More observations to fascinate you

1. It was raining a lot recently, and apart from the usual assortment of impromptu rain gear on the street — Hefty bag jackets, dry cleaner bag space helmets — I also saw a woman walking around wearing a shower cap.

2. Then it was unseasonably warm all of a sudden and everyone’s deodorant failed all at once. A trip to Fancy Ralph’s was like walking through a locker room for the visiting hobo team.

3. And NOW, TODAY, it seems to be patcholi season. Like, everyone got the same idea that their deodorant wasn’t going to pull through, so let’s all just smell as nasty as possible anyway and turn our little burg into hippie hug central.

4. Or maybe I’m just having a series of olfactory hallucinations. My whole kitchen smells like masa, that corn paste you make tamales out of. It’s a good smell, but still: whence the masa? Jack made a stunning rack of lamb with white beans last night, and we finally drank his birthday champagne a month late, because I gave in to the sweet, sweet call of booze again. And I guess the lamb had a little cornmeal on top, but not enough to account for a smell that actually preceeded the use of the material that causes it by a full month.

5. Once I lived in an apartment that was haunted. For example, one time I left some change on the table and when I turned my back it swept itself onto the floor. Another time my then-boyfriend was brushing his teeth, and then he came into the bedroom and said, “That was such a nice hug you gave me!” And I said, “What hug, I’ve been reading in bed for an hour,” and he said, “No, I was brushing my teeth, and you came up from behind and hugged me and I said Mmmmmm.” That was also the apartment with the fake cheese in the refridgerator. So even though it seemed like a nice haunting I wanted it to stop, and one day I just sat at the table and closed my eyes and gave the ghost a little speech in my head that went something like, “Hey, you seem really nice, but I have to ask you to go now because I’m a little freaked out. It’s nothing personal, but I need you to move on.” And I guess it did because no other unexplainable things ever happened there. Apart from that relationship, ha ha.

Making good on my threat to turn this into a knitting blog:

Three years in the making. Three years because I’d abandon it for months at a time, especially hot months wherein the ugly prospect of spending an afternoon with a batch of hot wool on my knees forced me to nudge my completion date from one Christmas to the next, until I finally got the armpits sewed up a week after this last Valentine’s Day (i.e., Monday).

The pattern was adapted from the seamless fair isle instructions in the remarkably good-natured Knitting Without Tears by the late, great Elizabeth Zimmerman. Here she is in chapter six, which is entirely devoted to the proper way to wash a sweater:

When far from home and wash-machine I have been known to sally into the out-of-doors with my dripping sweater in a salad basket, landing net, or pillowcase, and swing it round my head in an apparently lunatic fashion, to extract the water by centrifugal action, ending up by rolling it in several towels and even more loonily jumping on it. Anything to get rid of as much moisture as humanly possible, short of putting it in the drier. There is nothing more disheartening for a sweater than to lie in a sodden heap for any length of time. It can bring wicked thoughts of shrinking into its wolly little mind, as well as the idea of letting its colors run, just to spite you.

I actually learned the sweater washing technique that I still use today twenty years ago from Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles:

He washed his red shirt in the sink. Laid a motel towel on the floor. Laid the shirt on the towel. As he smoothed the sleeves and crossed them on the belly of the shirt he thought of his own death. Of how they might cross his arms just like the sleeves on his own dead belly. He laid a second towel on top of the red shirt so the shirt was sandwiched then walked on top of the towel with his bare feet, making tight mincing steps, squeezing the water out. This was something he’d picked up from his mother. He’d seen her do this with her own bare feet on top of blue fuzzy sweaters with small synthetic shells for buttons. He’d seen her toes curl. Watched water squish out faintly bluer than water. Bleeding from dye. He thought of her feet and pictured them so vividly that his whole mother appeared before him.

I’ll teach this to Jackson one day, so that every time he washes a sweater I’ll rise up in the shape of a wet towel and give him a big kiss. Although, I’ve heard that the dead have to marshal an enormous amount of energy to visit the living. I learned that from an afternoon sick on the couch watching Crossing Over.

The other night Jack rented Shaun of the Dead. And since we’re bad with the rentals and keeping them too long and my wallet just hemorrhages late fees (please don’t tell me about Netflix: I know), it had been hanging around the house for awhile, stinking the place up, as it were, waiting for a time when Jackson either wasn’t around or was asleep at the same time that we were awake, which turned out to be precisely never. So after letting it sit on the table for four days Jack just finally stuck it in the DVD player at dinnertime one night and we decided to see how scary it might be and therefore how much of it we could watch with a little kid around.

Here’s an opportunity to tell you about what a lax disciplinarian I can be when it suits me. And it usually suits me, oh, around dinner time. Because I like to eat my dinner, and Jack likes to eat his, especially when he’s spent upwards of thirty minutes putting together some typically spectacular and occasionally vertical meal. So when Jackson wanders away from his half-eaten dinner-compromise of macaroni-and-cheese and sliced apples to go play with his bat cave or watch Popeye in the bedroom, we got into what turns out to be the bad habit of not stopping him, and pretending, for ten or fifteen minutes, that we are two adults alone in an apartment sharing a meal and speaking in paragraphs.

But it turns out that every time he goes over to play at the neighbors’ and they invite him to stay for dinner, he thinks it’s perfectly normal to throw his napkin on the floor and run off to play before he’s finished his milk. This habit is being systematically beaten out of him by the kids next door, ages 10, 11, and 12, and their mother, the part-time elementary school lunch lady.

So Jack puts in the movie and Jackson says, “What’s this about?” And I say, “zombies.” And Jackson’s all, “Zombies! I love zombies! I like it when the gun shoots their heads and they go ptchew!” Lax area of discipline #2: when I take Jackson to the pool hall, I let him play the game where you try to shoot attacking zombies in the head. You know, the video machine with the two guns attached to it with metal pay-phone cords. Ptchew! Ptchew! Ptchew!

Now, what’s interesting about watching a zombie movie with a little kid, even a kid who’s familiar with the genre after watching several episodes of Scooby Doo, is that the conventions of horror movies, and especially comic send-up horror movies, will suck in this small child in exactly the way we grownups are too jaded to be sucked in anymore. So you see the silhouette behind the shower curtain and you, the grownup, go, “Ha, ha, there’s a guy in the shower, what twist on Psycho are we going to get this time?” But the little kid unfamiliar with horror movie conventions goes, “NO! NO! DON’T LOOK IN THE SHOWER! AAAAAAAAHHHH! TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF! IT’S TOO SCARY!” while his parents dive for the remote.

So we got as far as the roommate-in-the-shower scene in Shaun of the Dead and then we turned it off and watched a nature show and the next day I returned it to the video store. We’ll try again when Jackson’s, like, eight. It’s only five years. So don’t tell me how the movie ends. Even though I could probably kind of figure it out.

This morning I went to the dentist’s office.

I went up to reception and said, “Hi! I have a 10:30 cleaning.” The woman looked at her schedule, and then she looked at her computer, and then she looked at me. “You’re not on my list.”

“I have the reminder you mailed me right in here,” I said, digging in my backpack. (I’m between purses right now.) “Here it is!” I read the postcard. “Did you know there’s a Thursday the 17th in March, too?” I asked.

“See you next month,” she said.

About a month ago I started bugging Jack: “Let’s go to the Grammys.” All he had to do was make a phone call. Jack’s stepmom’s sister’s husband, Pierre, has produced the Grammys since the war of 1812, but this was his last year doing it. He had always offered to get us tickets, so I thought we should take him up on it, this being our last chance to do so. Plus, who doesn’t love award ceremonies? No one! America loves award ceremonies or there wouldn’t be so goddamned many of them.

Me; “Let’s go to the Grammys!”

Jack: “Why the fuck would we want to do that?”

Jack sort of never got around to dropping a dime, and then last night his stepmom called to say hello and she’s watching the Grammys in her condo in Connecticut and I’m like,”Huh? They’re tonight? I told Jack we should have gone!” That was kind of mean of me, ratting him out like that, because she went on for five minutes about how Pierre would have LOVED! to give us tickets if we’d only ASKED!, implying rather strongly that Jack was inexplicably retarded for letting this one last opportunity slide. And then she went on, “But the ceremony isn’t all that; plus, you have to be in your seat two hours in advance. What you really want to do is go to the parties.”

Me (covering phone and hissing at Jack): “Parties. Grammy parties. We could have gone to Grammy parties.“

Later Jack kindly reminded me that Friday night I was barfing, Saturday I slept all day, and now, Sunday, I ended up watching all of twenty minutes of the Grammys on TV before wandering off to floss my teeth. I had no interest in watching Gwen and Eve totter around on the balls of their feet dressed like pirates.

So, whatever. I didn’t go to the Grammys. I didn’t watch the Grammys. I went to bed and listened to my tummy rumble with uncontrollable gas instead.

Here are some people looking at jellyfish at the Monterey Aquarium.

Day Nine of Not Drinking

I was going to treat you to a roundup of my favorite nonalcoholic beers, but I decided not to because they all kind of suck. The one made by Guinness is probably the best. Also, that link is great for a couple of reasons, one of which is it’s like the Wine Advocate! For beer! Secondly, I like some of the screen names, “Drunk McDermott” being my favorite at the moment. And lastly, what in hell is a “cracker-schpoonk burp”?

Anyway, I’m busy trying to cook up a book proposal this week, but if you feel inclined to stick around you might enjoy a short trip in the way back machine.