Another fun thing about living in Southern California is that the ground is moving all the time. You don’t hear about it on the news, nobody runs out their front door screaming “Earthquake!”, you just get used to things happening like what happened to me about 30 seconds ago when my desk just swayed a little to the left, and then it swayed a little to the right, and for a second I thought it was me because I didn’t eat much for lunch and I’m still working on a Mountain Dew, and also there’s a guy here re-enameling our bathtub and even though most of the toxic fumes are being pumped outside maybe a little is sneaking in and making me dizzy? But it isn’t. It’s the Earth. It’s always moving.

I realize that I did not try hard enough in the previous entry. I had all sorts of opportunities to finagle some witty tangents out of “blow” and “goo” and “Krust” and I just didn’t make the effort. If I had made the effort, you know, to please someone who just tumbled onto this site without any previous love for the Boogermuffin and his swanky sweater collection, it would probably have ended up being all curse-filled and hard-bitten with veiled references to porn stars in a totally unnecessary effort to hook those busy blogsurfers who get turned off when they think they’ve found a site filled with baby updates and recipes for homemade play dough* so they don’t stick around for all my deep poetic insights and hoary reminiscences about my first pair of ice skates. So really, maybe it’s better that I cut it short and made some phone calls and took Jackson to watch me change my car insurance policy instead of finely crafting a blog entry to appeal to an imaginary 24-year-old cubicle-dwelling male who’s pretending to work, because I certainly don’t need one more asshole looking for kiddie porn to Google me up and then hit the bricks when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, resulting in another false hit on the old site stat meter. So if that’s what you came looking for, why not go make some play dough instead? Use some food coloring! It’ll take your sweaty little mind off things for a while.

*Homemade Play Dough

The secret ingredient here is cream of tartar. This recipe makes play dough that is not grainy like uncooked play dough and keeps for a long time.

4 cups flour

1 cup salt

4 cups water

4 tablespoons oil

1/2 cup cream of tartar

Mix all ingredients in a sauce pan. Cook and stir over low/medium heat until play dough is completely formed and no longer sticky. Allow to cool slightly before storing in an airtight container or zip lock bag.

Adding a package of unsweetened KoolAid will make it smell good, too. Enjoy!

Perhaps one good thing has come out of Jackson’s week-long snotfest: I finally taught him to “blow.” Sometimes, if I have a handkerchief, he even lets me wipe the goo off his face. If I’m driving, though, he’s on his own. Hence his new nickname, Krusty.

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And I’d like to say, thank God for Kegel exercises.

Another list — because paragraphs are for pussies.

1. My deodorant has “100% vegetarian ingredients.”

2. License plates I have known recently:

(a) IAN VAGN = normally I can coax some meaning out of even the most truncated platespeak, but this one has me stumped.

(b) IXLNJOY = how nice for you.

(c) OH2B49 = “Oh, to be 49″? This used to be on a Cadillac, now it’s on a Volkswagen Bug, so I assume the owner is regressing. Next it’ll be on a Big Wheel.

(d) IMIN2GI = “I’m into . . .” Gastrointestinal tracts? Galvanized iron? Your boyfriend’s in the army?

(e) MYCTPRS = I finally had to ask the plate owner on this one — it’s on a Mercury Cougar — can you guess? “My cat purrs.”

3. Jackson is “Jackson” to those outside the family unit, “The Nut” to those within the family unit, and either “Booger!” or “Muffin!” when addressed directly.

4. As soon as he realizes someone is in the bathroom taking a big nasty dump Jackson/Nut/Boogermuffin! runs on in, makes the sign for “toilet,” and as the offense is being flushed away he waves and says “bye-bye.” Sometimes he’ll blow a kiss. No one taught him to do this.

5. I always thought that if you had no more than three drinks a day you were not an alcoholic. This is a belief I clung to: three drinks no matter what — holidays, weddings, wakes, surviving a tornado — three drinks and into bed. Then Jack saw a TV show that said if you have two drinks a day you’re “at risk.” So pretty much everyone I know (except for the ones in AA, natch) is an alcoholic. Including you because, yes, Jello shots sucked out of your girlfriend’s belly button “count.”

Fun things to do while both you and your one-year-old are sick.

1. Pin him down while he flails around and try to wipe the snot from his nose with your shirt.

2. Lie on your back on the floor all afternoon while he runs in and out of the room, occasionally bringing you:

(a) a bar of soap with a bite taken out of it

(b) a dirty sock

(c) a can of lighter fluid

3. Invent new sign-language signs

(a) Turn on the Yankees game and get him to raise up his arms every time you say “Jorge!”

(b) Get ready for the upcoming basketball season with signs for various hoops slang like “put the seed in the hole!” (will no doubt be vaguely pornographic)

4. When he gets cranky in the grocery store, take him out of the cart and let him run around the feminine whosits aisle pulling all the “personal foam wash” products off the shelves. Then don’t put any of it back.

5. Go online while he naps and order a Michael Graves Beechwood Banana Hanger.

6. Give him a bunch of cold medicine so he conks out so you both can sleep, sleep, sleep.

Ah, the first day of Fall. Nothing like celebrating the new season with deathless poetry.

Leaf Whiz

by B. Henderson

the color

of the leaves

is like

fluorescent cheese.

the kind that squirts out of a can. pfffft.

On a campus that didn’t much care for poetry, my college had two poetry prizes. I won one sophomore year, and the other one senior year, which pretty much made me Big Poet On Campus. Every spring, five seniors from colleges and universities around the state were chosen for the Poetry Circuit, where you got to drive around and give readings of your poetry with the other BPOCs. It was very prestigious, and I made the penultimate cut, but in the end I wasn’t chosen for the tour. When I expressed my disappointment to my writing teacher, he told me something that I’ve never forgotten. He said,

“In writing, early success leads to early cronyism, leads to early intellectual death.”

When you’re twenty-one and so is Bret Easton Ellis and he’s famous and you’re not, that can give you some hope. But now I’m thirty-eight and so is Bret Easton Ellis and he’s still doing okay and I’m blogging, and it makes me wonder: Is this it? I gave up on poetry when I got to the point where I was only writing sonnets and could only think in pentameter; I gave up on fiction because I didn’t have the attention span to write a coherent, necessary short story, much less a whole novel.

Way back on November 23, 1985 I wrote in my diary, “Maybe this is all I’ll ever write — journal entries.”

Maybe I was right.

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

I come, my sweet,

to sing to you!

My heart rouses

thinking to bring you news

of something

that concerns you

and concerns many men. Look at

what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in

despised poems.

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams

First of all, this beautiful artificial food [via Mimi S.] reminds me of the time I ordered a fake hamburger, fake fries, and a fake lump of green peas, as well as four slices of fake Swiss cheese, from the Archie McPhee catalog. When it arrived I arranged it all on a plate and put into the refridgerator. A month or so later, when it was starting to look good and weird, my then-boyfriend came home late and loaded with his biker guy best friend from high school. Boyfriend came to bed, Biker Guy made himself comfortable on the couch, but before he passed out I guess he needed a snack, so he got up and opened the fridge. “Mmmm, cheese,” I heard Biker Guy say. Then silence. Then, “Mmmm, fake.”

Last night I was reminded once again that despite my best intentions, political discussions make my eyes glaze over like two yummy little doughnut holes. I never feel like I know enough when it comes to politics; I can discuss aesthetics with you until your tongue swells up, because no matter how ignorant I may be about Cubism or Pina Bausch or whatever the hell, I am confident in my taste and opinions. Not that they’re “right” by any means, but if we’re talking about art or poetry or dance we can all find something we like or dislike about a work and take it from there. Unfortunately, it’s hard to be taken seriously if you approach the nuking of Iraq from an aesthetic point of view.

So last night as I was trying to rustle the Nut back into the apartment for his dinner, two pierced-face intellectual chicks representing California Peace Action stopped me on the sidewalk to frisk my brain, looking to see where I stood on the latest Bush foreign policy outrages. They went on quite spiritedly and fact-filledly about jobs at the local Air Force base and Republicans this and Democrats that, and as my brain turned into Bavarian creme I finally just looked at them, weary guilty political Bush-loser apathy filling my heart, my one-year-old son heading straight for a fresh pile of dog shit on the lawn, and I said, “I am only processing about one-fourth of what you’re saying, so let’s make it quick. What do you want me to do?” They wanted me to talk to people, to organize!, to join their club, to make phone calls. Nope and nope, I said, thinking, (a) The last time this happened I finally had to give the guy a check to make him leave, (b) They are half my age and twice as smart as me, and (c) Please, God, make them give up and leave. “We take credit cards,” chirped the tall curly brunette — the weaker of the two — who was quickly silenced by a withering glance. The shorter sweeter bleached sharpie surf babe hurriedly offered me the option of letterwriting. I agreed to that, so she handed me a boilerplate and the addresses of my rep and senators. “It’s done,” I said, free at last, practically running away with the Nut under one arm like a squirming sack of gerbils. The letters were actually quite simple, just asking that our Women in Washington (Capps, Feinstein, and Boxer) vocally oppose bombing Iraq, and it only took me about ten minutes to write them, which I did gladly while ravioli and strawberries splattered all around me (I have excellent powers of concentration). But Jesus Fuck, it felt like the time I spent half an hour at the door with two Jehovah’s Witnesses telling me how the Jews ate their babies: two against one, overwhelmed and helpless in the face of facts and agendas.

Well, it was nothing an hour of The Sopranos couldn’t fix.

The moral of today’s story: Give me brochures or give me death.

Speaking of movies that I once hated but now really like because Jack made me watch them over and over again . . . I don’t know if it’s one of those codependent relationship things where my tastes and beliefs are slowly being replaced by my partner’s, or if it’s healthy and normal and shows my flexibility and openmindedness, but there are quite a few movies that I used to think sucked but now I like them a lot because my bossy husband buys them and plays them whether I want him to or not. So I thought this might bear further examination in a public forum, where strangers can judge my inability to form a coherent, stable personality and/or world view.

So here we go!

Lawrence of Arabia
Used to hate it because: Dated style of filmmaking; too much scenery chewing; Anthony Quinn’s prosthetic nose
Now love it because: David Lean’s genius never goes out of style; overacting can be embraced for its campy hypermasculinity; Anthony Quinn flourishing his robes and shouting “I have nothing! Why? Because I am a river to my people!”

Blazing Saddles
Used to hate it because: It was stupid
Now love it because: Richard Pryor co-wrote the script with Mel Brooks; Madeleine Kahn doing Marlene Dietrich in a garter belt, stockings, and a feather boa, singing “I’m Tired” (“I’ve been with thousands of men / again and again / they promise the moon . . . / They’re always coming and going / and going and coming / and always too soon”) in front of a male chorus dressed as World War I German infantrymen; Cleavon Little dressed in a Klan robe saying, “Where the white women at?”

Out of Africa
Used to hate it because: Robert Redford can’t act his way out of a paper bag; Klaus Maria Brandauer plays twins
Now love it because: The story is magic; Meryl Streep is a brilliant bitch; Klaus Maria Brandauer is a sexy rogue times two; Jack and I both cry when the lions lie down on the hill at the end, every time

The Last Waltz
Used to hate it because: Who gives a shit about these hippies? Fell asleep in the theater when it came out
Now love it because: Robbie Robertson is a total babe; I’m now older than everyone in the film, so I can be amazed at the beauty of their talent and sacrifices and the drug habits that most of them overcame; The Band fucking invented that country rock thing; oh yeah, Martin Scorsese directed

Anything with Paul Newman or Steve McQueen
Used to hate them because: Newman = boring; McQueen = married Ali McGraw, then had her serve him and his girlfriend breakfast in bed
Now love them because: Newman = The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy, The Sting, Slap Shot, The Verdict; Steve McQueen = she didn’t have to do it, did she? Plus: The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, Le Mans, Papillon

Still on the fence about: Burt Lancaster = Creepy genius, or big fat closeted fake? You make the call.

Movies I will never love, despite my husband’s clever brainwashing tactics:

1. The Unforgiven (despite Richard Harris’s clever turn as the Duck of Death, and my eternal love for Gene Hackman)
2. Bird (Charlie Parker played sax without moving anything but his fingers and his eyes; Forrest Whitaker plays Charlie Parker playing sax like a man with spiders in his hair)
3. The Professionals (yeah, yeah, cowboys having shootouts in echo-y canyons — what else is new)
4. There are more but I don’t have time to go digging through the tapes right now

Conclusion: Are you still reading? Guess what? There is no conclusion, I could go on all night about this, but if I don’t want to see my site stats plummet to one visitor per week I need to exercize a little restraint. You’re welcome.