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.

Process

The problem is that I expect value in what I create and as such lock focus on my results. This sabotages efforts to get anything done. The art I've seen and the books I've read left indelible marks upon my life and I would not be where I am today without them. I expect what I create to fall into this category, wholly forgetting that I've seen a lot of silly things and read a lot of pulpy trash. For some reason, it isn't okay for me to make something experimental that doesn't look good, or write (save) any prose that isn't sparkling and valid. I spent my youth drawing in margins and filling notebooks with dreary poetry and indulgent fanfiction. Such unimportant meanderings are exactly why I am where I sit today. And yet, I judge myself, harshly, when I cannot produce noteworthy results.

What changed? Everything. I made a big decision and ripped myself away from my life and home and family and job and came to the desert to make a new me. I'm expecting important results from such an important change. Lackluster art and blemished prose is not acceptable. I should be reflecting the epic, dear! Why the hell am I just fiddling in the margins and turning in stories that start in the middle and don't entirely end?

I guess this is a goddamn process.

New year, new studio, new arty

While going about the last few days of celebrating the New Year (and working a few overnights at the bookstore) Martin and I took the opportunity to set up my studio. I bought a couch on Craigslist that is perfectly suited to the space and should hopefully serve as a comfort zone for myself or any visitors who come to share the studio time with me. I also rearranged and organized my supplies and assembled some pieces to interrupt the solid beige walls.


Eowyn immediately evaluated the couch for suitability.


Assembled art from Borders. I can't remember what the bookstand was advertising, but it was one in a series of angsty, supernatural romances from the teen section. I stuck leftover holiday logos all over it, along with two pictures of Sami and a hidden Batman plushy.


My first project was to reinforce a plastic cup to hold all my pens and miscellany. I melted off the bottom and stuck it in the leftover cup from a scented candle.


While working, I found the pressed Stargazer Lilies I stuck in a book and sketchpad from the old apartment.


They were exceedingly fragile, but looked amazing in the light.

I futzed around with my various supplies and wound up pressing the petals between pieces of tracing paper treated with diluted Modge Podge, let them dry, cut them out and then made a mobile.


However the sun chose a similar time to hide behind the clouds, which meant getting the sun blasted image of the petals was lost. I knotted the strings to make the ends shorter and avoid cat interest.

All in all, not the best results. The tracing paper warped due to too much water in the adhesive mixture, which resulted in air bubbles that were too dangerous to press out due to the delicate quality of the dried petals. Again, in the full desert sun, it looks great. We'll have to see how it improves as winter gives up for spring in a month or so.