Torn Red Ribbon
January 24, 2009
I tore open the holiday gift basket (you know, the kind with assorted cheap toiletries from a drug store) in the usual manner. Using my teeth, a kitchen knife, all ten fingernails, I just wanted to rip into the thing for a bar of soap. I happened to be out of soap. Otherwise, I might never have opened it. I actually couldn’t believe it was still on my dresser, a month after Christmas, acting as a dust catcher. I didn’t throw it away, like I usually do with stuff that I almost want, but don’t. My life, after years of mindless shopping, was full of stuff. Stuff that I almost wanted, but didn’t. Stuff that I now could never throw away due to the recession my mother had warned me about when still alive and, must to my disgust, recycling her tea bags.
I thought about my mother and her coupon addiction as I jabbed a fork through the pink cellophane wrapping. I dug down for the soap, which was wrapped, like the basket, in a red ribbon with curly yellow tassels on the end. I pulled off the ribbon, grabbed the soap and was about to push all the wrapping into the wastebasket, but didn’t. I considered the red ribbon. It was cheap and filmy, slightly frayed where my teeth had hooked it. I saw a ribbon that might cost, new, about $3.50. My mother had always been right. I’d been wasteful in the past, ignoring the value of a dollar let alone a piece of ribbon.
I decided to save the ribbon, but where? Where, exactly, do you stash a used, torn ribbon so that you’ll find it in a few years, when you need a ribbon? We haven’t cared, have we? We could easily buy all the ribbon we needed, at CVS, 24 hours a day, in every city and town in the United States. The ribbon sat there on the shelves, all year, beautiful and neglected and begging to be bought and used. Most of the time we walk by ribbon on the way to the toothpaste or toilet paper. We know it’s there whenever we need it. We don’t panic about ribbon.
After years of throwing away stuff from abandoned apartments, stuff that I couldn’t bear moving again- to a new state, country, job, boyfriend, wherever I was headed – stuff that went into a big black garbage bag; torn, broken, tired, shrunken, ripped, or perfectly good stuff that I was sick of, I was at a loss. What to do with the ribbon? The world moved fast, and if I was going to keep up, I couldn’t drag around shoeboxes of string, wire, ribbon, rubber bands. Or could I? I tied the ribbon around a flower vase.
I will save ribbon from this day forward. I can feel it. Every object in my life has been imbued with a new value. In years to come, I will never look at a ribbon or any object the same way again, money or no money. Value has attached itself to everything I own, no matter its condition. Tonight, I almost swept a stray pitted olive, left out overnight, in the garbage disposal. I washed it off and popped it in my mouth. It tasted better than ever.
The Special Gift of Recession
January 24, 2009
You’ve heard the phrase, “nobody knows you when you’re down and out” and although the opposite is also true “nobody likes you when you’re up and rich” – this recession offers you the opportunity to collect critical date on friends, family, acquaintances and business associates. Yes, you can finally find out who your friends are. Read more
The Stinking Smell of Money
January 22, 2009
It was all a joke to me, the candle-lit orgies in the mauve bedrooms, the sloppy Jacuzzi sex, cocaine on the veranda, blow-jobs by the fireplace. The parties in mansions as intimate as sports arenas, Child-like grown-ups on make believe play-dates, rolling on porno-perfect satin sheets, laughing into mink-lined pillows, squirting aromatherapy massages oils, buzzing with the latest whatz-it’s from Sharper Image. On the side tables, plates of raw oysters, cold salmon and capers, grapes strewn around wilting flower garnishes. Read more
My Little Life
January 18, 2009
I have a little life. Nothing spectacular, nothing worthy of comment. Just a life that began in 1952 and will end before 2035. Read more
The Face I Can’t Say No To
January 18, 2009
This is the face that keeps me busy twenty four hours a day. Howard. Howard is a lemon. Howard has some issue at all times. Read more
Trapped on FACEBOOK
January 15, 2009
Sub-zero temperatures encourage me to stay indoors and write? no, read? no, clean? no, use my cell minutes? no. I check my Facebook page and feel an overwhelming desire to communicate with my so called 156 “friends” – communicate my loathing for myself and Facebook, them, the weather, the world, modern civilization. If I can wean myself from TV, chocolates, sex and expensive face creams, why can’t I extract myself from Facebook? Read more
Irish Whiskey Stew — Secret Recipe Revealed!
January 15, 2009
20 potatoes, 10 onions, 4 garlic cloves, 2 cups whiskey, 1 cup white wine, 1/2 cup brandy, 1 cup vegetable broth, 2 cups milk, 4 beets with greens, 5 kielbasa, 4 leeks, 10 carrots, random spices, olive oil. Sautee beets, onions, kielbasa, leeks, garlic, carrots in the olive oil for fifteen minutes, splash in white wine and brandy, simmer another fifteen minutes, throw in diced potatoes and whiskey, bring to a boil then simmer for one hour. Salt, pepper, onion salt, MSG, to taste. Pour in milk, reheat. serve with french bread and a salad. serves 15 during sub-zero temperatures.
Sociopathic Birth
January 11, 2009
Do you ever feel like you’re going nuts? And then you tell yourself, well, everybody is nuts, and you mention your fear to anybody and they’ll force a laugh and say, well, every body is crazy, ha ha ha. You make comparisons and you come out ahead. You aren’t in jail, or in a mental hospital. Two pluses right there. But still.
I’ve felt slightly crazy, if slightly is a possibility with crazy, since I was a young man, so horny that I considered raping my sister, but of course I didn’t. The gap between thinking something and doing it is wide, a long swim, fraught with what if’s, and those what if’s are internal cops. We don’t want to get a ticket.
So I was a young man and didn’t conform and turned into an older man who still doesn’t conform but goes to work everyday, although I cheat the IRS and I hope to fuck they don’t catch me. If they do, I am going to plead insanity. I was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1974 at the University of Vermont, so I know I am on a list, and that list consists of other subversives such as crazy people who cannot be controlled. We’re all being watched, but there is one loophole: being looped. The mentally ill in our country have more freedom than the rest of us. They can murder and eat children and if they can prove that they’re nuts, they get life imprisonment and three meals a day, maybe a couple of butt fucks, but hey, better than no fucks, right?
I don’t mean to be obnoxious, although that seems to be the hip mentality now. Loud, boisterous or, there is another choice, monk-like, soft-spoken, in-touch, superiorly enlightened, not of this world. Maybe I’d rather be obnoxious.
I work for myself, so I can be obnoxious at work. I live alone, rent a room with some younger folks, so I can be obnoxious at home in my own room. I am free, or so I thought, until I began to feel that I was going nuts.
There really are men in white suits. Standing by. You are not being paranoid.
I have always been well-liked, popular, with the ladies as well as my buddies. Even at my age, 55, I am still handsome if I wear a loose fitting shirt to cover my gut. I also wear baggy pants because my father always made fun of my thick legs, and my hook nose. “Where did you get that God damned ugly nose? And those legs, like water pipes, and for Christs sake, you aren’t wearing any underwear and your balls are hanging out. We’re sitting in the living room, with guests, and your balls are hanging out!”
Nobody wore underwear in high school that I know of. My friends didn’t’. It was 1972, we were seniors, cutting down billboards in Vermont, just after they passed a law banning billboards. Of course, there were a lot of billboards grandfathered into the landscape and we didn’t like them. By we I mean, my ecologically organic buddies and me. We were town hippies. We couldn’t go up into the mountains like the kids with trust funds, and dance around naked and grow pot, we had to stay at home and then go to a state college, and then end up like I have, sitting in front of a computer, word processing other people’s books and lectures.
It was a time of no underwear and short shorts. Thick socks and hiking boots. Long hair. A wisp of fuzz beneath our noses. Sawing down the enormous billboards and storing them in my parent’s basement. The law was as such: If a billboard fell down, or was removed, it could not be repaired or replaced.
Did I think I was nuts, then? Probably, but I had supportive friends who kept me busy. I didn’t have time to think about it. But when you grow up and start a grown up life, everybody else that you are friends with REALLY grow up and get good jobs and build houses and have wives and children and gardens and problems. Adult problems. One child is born without any hands, the wife gets breast cancer, there’s a fire. I don’t have a wife or children and I don’t own a building that can catch fire, so I feel like I’m ahead of the game. Wouldn’t Oprah be appalled? So politically incorrect to say I am better off without a family or a house. The American Dream! Well, I have credit cards. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that make me a member of the American team, and I play soccer with the boys and I play drums on weekends with a local band. Yeah, I have a grey ponytail, so what? Go fuck yourself.
You see, it’s like this. I am a man. I am 55 years old. I live in the United States of America. I have a place to sleep, a job, food, friends, tickets to rock concerts. I am one of the lucky ones. Then why do I feel like killing someone?
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Dumb- Ster
The cop looked in the dumpster and noticed a picture of his wife. He had just received a complaint from the Olympic Sports store that someone had dumped bags of garbage in their dumpster. That someone was me. I’d cleaned out a few drawers of hometown memories that morning, – high school notebooks, graduation pictures, diplomas, clippings and headed into what I thought was a free-for-all dumpster tucked behind a strip mall. After I threw the bags into the dumpster I took a walk with the dog and when I returned to my car I was met by the policeman and the assistant manager of the Olympic Sports store. Read more »