarried parents, gay marriage, communal family units. Why, if I was afraid of all that, I would find a way to make the Bible support my beliefs, too.

It is fair to say that there are a LOT of Christian websites and forums that do not support the assumption that remarriage equals adultery. It's a hot issue with much research, analysis, and conviction behind it. These are the websites that speak honestly about the pain of divorce carrying all the punishment one needs for any supposed sin. Further, the end of every argument is that God forgives. So if you think divorce and remarriage is sin or not, God will help you deal.

I don't mean to sound pro-divorce. I don't wish that pain on any family. But I do believe that people change over the course of their lives. Marriage based on love is subject to the whims of love and the damning effects of stagnation.

When my ex and I married, we were both young and struggling with the responsibility of adulthood. We married believing that we could face our problems together and, finding strength in our union, defeat them. But after a while, I was the only one rising to the challenge. I labored to keep us afloat and congratulated myself on my skills in doing so. Most challenges came from within, including his rampant spending and stalwart refusal to adopt a budget or take on the responsibility of separate bank accounts.

I could handle all that, I believe, if our sex life remained strong, or at least present. But it didn't, and he brought the same stubborn attitude to solving that problem as he did with our finances.

We stopped being partners. It took me a year of self-analysis and soul searching to realize I was running in place, wearing myself down a year at a time, and that the best thing I could do for my marriage was end it.

I don't wish that on anyone. No, I am not pro-divorce. But ending a bad marriage is always, always, always an option and God knows it.

Simple Cat

Merely stating that my cat is stupid does not give justice to the simple, moronic qualities young Fritz expresses. At just shy of one year, Fritz is clingy and crazy. As much as he is a people-cat and sleeps on my bed, helps me brush my teeth, follows me to the bathroom and hinders all bed-making, he is also completely enamored with the other two cats. Neither Ryoko nor Eowyn bother to encourage him, and not a day goes by I don't hear the rampaging of kitty feet down the hall and crashing through the stairwell, punctuated with harsh, angry hisses.

But this is all relatively normal cat behavior. Allow me to sharpen my point. Fritz not only loves people, he loves our stuff. Every night around one in the morning, I'll wake up to him leaping onto my bedside table and rummaging through my possessions. He's batted my jewelry under the bed often and made off with my birth control pills three times. Previous to prophylactic theft, he lavished my emery board with kisses. Wet sandpaper smacking is not the sound to wake to in the dead of night.

Before discovering my bedside table held all the good toys, Fritz charged the closet each morning and tangled in my dresses. We discouraged this habit as Fritz also exhibited the freedom of pissing on our clothes, blankets, pillows and once the dining room chair. Most of that is, ah, out of his system. But we must be vigilant ere he surprise us. Just the other night, Martin sought rest downstairs during a bout of insomnia and woke to Fritz bombing his legs.

Obnoxious and persistent, even this is all par for the kitty course. But Fritz's fascination with my dresses, jewelry, birth control pills, and beauty supplies leaves me wondering. Is Fritz gender-confused? All his feline peers are girls, and hate him. He slings his pee about like a pubescent boy on a Ritalin kick and gets his jollies smooching on feminine hygiene products.

We tried to dissuade his bad behaviors with a water spray bottle, (ie Fritz Spritz.) And the little bastard LOVES it. Oh, he cringes and cries when we whip out the punishing bottle of fear, but then he waits for the hit like an anxious sub handcuffed to the bedpost who just called me a bitch. When I would hose him down from bed, the damn cat soaked up half the bottle before he bolted for the safety of the bathroom. Even when I hit him in the face.

If only that were the end of it. But no, it gets worse. The horror of it makes me shrink for the keyboard. I want to gather up my well-behaved girls and go hide under the bed. It doesn't matter. His long black paws poke beneath the door, clawing at my the dangling straps of my bras I've foolishly left hanging on the doorknob. There is no escape!

It was morning. I had the day off. Still warm from Martin's cuddles but aware of his recent departure, I reached to my bedside and brought over my high-end vibrator, (Martin calls it my pink, European friend.) It lives in the little plastic coffin it came in, which I believe protected it from Fritz's romantic investigations. There wasn't a cat in the entire top floor when I started and the gentle hum of tiny motors barely could be heard from the insulating rubberized plastic.

At some point the math broke. I can tell the vibration speeds from each other, and this wasn't right. Still closed up in my Daniel Craig fantasy, a thread of worry itched my awareness. That's not the engines, and I'm not the one moving it.

I looked down, and instead of James Bond, there was Fritz. Licking my vibrator. While I was using it.

The next few moments are a blur of motion, bedsheets, cat hair and screaming. Then a long shower ala Crying Game. Fucker left a tooth mark in my overpriced vibe.

My cat is either exceptionally simple, or a sexual predator. Is he planning on taking Martin out so the harem belongs solely to him? That may be why he darts beneath Martin's feet every time he's on the stairs. I wonder if he's planning on scratching off my skin and wriggling beneath it like the bedsheets he loves to play with/pee on. In any case, Fritz is a force to be reckoned with, or maybe just petted.

I'm hoping the kitty condo calms him down. Property ownership usually has that effect.

I don't want to write

I'm not going to sell books anymore. That meant a lot to me when I got to Vegas. The concept of launching into the utter unknowable excited me when I left my husband. My first job in my new life was to sell books. I hadn't worked retail since the previous century, but after finding a decent pair of shoes I managed to make it work.

Anyone who would listen got the whole story. Multiple times. I also scored exposure to the younger generation of nerds. I sold books. I read books. I talked and talked and talked about books. I even gave myself a new name, Bookwench, to commemorate my new life.

Just over a year later, Borders throws in the towel. There are plenty of people who can tell you that story. I don't care, honestly. Brands and corporate concepts to not instill loyalty to me. People do.

But who am I going to be now?

Poesybabble

The world aligns. Patterns emerge from some ethereal, Jungian perfection. And there, there I am. In the middle.

I am surrounded by these amazing, bright and beautiful people, and to each I am tethered along a golden thread that shines perfectly clear. My very tread tangles a few more at my Achilles heel. Where are they coming from? I wasn't looking for this.

The stories are given freely, with only the touch to open each blossom into full bloom.

I feel so wide I could encompass the world in my arms and love the whole of it.

The face of god is in here somewhere, along with mine and where they find some smooshy, gnostic balance between them.

Right Now

Borders is closing and I don't want to get married.

I am going to miss my job. Not right now, during the first weekend of a company-wide liquidation sales. Right now I want to collapse into a boneless heap of exhaustion and sleep until I open the store tomorrow. Also, fuck you Borders. This was the best job I've ever had.

I don't believe in soul mates. It's tacky. I do believe that some people can stumble into each others' lives and fit so perfectly it defies reason. I also believe that strong emotional connections require calibration and upkeep. Martin and I have both of these things I believe in. What we share sings with the harmonic resonance of being a damn good fit. Hitherto unknown quantities of happiness abound. Beauty overwhelms. Love blossoms where once a desert burned.

But I live in that desert. All I know of my previous marriage is rage. I can't think about my ex-husband without hating him. Bile is the taste of my name and his conjoined. Sifting the ashes of memory yields the tiny treasures grown from pressure, time and me. A mountain does not long for the glacial mass that upset it.

No, marriage has not been good to me. I want no part of it.

Realizing this, right now, is a kick in some part of my anatomy.

D&D Writing

Her mother died first.

Frail and lovely, the Lady Van Gaale withered like a savannah blossom in spring. Both husband and chevalier stayed on another dozen or so years, but they, like the lords and ladies of her youth, fell to the realms of the dead. Her children budded and blossomed into darling half-elven princes and princesses before the iced hand reached to her companions. Those who remained loyal and present in Aramuth fell in service of the King and his sword. This, and her youngest son's death in his father's battlefields, sent her from the island nation and back to the river and city of Valin.

Even among those gifted with long life, the Queen retained her youth long into other winters. But Valin knows stranger enchantments and welcomed her regency. Her eldest daughter wed into the ruling family and began the half-elven strain of aristocracy there, fancied so much among the elite that fashionable spas offered ear-pointing services. The youngest daughter, holding no such interest in family, studied at the library of Althune and brought back correspondence to her mother until a fight with a desert serpent left her crippled. Together, they established a University in Valin, where daughter lectures and naught is seen of the Queen.

Her living sons remained with their father and his most loyal companions, making war and pledging honor and might. Mordecai came to Valin only once during her exile, and winter chased his footsteps with snow. He served his king only another decade before Altheras reclaimed him to her bosom. The Queen mourned him and faded from view for a year to serve the silver dragon in his name. Upon returning, she found her days full up of the twilight of her generation. Her own order of knights waned and repopulated with devout sons and daughters. Her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, swarmed in the streets and redefined the fashions she couldn't bother to keep up with.

Her husband the King died and fetched her back to Aramuth for her son's coronation, but even he wore a dusting of snowy old age. The Queen asked if he would continue the wars his father waged in all places of the world. The newly minted regent considered his counselors and could not be sure what the future would bring.

Smyrna Van Gaale de Damondred understood, then, that the wages of her sins of ambition and primal power was death. Very little defined her life anymore but the failing of it.

The Queen of Ice took her place along the long-abandoned chessboard of the realm and began to set her pieces into play. It would take time, lifetimes, to make her position ready. But Smyrna's death would only come at the hands of one other, and the prospect of checkmate proved intoxicating no matter who it was to fall.

Facade

The kids at the late, great Borders store 81 exchanged and evolved a particular, peculiar verbiage, a hipster nomenclature touched with abject nerdity, pop culture and veiled attempts at honest expression of feelings and love within the clunky clucking of haughty Vegas booksellers. Among these favored and favorite terms of endearment I found myself repeating words of enthusiasm as “fancy”, disdain “Lamer McLamerston” (and variations thereof), and appreciative personality with the subject's name and the appended suffix “face.”

I called my boyfriend by this, telling him I didn't like it when he abandoned me on Sundays to play games with his loser friends because I miss his Martin-face.

The problem is, I'm getting lost behind my own face. I hit the ground running at my new Borders store and in doing so affected a potent bookseller-face for both our customers and employees in order to win acceptance, engender trust and adapt to the 534 vibe on each side of the counter. I listen, I learn, I tell jokes, I accept tasks and offer service. I am beyond the place at which my excitement and raw charisma exuded by recent relocation to Las Vegas will carry me into teambuilding and upsales. I'm at one year, one month as a local and nearly reached my Borders anniversary. If I'm going to keep meeting my own and exceeding all others' expectations, I've got to work smarter and harder. I can't let my natural reclusive tendencies make another Nationwide – great work but no social support to help grease the administrative wheels – or God forbid another Jain – awkwardness met with derision and disdain.

This far in, I've learned that making friends here in Las Vegas is not as simple a matter as it was in Ohio. I can't just hope that other like-minded nerds and intelligent outcasts will catch onto my drift randomly and general forays into friendship evolve naturally, if sideways, and eventually my expressions and extensions of pleasantries and movie quotes, dotted with homemade dinners and mild movie-going adventures, will net me a small if serviceable circle of friends. Vegas is rough. No one talks if they don't have to, forget making efforts to visit each other, and everything costs more in time, talent and treasure. That I've managed the few friends I have found is the result of many, many experimental attempts (i.e. failures.)

Further, the deck stacked against me before I got here. Martin's friends reacted as any social group would to the sudden unbalancing of his role in their lives with the inclusion of mine and took to a steady hate-on to me. I can't blame then entirely. I did the same thing in my own history when one of my single male worshippers got himself a girlfriend and dropped me like a sack of potatoes. I'm not proud of any of that, so I can't really claim moral majority. But it hurts to know that all that effort I put in to being a part of Martin's social life was rejected without a thought by his friends because I “stole” him away.

The fact I am writing today is a minor feat as the very idea of expressing myself in written word or artistic rendering recently leaves me depressed. My dreams are vividly marked with broadly painted metaphors of my life changes and desires. Just the other night, my first love fell down an elevator shaft and I undertook a dangerous mission to recover him only to come to the understanding, much too late, that even when I got him back, he wasn't mine anymore. The dreams about being tortured and ruined by children came after spending the most delightful afternoon with two pregnant ladies. I want to write letters of thanks to recapture that sense of joyful humility, but so few people write back anymore. My cognitive distortions sup greedily and now I can't be sure if anyone really wants to see me when I visit Ohio, or if I'll just be scrabbling at the shadows of memory instead of making any real connections.

I've lost my face. I don't know who I am anymore.

Yearling

April 5, 2010 was the arrival date. When planning to relocate my life to Las Vegas, I couldn't see beyond that day. No future existed, at least none that I could imagine. All I knew was that I would be living with Martin and eventually pursuing my divorce. I don't remember much of that first day other than traversing the Virgin River Gorge in Arizona and the awestruck beauty and torrential terror therein. That trip felt much like the crucible forging my new life from the old one. Then there was the Nevada border, the desert, and the city I would call home.

I hid in his room the first day or so. Every morning for a week Martin and I made love before he left for work. I gradually explored the apartment, the streets outside, the twisting knots of unfamiliar roads. I made an ever widening space for myself in his life until discernible elements were not just ours, but mine. I gathered supplies, I secured a job and I colored my hair. We found some habits to fall into, and others to break out of. He bought a house for us to live in. We chased adventure, we nursed illness, and generally figured out how to exist together.

I've lived here for exactly one year.

The biggest decision of my life is still easily the best I've ever made and I regret absolutely nothing.

Happy Anniversary.

Reset

The liquidation doldrums perpetuated an environment of illness and negativity. A shift would not pass without anxiety manifesting as nausea and headache, both of which occurred with heavy regularity at one of my previous jobs in Ohio. Back then, such reactions reached a boiling point every six to eight months or so, sending my non-insured carcass to the Emergency Room to rack up a few thousand dollars of treatment checking my heart, my digestive track and my head. It was a documented excuse not to go to work, which I think was the point.

I love my job at Borders. I do not want it to be another awful job.

Then my cat got sick on my birthday. Much as I could not afford my own health care in Ohio, I couldn't swing vet care for my girls, either. Anytime they took ill, I panicked and through myself into research and home remedies and treatment. Thankfully, they never took so sick as to require much more than mommy's TLC, but the fear remained that one day, some day, they would.

I'm good at taking care of pets. I bathed, fed and exercised a geriatric rat every day during her convalescence and even managed to restore some of her mobility when she was paralyzed. I diagnosed my girls with worms back when I was single, bought medication online and wrestled them each down twice to administer drugs. This time around, I hydrated Ryoko with Pedialyte and an oral syringe, though I would up wearing most of it.

But she didn't get better, threw up for days and stopped eating and drinking entirely. So Martin and I took her to the vet.

While waiting in the examination room, Ryoko slipped on the steel table, fell on her face and broke her tooth off. Having been up since 3 AM and haunted with her illness for a few days, I promptly broke into hysterics and only retained control to talk to the vet. Eventually, we brought her back for X-Rays, blood work and hospitalization. She stayed there for two days.

The road to recovery stretches on before us now that she is home. Martin and I have to dose her with three different medicines, twice daily. Yesterday we planned a short road trip and dinner with friends, but I canceled to watch her. (We were supposed to spend the long weekend in LA to celebrate our anniversary, and canceled that, too.) But even as I write this, she's curled up between my arms and the laptop, which she hasn't done since before taking ill.

And I could care less about work. I've secured my transfer and the store should be in her last week, but I'm not worried about it anymore. No headaches, no nausea, no desperate fear of being there. My concern and attention for my kitty simply trumped all that fretting and blew it out of my awareness.

I'll never be thankful for my cat getting sick. I've put too many pets in the ground to embrace that sentiment. But my darling kitty did manage to put the world into a better perspective for me, and I feel stronger for it.

And for the rest of her days, she's going to be spoiled rotten. But that's no surprise.

Bookseller of Woe

Working retail precludes any chance of avoiding interaction with the public. Ergo abuse. The wide spectrum of requirement an individual consumer anticipates creates an ever-shifting crest of expectation and writes the unwritten rules of the shopping experience. Most of these expectations are based around customer service indulgence. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so what can I do to make you happy and solve your merchandise ills? We the retail booksellers must dance, changing partners often, to get to the end of the shift. I'm quite good at the bookwench shuffle. (There is a crab-like, sidling motion, Sometimes of escape.)

The thing is, I like being a bookseller. A year and a half stint in Nationwide's call center taught me to find my own motivation, and how to placate people using only my voice and my words. (Also in the shortest time possible, because stats are king.) Thus I get a thrill out of winning a given interaction. Answer question, solve problem, lift spirits, kthnxbai. I loved the angry callers. Give me five minutes and I'll have them thanking my parents for bringing me life. Yes, I'm that good. Applying this to customer service in a bookstore may as well be the greatest combination of flavors since mocha and raspberry. There are people everywhere who want to read books. (Buy?) I flutter like a lascivious butterfly, dropping on each unsuspecting consumer blossom and winning that nectar of an upsell, only to flit to another for a new fix.

I know the rules. I listen. I dance. When people aren't abusing the right of consumerism, it's beautiful.

February 19th, 2011, the rules changed at my Borders.

My options for placation and resources for awesome are diminished if not dashed underfoot. My ability to see the worth of my efforts flags. We can't even keep the store organized. It's a nightmare. Now the consumer demands his rights and is shut down. No, you can't hang around and not buy anything. No, you can't use our bathroom. No, we can't help you find that book you wanted. No, you can't return anything. No, I can't take your coupon. No, you can't sit there.

I'm so sorry I can't give you these things. Because now you hate me and the frustrations of a consumer are the stuff of legend. No one appreciates the suspension of rights or negation of the sole bargaining chip of one's well-earned money. No more rampant, puppydog clamor for your business. If you don't want to buy from us, someone else will. It's all gotta go.

I've taken a cruel liking to calling the bluffs of the manipulative consumer, particularly when I offer to put back their books when they threaten to leave. But it is a sad amusement. Once upon a time, I could win that moment and everyone would be happy. Now I can never win.

When the consumer's reality is damaged beyond the point the ego and can absorb the impact, a curious thing happens. Intelligent, well-meaning people suddenly achieve critical mass and blow radiation-laced malice over every surface. Name calling and insults are common. Accusations of discrimination of any perceived minority are thrown. So are pens. When the rules break down, so does the order of society.

It's been a month of this. Now we're down to three final weeks. I can safely say that this is not a good time for me. But I am looking forward to the return of customer engagement rules. I'm transferring to a larger, successful Borders store, actively managed and a five minute drive from my house. I'll learn a new store, begin the snapshot knowledge of store inventory, and meet new regulars. I will have the tools and the opportunity to win again. And again.

For now, a bookseller's shift focuses on survival. I took the offer to sell the fixtures for some active investment in my own day. Selling is selling, after all. I'm turning back on my customer service girl mode. I'm happier when I can help. Last night a father asked me to find his distracted son something educational. I turned to the boy and asked him, “What is your favorite book?” We pawed the hopelessly disfigured arrangement of children's books. I pitched one, another, and then handed him a hardbound copy of The Tale of Despereaux. His eyes widened when I spoke of a heroic mouse. Then I convinced his father it was the best purchase he could make for his boy.

I won.

Angle of Approach

We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.
Theodor Suess Geisel

I feel compelled to record this here.

Love

Sandi and I clean the bathrooms at work. We're not to thrilled about it, since the exertion at the beginning of the day leaves one sweaty and stinky for the rest of the shift. But we're both OCD and enjoy seeing our environment brighten in the process of cleaning. I brought a bandanna to leave at work for these mornings. Gloves are great, but wiping the hair away from your eyes with a latex mitt previously scrubbing out a toilet is unpleasant. Seeing Sandi suffering with this, I decided to bring her one of my many bandannas hiding in my sewing box.

Camo or pirates? Not so much Sandi's style. But then I found the kerchief I rescued from my grandmother's house after she died. I only saw her wear it in photos older than myself. So I gave it to Sandi and helped her figure out how to tie it on. Sandi loves family, and she resisted taking a possession that belonged to my dead grandmother. I told her if we ever stop working together, we could discuss the future of the headscarf.

Two weeks ago, Borders filed Chapter 11 and announced plans to close our store.

I've been a troll since it started. The liquidation sale crowds are like Christmas without the goodwill. My customer service skills trampled beneath the common lust for a good deal. Our store is trashed every day and we the staff struggle to make a phoenix transformation out of the ashes each night. I pick fights with rude customers, just to take out a lash of aggression and ride the lick of adrenaline that propels me further into anti-social behavior.

But once I've pried my head out of my ass, I've noticed an outpouring of love from the guests. They may not be adept at expressing support and compassion, and in some cases we wind up back in the troll situation. Nary an hour can pass without someone telling me how sad they are the store is closing, how much they loved it and for how long, and expressing a deep and sincere hope that I find work at another Borders or, lacking that, offering encouragement that opportunities will come my way.

I've offered the divine defenestration analogy. God doesn't close a door without throwing you through a window. It's a poor response to such genuine concern and support. I'm not myself when I'm not helping others to find their literary heart's desire. Which is to say, I'm not me if I'm not loving.

I reviewed my old memoir project and journal from the last year and before. Invited to my supervisor's wedding in Ohio, I mention not being able to understand why anyone would want to get married. Coming up on twelve months in Las Vegas, my time has been dogged by the issues surrounding extraction from my marriage both financially and legally. I've jumped hoops with insurance companies, banks, state and federal agencies in order to reclaim my independence. I hate registering my marital status as divorced when I would much rather be single.

Martin never fails to support me in all my craziness, be it economical or existential. Despite all the bullshit of closing the store and securing future employment, Martin keeps me grounded. I gloated to my coworker about our charming mornings together. She asked me why I wasn't married yet.

From the memoir project, written prior to my divorce,

I don’t believe anyone can love me.

I'm not even thinking in terms of attraction. I mean wholesale, undying approval and love. Forever love. Love in concept. Love that will fight all your bullshit just to love you more. I can’t say whether I believe I am unlovable, or if that kind of a love exists. I can’t use the gracious term “lovemaking” anymore. It’s all just sex. My own approval issues in my marriage taint the very institution, which espouses the very ideal of romantic love. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to get married. I can’t fathom why it would make anything better.

Much about that statement is not longer valid. But not all.

I don't want to be married again. Domestic partnership is all well and good. And hey, it would be nice to be on Martin's insurance since mine is evaporating once the store closes. I do believe we are already each the others beneficiary in life insurance and retirement fund cases. It's amusing. Homosexual couples are fighting for recognition in marriage at a level I don't want. I would prefer a civil union and my own name, thankyouverymuch.

My uncle and his girlfriend are in much the same boat. His marriage ended so bitterly that his partner of nearly twenty years will never be his wife. I don't know if common-law marriage exists in their home state of Missouri, but it certainly doesn't here in Nevada.

I love Martin. It's the background music of our lives. We make dinner, the cats go crazy, I love him. We go for a drive, we rock out, I love him. I pay my auto insurance, I write on my blog, I love him. It is the thing we do and it is as simple as breathing. I am still blissfully, stupidly happy here with him. I have a Good Thing going.

But it isn't enough to make me want to lose my name and independent legal status again. Nevada isn't as misogynistic as Ohio when it comes to legal identity, but back home I had to cart my certified marriage abstract around with me because two forms of ID in my maiden name just aren't enough. I left my insurance agency because I couldn't get my ex of my policy on my own say-so.

I don't want the greatest love to become something I must scourge my life emotionally and financially to be rid of.

Sandi took the news about the store hard. She survived cancer. She is the sole provider in her marriage. When making to leave the store in the midst of the hurricane of closeout sales, I came around the counter to give her a hug. Tears sprang to my eyes when I made the connection, and I whispered fiercely, "Keep it! Please, please, please keep it!"

"But it's your grandmother's!" she sobbed.

"No, it's yours."

Sandi smiled and me all misty eyed and kissed me right on the mouth.

Itself

Welcome to your last moments of safety.

Right now you are probably wondering what all the fuss is about. No doubt what you see before you does not make sense yet. There are shapes and angles, light and textures that seldom overlap in this configuration for you. It will take the sum total of this moment for you to figure it out.

That sound? Rough and pitched? That is you. Perhaps you recognize it as screaming.

Shortly you will be caught up with the hammering of your heart and the painful clutch there, yes, right there in your stomach. That horrid sound will break mournfully and you will know. You will always know.

But not yet. Right now you are safe, peaceful if curious at that sliding sensation of our body crashing into panic. Your guts are not gnawed with apprehension and guilt, your nerves not jolted by each and every sound, your gaze unpierced by shards of light and clear of the choking fog of nightmare.

Not to worry. You will.

Here goes.

Hard Place

I'm not entirely creative at present. There will be a back post at some point documenting the Valentine's Day comic I made for Martin. Right now, I'm tangled up in the closing of my store and the exhaustion that comes with it.

A friend of mine burst the entropy bubble briefly today and asked me to mock up a concept for a stage piece in her current project. I know Midsummer Night's Dream inside and out. The director wants a dead tree with hiding places for actors.



I imagined a white spectre frozen in the final throes of death. Creepy, huh?

More love at a distance

Back and forth
To and fro
I've winged Southwest to find my heart.
In doing so
I've had to leave my most beloved behind.
Mom and Dad
For lack of arms, all I can share
Must be expressed in what can pass
Hand to hand
Precious cargo from my heart to yours.
Thank you for taking my greatest and brightest
Soar the longest and highest.
Without your gilded wings
I could never learn to fly!

Submission for Southwest Airlines LUV Sick & Long Distance writing contest.

Care Package

I want to give you my time
The curve of my arms, a waft of lavender
Minty breath, heartbeat
There, there

In lieu of this expression
The stretch of my arm, a gust of ozone
Long distance affection
Here, here

I hate being so far away.

WTF Old Guys!

At first, I thought it was a fluke. One does not have a double X chromosome and work retail without getting hit on. I've been told I look young for my age, thus did not see much issue with a wide age-range of males across the counter making passes at me. But at some point the pie chart widened to Pac-Man proportions. Most of the men who flirt with me at work are senior citizens.

Las Vegas does have a prodigious population of seniors. One can't drive down the street without passing an assisted-living facility or seniors-only apartment complex. There are entire off-strip casinos claimed by the elderly, where crossing to the movie theater means negotiating a blue-haired swath of pensioners scattered amongst wheelchairs and walkers, through a miasma of cigarette smoke, denture cream and entropy.

When I worked at MatchMaker International, (which holds the number four spot of favorite employers after Borders, the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and C.O.S.I. Center of Science and Industry,) I quickly learned the age wave disparity between the sexes in our membership. Where there were few women between 21-30 to balance the glut of desperately seeking men of that age, the flip occurs after 60 with only a handful of healthy gentleman seniors interested in companionship amongst the sea of widows anxious to fill their lonely days. Also, men are jerks who refuse to date anyone a week older than them, prefer their ladies skinny, never married and, if at all possible, Asian. (Stocky Ms. Nakamura went out with over thirty men who immediately complained she wasn't the Asian they were looking for.)

Further, the older a man gets, the younger his target for sexual advances become.

I fall into this Goldilocks zone of being over twenty years younger, bosomy, and approachable in my customer service. I like to sell things, and my preferred methods involve an affable demeanor and grinning effort to make the customer feel intelligent and discerning. With the more sharply dressed and polite people, I will shake hands and make a brief physical connection. I don't have a record run of upsells, donations and rewards cards because I'm standoffish. Feminine wiles work, bitches.

This is why I think I'm gaining a steady following of both local and tourist senior citizens. I treat everyone like they matter. I value their opinions and listen diligently to the pearls of wisdom anyone feels like dropping for me. I think long and hard about the best way to satisfy their literary needs and laugh delightedly at their jokes. I am a geisha bookseller.

Anyone receptive will react to such a thing. And I don't know a red-blooded man with a long life behind him and a shorter one ahead who doesn't like making the little lady smile.

But dude, don't give me your phone number. It's not going to happen.

Of Self

I try my best not to trash my ex-husband online. It's tacky. Also, it could be uncomfortable for our mutual friends who potentially still follow my infrequent creative paroxysms on the 'net. But mostly, it's tacky.

Accepting my neuroses again proves to be the best solution to the prodding of mental dysfunction that keeps cropping up like persistent cockroaches in my emotional baggage. (Perhaps a moth metaphor would have been better here?) Yesterday morning found me paralyzed within a sudden set of outdated restrictions; don't talk, don't move, keep hidden. I still have no idea what triggered it, other than a rough set of nightmares that began the day. Martin suffered my crazy as he always does by being patient, present and not provoking me. (The latter is not a common skill set, but he does well when the situation demands.) After an hour mummified in the afghan, a snit and a nap, I recovered.

There was a time during my marriage when I was publicly hostile about my stagnated sex-life with my husband. Even now, it embarrasses me to recall. Not that complaining in front of our friends succeeded in bringing positive attention to the issue any more than the years spent doing so in private. But it was, as stated above, horribly tacky. Frustrated and emotionally strung out, I began wilting in socially stimulating situations. We hosted game at our condo every Sunday, seating eight to twelve friends and oftentimes feeding them all. Hostess duties and role-playing in a very loud, close place, and just before another work week, drained me. Insomnia persisted. Resentment swelled.

I asked my husband if I could take a break from the game. I was already skipping out early here and there, or trying to dodge entirely by claiming illness. But my room looked out to the play table and there was no relief. I asked to bow out of four sessions, and if game could not be held elsewhere, I would spend it with my parents down the street.

I don't like to trash my ex-husband. But he took offense at my request, believing I was somehow wronging him by not wanting to be a part of his magnum opus D&D campaign. After all, if someone had a problem with game, it meant he wasn't being the best GM of all time anymore and that threatened his fragile ego. So instead of asking how he could better help his wife in her emotional instability, he argued with me, as if my cognitive distortion was some sort of ill-defined rule in a game that could be debated and solved by a GM's solid ruling.

This strategy failed previously in the bedroom.

While I shivered within my blanket cocoon, trying to focus enough to overcome the mania, I wondered why Martin wasn't arguing with me. Why did he just sit there, only occasionally placing a hand on my foot or elbow and asking for me to talk briefly before lapsing back into silence. Why he didn't chase me up the stairs when I finally stormed off and then let me sleep when he came to check on me.

Oh, right. Because he knows my crazy is about me, not him.

Source material

Idly people-watching at the DMV while waiting for fifty people to go ahead of me, I suddenly felt overcome with a widening sensation. My self identity expanded beyond the perimeters of my body and I felt a sincere, heart-breaking love for everyone in the room. At the DMV.

I cast my hazy, soft-lidded gaze across the floor and spotted two monks in saffron robes and knit sweaters padding their way to the plastic chairs. Each wore ankle-high socks under their sandals and one perched his feet on the crossbar beneath his seat. It was adorable. I glanced over to my iPod, soaring choral music raised in my ears, and saw the title of the tracks from my Secret of Kells soundtrack. "The Monks."

A coworker told me last night that she wanted to have a deeply spiritual experience, but not a scary one. I agreed, stating that while many wish to trip the light fantastic, no one wants to then fall down the stairs. This was after I found a scrap of paper behind the books at the overlap of the Religion and Atheism sections, with the word "Drama" written in red in my handwriting. I don't know how it got there.

I watched a chubby-faced baby in his stroller at the bank and winced as my ovaries begged for active use, my uterus conspiring with the stew of hormones surging through my system to clearly whisper "I want a baby!" But I really, truly don't. My health and body image teeter back and forth over the pass/fail grade. Pregnancy would fucking wreck me. Neither Martin no I do well on little sleep, I survived a week of insomnia and turned into a gibbering mess of crazy and tears. No one in this hypothetical family would do well in this environment. Further, after nearly ten months in Las Vegas, I still feel like I only just got my life back. Today I completed my name change process, and I am loathe to give it up after all the effort that went in to reclaiming it.

I writhe within the coils of indulgent selfishness and I don't fucking care. And yet, there are moments I stumble into brief clearings of transcendence and I wonder of the beauty of loosing, losing myself in expansive, unfettered, unbiased love.

Then I faceplant to reality, scramble for a pen and vomit over my journal these quasi-philosophical chunks. I don't have meaning, just the similarities of ingestion and what poetry I can finagle from it.

Portmanteau

Before the term "fist bump" found common parlance, we called them "respect knuckles."

Respectacles.

Ergo,

"When I wear my respectacles, I appear distinguished."

or

"He kicked me in the respectacles and I lost all my dignity,"

The Respectful Sand of the Last Lady Epizeuxis

The counter-offer singed his eyebrows and caused an unpleasant clenching of his bowels. He would have laughed, as he had the first time she disagreed with his sentiments and suggestions, far, far away when he remembered how to laugh, but the last round of haggling left him with the distinct empathy for skewered butterflies in examination cases.

"My lady," he began and stumbled headfirst into the stuttering embolalia that took the place of his argument. "Er, ah, yes, concordant to such a thing, you understand ..."

"Yes, yes, yes?"

Her voice delivered enthetic blows upon his nervous system. Perhaps he should crawl beneath his desk and hide. Desirous of naught but escape, he offered an exiguous rebuttal before relenting.

"Good, good, good."

Prepositional Acrostic

Excepting the faults of adolescent infatuation
Verses the primal desires of womanhood
Excluding of course those divine in nature

Without her permission
Except those implicit
Past the boundaries of a kiss
Towards the greater heartbeat

Evening and Morning

Having regained sanity after a full night's sleep, I wonder at the berserk racing of thoughts that choked my awareness and stood me upon a perpetual precipice of hysterical tears. If you think you can go four or five days without adequate sleep and perform normal human actions unaffected, you are stone cold stupid. I for one am grateful for the world around me now that I've shut it out solidly for at least six hours.

I feel I learned a few interesting things about myself in the process of exhaustion, primarily that I haven't been stricken with the compulsion to write like that in a very long time. Granted, what I had to say was mostly gibbering rhetoric, I decided early on not to restrict my creativity when it needed to flow, nor censor what I felt I needed to share, (despite being pants-on-head crazy at the time.) Further, I found myself watching a parade of mental disease cavort about in my fogged awareness. In doing so, I unflinchingly labeled my obsessive compulsive triggers, my anxiety disorder, and a peculiar mania when it comes to cleaning. That's it. After years of struggling with labels and treatments, it was comforting to discover my mental flaws aren't all that bad or numerous. Just persistent.

Perhaps creativity is a form of madness. I've heard a lot of talk about artists who can only channel their talents through emotional pain, and that lacking such traumatic stimuli, the potency saps from the process. Takes the blues off 'em, if you will. Skimming the acknowledgments of some of my favorite novelists, I see many grateful nods to those friends and family that put up with the author's own brand of crazy, and absence, during the writing process.

This creates a challenge in my mind that I am loathe to entertain seriously. By restricting sleep and cranking up the emotional resonance, would then the words flow? What could I create under those conditions? Moreover, how long could I maintain that momentum?

It's a bad idea. I dislike my mania on a good day, and I lived the sleepless, addicted lifestyle once before. While the writing that came out of it was quality, and the relationship fostered with my long-distance writing partner planted the seed that would become my current romance, the cost of health, mental degradation and job performance was too costly.

Still, it is good to know I am yet capable of such a thing. Perhaps it is not the worst idea I've had.

midnight rantings

Crazy wants to write, fine. Crazy gets to write. At least Crazy stopped to put on pants first because it's the middle of the goddamn night and it's cold downstairs.

My crazy is coming out a lot recently. Tics and twitches that made cameos or recurring roles through my life are coming back for a curtain call. OCD swings in during conversation with Martin. “I cleaned the cat pan,” he said. “Thank you,” I reply. And then Crazy piped up. “Wash your hands.” “Yes, I've got that covered,” Martin said. He is very patient with my crazy, even though I haven't had a decent night's sleep in four days and neither has he. I sleep in 90 minute bursts, and then wake and cannot fall back under. Insomnia links elbows with anxiety. I've learned so much how to cope with that, I don't recognize it. My first impulse when it triggers is to ignore the fuck out of it.

Borders may be filing bankruptcy. The deal for financing hinges on the all-profit Plus cards that we are selling in the stores. So yeah, it's up to me to save my job. I know this song. Holy shitballs, here it comes, rolling over me like waves of storm clouds and echoing far-off thunder.

But it's not my fault, for realz this time. Still, my heartbeats skip and roar in my ears. Every sound in the sleeping world keeps me awake. Body ache, nausea, and love-seeking cats are no help either. Martin is a godsend, so calm and cool and unaffected even when my antics rob him from sleep and leave him exhausted and zombified during his work day. He's taken to reading to me at night to help calm me down. No one has read to me since my parents did when I was a child.

I loved reading aloud. I read to my brother a lot in my youth, and to the children I babysat, and to my boyfriends when I penned horrendous, gothic prose as a teenager. My ex-husband refused to be read at, citing some leftover baggage from his father reading to him. I've read to Martin over the phone, web-cam, and in person. This is the first reversal and I am touched by his kindness.

We're reading Christopher Moore's The Lamb, a humorous but poignant retelling of the Christ story from the perspective of Jesus' childhood friend, Biff. Moore has done his research. My childhood faith in God swells remembrance. Tonight, I cried to recall the love of Jesus as only a six year-old girl can hold in her mind, with a bearded father who dresses like a shepherd to lead children's ministry at our church. I buried myself within those hugs. It is not too far a stretch to extend that perfect love to the smiling man in a blue sash in my picture Bible. After all, Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong. They are weak, but he is strong.

Here is where I wept. Me and church didn't always get along. I wonder if this is an extension of my own father and his struggle with humility, later discovered to be exacerbated by an iron deficiency. My father cannot believe in his own grace. He is the most beautiful human being I've had the blessing to know, and he refuses to acknowledge that anything good in him is his own. No, it must be Jesus. To be fair, he is justified in this. My dad was a raging asshole for a good chunk of my childhood. I remember more than once clinging to the iron banister at our stairwell, frozen in terror as he railed at my brother and I for being messy. Yes, the cardinal sin in our house was being disorganized.

Last night, exhausted from lack of sleep and shaking with nausea, I stood from my seat at our kitchen table and gathered up our dishes from the living room and the empty soda bottles next to the couch, tossed them in the trash and made sure to run some water in the bowls. After 90 minutes of blissful sleep under the deep blankets of Nyquil, I woke up and clawed through the cotton in my brain because clearly I had shit to do. I'm surprised I didn't run the vacuum. This is my crazy, learned from my father. Jesus loves you but it's your own ass if you don't pick up your toys.

When I was a child, I acted as a child. When I grew up, I put away childish things. I want to go back into storage and drag out the love of Jesus and the simple faith of a child who knew that someone beautiful loved her unconditionally, even when she made a mess, or hit her brother, or threw the cat down the stairs to see if he would land on his feet, or suffered nervous fits in her early teens and tore her hair and struck her head against the wall and felt too guilty to tell her mother, even when her favorite teacher asked her to. Because frankly, I was a shit. And love is never unconditional in this world.

Christianity is bullshit. It's a cultish faith tacked on to an older religion with more impressive guilt, evolved over hundreds of years by invaders and political agendas, practiced by ignorant fools who accept with sincerity the ridiculousness of folk stories and myth degraded by time and retelling as fact, and rise to any heights to defend it instead of bothering to strip the scales from their eyes and think, “Huh. Maybe the Christians lied about Jesus coming back from the dead to keep their already fractured and unsteady movement alive.” Considering Jesus didn't do anything remotely important after he defeated death itself is highly anticlimactic. The best way to seam up that issue is to pretend that Jesus wasn't a prophet cum martyr and instead SAVED OUR SOULS through some symbolic, grisly death, which also works retroactively in linear time to save the souls of those dudes who kicked it in the thousands of years before Jesus did.

As a storyteller, I feel the resurrection of Christ actually undercuts the sacrifice he made. I believe Jesus was a great man who didn't mean to start a cult. He shared a message of love and not being dicks to each other. He cared for a terrified people who carved a social identity of oppression and guilt. But he wasn't a soldier, he didn't raise an army to defeat the Romans and free the Jews, and he was just as much loved as he was reviled for it. So his people killed him. Way to go, douchebags.

I wasn't a Christian when I was a child. I believed in a greater love that loved me, too. Why did I ever put that away in favor of the complications of organized religion and the moodiness of people? This is my problem. Jesus I can get behind. Everyone else is just crazyfucks doing it wrong.

Of course, I'm also one of those crazyfucks. No, I don't throw my cat down the stairs anymore. I've got plenty of guilt riding me about that, thanks. But I still have fits and occasionally some hair gets pulled and I hide in my closet until Martin comes to find me. I'm nearly 32 and I can't possibly have all the answers, yet I am desperate to believe I know just a bit more than everyone else. And every day I gain new clarity that frees me from the shackles of the folk belief I adhered to in my youth. Yet I wish I knew where my Study Bible was buried in my storage unit back home because I can hear the rhythm of memorized verses in my head but I can't remember the words.

Christ.

Okay, Crazy. Did I say enough? Can I go back to bed now and actually sleep this time?

Murgh

Insomnia last night and an early AM morning shift are not helping with the creativity. So here is a picture of my studio shenanigans from yesterday. I found images on deviantArt, extended one to a full body image, gridded it out and transferred it to the back of a poster I ganked from work. No, I have no idea what I'm going to do with it yet. Color needs to be involved.

Kitty PSA

It is a well-known fact, for those who know it well, that those cats who choose to live with humans do so as their protectors. Cats do not make these decisions lightly, after all. Though the food is good and the comfort great, they must often sacrifice their claws and their chance for progeny in order to take on this sacred task. But in exchange, they are given the Sight. And with this blessing upon their senses, cats ward their humans against those hungry ghosts that seek the warm attentions of normal folk.

You see, in order to poke holes between this world and the next, these hungry ghosts need our focus and our belief. What little they have is hoarded jealously, and used in sparing amounts to stomp down the hall at night, lose a set of keys, shove furniture into better alignment for catching ankles and shins, and otherwise bring what attention they can to the mysterious unknown. The more belief and attention humans pay, the more the pesky ghosts can shove into this world. And a great many cats must gather to stop such a thing.

But prevention is the best strategy, so cats convince their humans that there are no ghosts. Thus when the door creaks or sways, the shutters rattle or flatware skids and makes a midnight clatter, humans are trained by the cats to assume the felines are making all the racket. Further, cats yowl and screech to scare the hungry ghosts away. And instead of being afraid, humans may roll over or fling a shoe, bemoaning that cat losing its damn mind, again.

So the next time your cat winds her way around your ankles and nips at you, give her a belly rub and watch out for replaced furniture. Your cat is just trying to help you out.

Just that Cat

The cat wrapped neatly around her extended arm and nibbled her fingertips. Irate at the midnight stack upon her person, she rolled and tossed the feline from his perch until she settled enough for him to drape over her back. In this position, he could better ward her from nightmares.

Vapor

One of the stranger qualities to my relocation to Las Vegas is the assumption that everything is going to go away. When visiting the strip especially, I often stop to marvel at the view and find myself desperate to capture it in memory or on camera, because it won't be there anymore. This of course is not based in reality at all, merely the learned habit that Las Vegas and everything it entailed was a temporary situation prior to my moving there from Ohio. And thus while on vacation, I had to cling to every moment with white-knuckled dread for fear of the time when I would lose it. Airport goodbyes became so traumatic that once I moved here, I refused to take Martin to McCarran when he had to fly to Reno overnight for work.

My evening commute from work allows for some of the more breathtaking views of Mount Charleston and the valley. Last night I watched as the clouds tangled with the mountaintops and stuck there like cotton balls. I found the urge to pull over and wrangle my camera phone into place to keep that image before it faded away. Even after nine months in Las Vegas, and feeling fairly established at that, the occasional burst of anxiety recurs. I don't want to lose this.

This morning I dreamed I was buying a house. I found a sprawling compound with doors that wouldn't shut, which caused worry over keeping my cats contained. Later in the dream, I “remembered” that I had two children with my ex, which sparked a dreamtime depression of a magnitude I don't think I've dreamed before. At the end, I found a great house, but was further upset that it was in Ohio and not Nevada.

I'm not sure if it is the New Year and preceding holidays sparking this surge of emotions and anxieties, or perhaps I've relegated the churning of emotions regarding my move to an unconscious level. Either way, a day does not go by without me admiring the mountains our home tucks against, or the sprawl of the golden valley at night, or the crazy denizens and happenings of Sin City.

New Years day, Martin and I went on a drive. And I, intoxicated from a hangover cure that involved more drinking, leaned back in the passenger seat and felt the hot sun on my face through the windshield, nodded to the stereo cranking indulgent rock and roll, and curled my hand over Martin's on the gear shift.

My resolution, so different from the year before, is to make 2011 the best one yet.