I find it hilarious when thoughtful people respond to hatemail.
Chris is priceless.

"I've poisoned your awful child! He'll be dead soon!" I liked to imagine their fictional reactions: "Oh my God, how can we thank you? Now we can buy things we like!"

Enjoy your weekend.

One thing I've hated lately:
Hearing adults use the word "mom" as an insult

One thing I hated and then liked:
The Corrections. I hated it at first because the characters had so much anxiety that I could identify with that just reading about them made my scalp feel too small. But then the characters, instead of just sitting there hating themselves, began to go out in the world, and the world stole their wallets and gave them back their childhood train sets and fed them some eggs and [spoiler deleted] and then they felt better.

Three things I've loved lately:
The way the air smells now. The way the angle of the sun is changing. Red leaves, even in this palm tree infested town.

Portrait of a chef as a young felon

Jackson: I can't wait 'til I'm a big kid so I can cross the street by myself.

Me: What else do big kids do?

Jackson: Play with knives!

Hair History though a work in progress, is up here.

I brought a dozen doughnuts to our job site CPR training. This is a teeny bit like passing around cough syrup at a N.A. meeting. You just don't offer bags full of colorful, artery-clogging goodness to people trying to learn how to save each other from heart attacks.

The second thing I learned was what to do if someone has a pencil sticking out of their eye.

1. Tear the lip off of a Styrofoam cup until the cup is about an inch tall

2. Punch a hole in the bottom of the cup

3. Position the cup over the person's eye so the pencil comes through the hole in the bottom of the cup

4. Wrap or tape the cup securely

5. And while you're at it, wrap or tape the other eye, because the eyes move together, and if you leave one eye unwrapped, every time someone says "Hey! Pokey!" the guy with the pencil in his eye will move his unwrapped eye to look, and you know how your eyes usually move together? The eye with the pencil in it will move, too.

6. *shudder*

7. Cup both your hands over your own (open) eyes and count to ten and listen to how strange your voice sounds

8. Sit there with your hands cupped over your eyes long after the instructor has moved on to another topic, and then remove them abruptly and look around to see if anyone noticed how you were stimming on the ambient noises of your cement-floored office

Also, if you get bit by a snake? Not just a little half-circle vegetarian snake jaw-print on your arm, but actual fang holes? Don't do that late-night TV western thing where you slice the skin above the wound and suck out the poison. Because then you'll have snake venom in your mouth. Where it will be absorbed into your system with breathtaking efficiency. And no tourniquets, unless you're one of those people who looks forward to an amputated limb. If you're not one of those people, just circle the bite marks and note the time with a ballpoint pen on your skin and call 9*1*1*.

Then save the ballpoint pen in case you need to give someone a tracheotomy.

We were watching Scooby Doo and Jackson asked me who I liked best. "I like Shaggy and Velma best," I said. "I like Daphne and Fred and Scooby best," said Jackson, which was great because it showed me he's beginning to define himself as an individual in our little family herd.

But nothing prepared us for the other night as Jack and Jackson were watching the Yankees game on TV. After Jack and I chanted a rousing chorus of "Let's! Go! Jorge!" a little voice from under a blanket called out "Let's go Red Sox!"

Did I tell you I've been passing gall stones? I didn't, did I. I'm not hiding things from you! I just didn't want you to worry.

Remember back in April I mentioned that I had this weird ache on my right side, like I wanted to lift up my ribs and massage my liver? So I went to the HMO and wondered aloud about gallstones and Dr. White Hair said, "Gall bladder! We can remove that. No problem." And I said, "What about those little pills that dissolve gallstones, so I can keep my gall bladder, even though it's just there storing bile, because I kind of like having a bile middleman between my liver and my stomach?" And Dr. Old-timey Paternalistic Chatter said, "No, that takes forever! And what if you pass a gallstone? That's very painful! You don't need your gall bladder. We'll just take it out." And he scheduled me for a sonogram.

Meanwhile, I had also gone to my acupuncturist, who looked at my tongue and found darkness! And stagnation! And gave me gallstone dissolving herbs and liver cleansing herbs, and told me that if I was going to drink I should only drink distilled alcohol, which was great because then I could tell everyone I was cleansing my liver with tequila.

But then I had to switch acupuncturists, due to health insurance, and I went to my new L.Ac. and she was like "Tequila? To help your liver? He told you that?" Then she told me to start eating lots of green apples and radishes. Sure, lady! Fruits and vegetables! That's a good one! If you'll excuse me, I have an appointment with Dr. Margarita Mix.

Anyway, she gave me more herbs to take*, and my $15 copay qualified me for one hour of tongue examination, pulse feeling, and gall bladder channel poking per week. Over time the pain reduced and reduced, and then it went away! And then it came back! And then one day I was all (squeamish readers please skip to the next paragraph) Hey! There's a cut on my butt! Like, inside my anus. Not normally being a bleeder from the ass, I put two and two together and said, Hey! Maybe I pooped out a gallstone and it cut my butt! But it was too late to go digging through my poo, and really, I've never been a poo-digger, like most people I prefer to hand off the poo-digging to trained professionals.

Meanwhile, I'd never *ahem* gone to my sonogram appointment, because I can put two and two together, Dr. Fatherly Advice! If you see a sonogram of my gall stones, then you will call me and tell me you need to operate! And then I'd have to shout "No! No!" at you and say "I'm taking herbs!" and hear you cackle with barely disguised disgust while I insist "The gallbladder's simple function may be hiding deeper mysteries that you cannot see with your disaster-based, nonpreventive, black-and-white Western medical training!" And also, being a pure coward, I didn't want to have to fight a doctor about keeping my gall bladder. So I never had the sonogram.

So I kind of don't know if I'm passing gall stones.

But if I'm to believe this, passing a gall stone is, like crucifixion, a doddle. But I need at least another week to screw up the nerve to drink a pint of olive oil and really flush that fucker out.

*God am I sick of taking herbs.

This piece of Flash animation is based on what happens every night when Jack comes home. Seriously.

No, I'm kidding.

No, actually I'm not.

Thanks, Anil

Some tombstones that might be appropriate for me:

1. I'm done talking about it, obviously (*rolls eyes*)
2. Shhh!
3. Moved to a new url; please update your bookmark

As Halloween approaches Jackson continues to beg us to take him to World of Magic, a costume store that opens up for a month before Halloween every year, to look at all the fake amputated hands and moaning mummies. I bought him a secondhand book about mummies (which he pronounces "mum-ME" for which reason we know not why) which is really fucking gnarly, but he seems okay with the frozen bog guy mummy, and the horrible screaming Incan sacrifice mummy (if you define "okay" as "waking up at night crying and shaking"). We've actually had a few talks about death -- killing a couple of goldfish helped illustrate the concept -- but he hasn't said a word about an afterlife, so, you know, whew. Because then it would be time for choices.

A Modern Child's Choice of Vaguely Christian Afterlife Scenarios

1. Everlasting darkness (like you're sleeping)
2. Some temporary darkness, followed by A Guy In A Beard assessing your entire life down to the teeniest decision you ever made, like when you stepped on all those ants!, followed by His judgement, followed by
a. an eternity of harp calluses, or
b. an eternity of futile requests for ice water
3. A long tunnel with light (and relatives, and perhaps pet GOLDFISH) at the end
4. (see below)

My concept of the afterlife was forever dented by a teenage reading of James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, a book-length poem detailing Merrill's ouija board conversations with a newly-dead W. H. Auden, which paints the uberwelt as a sort of vast bureaucracy running at breakneck speed, overseen by huge black bats. Believe me, it's very clique-y up there, with there being several competing versions of the Algonquin Round Table, apparently, and also a lot of talk about God-as-biology.*

It's preferable in some ways to what I gleaned after skimming the first chapter of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which describes the moments after dying as filled with an "intense restlessness," which doesn't sound that bad, but I bet once you're there you're like, Oh, shit, nobody told me! When they said intense restlessness they really meant INTENSE FUCKING INESCAPABLE ANXIETY THAT SHUDDERS WITHIN THE VERY MARROW OF YOUR BONES. But if you're a Tibetan monk and you've spent your life (or perhaps several lifetimes) preparing for (yet another) death, then you've got a leg up on me, Lhundup old boy.

Anyway, I'm not going to tell Jackson about that just yet, he has enough on his plate right now with us sticking knives into pumpkins and disgorging their brains and toasting them with salt.

*I never told you about how I stalked James Merrill, did I? How I read the book, then I read the book again, then I wrote him a letter, then he sent a nice postcard back!, then I went to a reading and got introduced to him, and that's when he saw that the look in my eye didn't say "charming budding poet," it said "insecure and CRAZY budding poet." Extra Crazy, because I moved into a rental about two blocks away from Merrill's house, in Stonington, CT, and then would stand on the sidewalk and stare up at his windows, and call his house, and get shouted at by his partner, David Jackson. *sigh* There are a lot of things I wish I could not do over again, and that's one of them.

Having a husband in the building trades has opened up new vistas in my vocabulary. It never ceases to charm me how a bunch of big, gruff, manly men can sit around and politely discuss the intimate details of some of my favorite little anachronisms, like a "powder room," and a "lavatory." I've learned that a Juliette balcony is exactly what you think it would be: a small, round balcony, often with a wrought-iron railing, overlooking a swooning youth in tights. And what is a story pole? It's a two-by-four, driven into the ground, whose height matches the projected height of the finished house so you can gauge how much of the view from other properties might be blocked by the new roof; it's a pole that tells a story!

The other thing I've learned about is the tonnage rule. This means that if you roll up to an intersection at the same time as an eighteen-wheeler loaded to the gills with lavatories and Juliette balconies, the person whose vehicle is most at the mercy of inertia gets to go first. Which means not you, you cute little Volkswagen with the daisy in your bud vase.

But I've also realized lately that I've long operated respecting the emotional tonnage rule as well. The emotional tonnage rule states that the person with the most urgent need gets to go first. Unfortunately, I am prone to allow some abuse of this rule, as I tend to defer to people who scream at me. Unless they're short. Then they're fucked.

Anyway, despite my attempts at taking control of our apartment's television technology through the magical TiVo, I keep getting crapped on by not one but TWO men, one big and one small, both of whom have figured out not only how to use the remote control but to lose it, and their urgent network needs continue to trump mine every time. It can seem fantastically necessary that we watch "Baby Looney Tunes" right now, yes, little Bug, but here comes a man with eighteen smoking wheels and god help you if you try to change the channel WHEN THE YANKEES ARE 1-1 IN THE PLAYOFFS.

Because why not ask health food store employees for medical advice?

Me: Excuse me?

Health Food Store Employee: Yes?

Me: This deodorant, it's vegetarian wild yam deodorant? And I was wondering what exactly wild yam would do for me.

HFSE: Well, women often use wild yam to naturally balance their hormones.

Me: Uh-huh?

HFSE: And if you're putting it here (lifts up arm, mimes applying deodorant in armpit) it's going to be delivered into your system very efficiently.

Me: And what's the dosage delivered, say, per wipe?

HFSE: No idea.

Me: And what if I'm not sure if I want to naturally balance my hormones?

HFSE: Then you probably don't want to buy vegetarian wild yam deodorant.

ME: That's too bad, because it smells really good.

I bought lavender vegetarian deodorant instead. Because I'm not afraid of its soothing and nourishing qualities.

We had two French teachers at my college: the one I had, who scared the shit out of us and made us recite medieval poetry; and the one I wanted, who was warm and encouraging and didn't give you the feeling she was going to slap your hand with a ruler if you mispronounced cueillez.

So once again my college alumni magazine dropped into the mailbox and I gave it the usual cursory flip-through, and then I got to the section where they do the deaths. There are always a few hold-outs, the Ednas and Berthas from the class of '25, and there are always a few shocks, people who graduated just a few years ago who died under mysterious circumstances. Hell, everybody died under mysterious circumstances, the alumni magazine obituaries are so maddeningly polite they never tell you how anyone went. I don't need details, I just want to know "cancer," "boating accident," "flesh-eating bacteria." It interests me.

And then I saw the in memoriam column for Alix and Pierre Deguise. In a stunning reversal of standard obituary policy, this one was filled with confusing details about the last hours of the wonderful French teacher I never had and her husband.

Alix Deguise, 79, had been taken to Lawrence & Memorial Hospital with a blood clot in her lungs. Pierre Deguise, 89, who accompanied her there, slipped and fell in the emergency room, breaking his hip. The two were placed in side-by-side beds, and Pierre Deguise, too, developed a blood clot in his lungs.

As the couple slipped in and out of consciousness, hospital staff made a plaster cast of their entwined hands. Pierre Deguise passed away in the darkest hour of the night, and a few hours later, Alix Deguise joined him.

Never mind the fact that the first time I read that I thought the hospital staff had built a cast around their entwined hands so that their hands were encased in some awful plaster lump hanging uncomfortably between their beds (on a second read-through I'm willing to accept that the staff just made some sort of "art" impression of their hands), and never mind that "darkest hour of the night" business. I don't have a whole lot of belief in "soul mates," mainly because I've met my soul mate a couple of times and three weeks later I realized he was just another alcoholic who's good in bed -- ahem -- but couples who develop the same sudden illness and die within hours of each other? That squeezes a drop of saline even from my withered heart.

When I see a guy who's over fifty and working retail in this town, I tend to assume that the man is an expert in his chosen field. When I go into the local Red Wing shoe store with Jack to buy work boots, and the salesman can sincerely talk us into a six-pack of twenty dollar socks because nothing else will do, I think he must be working on commission, because you, sir, are a Company Man. That or he owns the store outright. Why else would a man his age even be touching a cash register? You can't support a family on a retail salary around here.

The local Home Improvement Center -- which, bless its heart, hasn't gone under despite the no longer newish Home Depot ten miles up the road -- they must have a loyal customer base, because the store is full of old linoleum and the lumber yard is the size of a Sunset Do Your Own Grouting book, but it's always busy, being smack in the middle the building trades part of town. Another weird thing about Santa Barbara is that the industrial section of town is, like, three bocks from the beach. You have all this incredible oceanfront property filled with cute little hotels, and then directly behind Fess Parker's Fancy Hotel is this huge gravel pit, and twelve different auto body repair shops, and Smarden Hatcher plumbing supply, and etc. It must drive developers nuts to see busted-out pickup trucks being cannibalized for parts in a lot the size of New Jersey five blocks from the sparkly, sparkly water.

Anyway. The fifty- and sixty-something guys who work in the Home Improvement Center wear red vests and they don't have to ring anybody up, there are girls in cages for that. (Does that make it sound like they're doing pole dances, too? They're not.) These guys know everything about the entire store, but their jobs are specific to their departments. The guy who runs the paint can shaker thing would never dream of copying a key. Maybe because the guy who copies keys is a scary fuck who's worked there for 1,000,000 years and seethes with hatred behind his key grinding machine. Die, puny humans, die.

I don't know why, but I was thinking of these guys this morning as I made my decaf Peets that we get in a cheery little Peets store staffed with cute college kids who know all about coffee but are poised to move into jobs where they will never again be called upon to rinse out a garbage can with a hose. I was thinking of the old guy with the gold wedding band in the Red Wing store who sold Jack two pair of what at the time seemed wildly expensive boots. And then Jack went back in a couple of years later for another pair and found out the guy had died, and there was a new fity-something guy there who was just all-knowing as the last guy. I don't know. I guess it was the wedding band, and the retail job, and knowing the previous guy died of a heart attack on his day off from Red Wing shoes. We get defined by our choices. What was the path that brought him to the same strip mall where I was working, too? Would that be me in twenty years? Was he disappointed? Or was he grateful for the job, because he'd known much, much worse.