Category Archives: Photos

Maybe you’re thinking: You let a dog that ugly sleep in your bed? Internet, if your big brown eyes were that deep I would let you sleep in my bed, because I’d dig that horrendous underbite and your tongue so long it fell out your mouth half the time. I would feed you the best kibble, baby. And even though I’d make you spend most of the night in your cage because you’re still a puppy and I don’t want to roll out of bed and put my foot in a steaming pile of dog poo, in the morning I’d let you jump into bed with me. Well, not with me, but with my son.

I think I’m going to have to hand in my mommy blogger crime fighting badge and secret decoder ring: Jackson’s fourth birthday passed last week without a post about it. Does that mean his babyhood is over and I can have my mind back now?

Jackson’s made a lot of friends in our new neighborhood. We live in a cul de sac, near a grassy playground that we can see from our windows, so he just runs down the stairs and shouts I’ll be in by eleven! and I can keep an eye on his ass and read blogs at the same time. Or else he’ll drag all the kids in here and start handing out weapons. I always say yes. I want him to know our house is always open to his friends. Except when they’re covered in paint. Then they have to take it outside.

Can you see that I’ve let him go out in his pajama top, what appear to be green leggings, and clogs?

I’ve been experiencing kind of a letdown after all this change. For the last couple of weeks I’ve just been kind of sad for no real reason, and touchy, and bored, and I don’t feel like posting photos of the places where the new carpet is curling up. I can’t squeeze any entertainment out of our need for additional dryer vents. What interests me right now is hanging family photos on the wall and finding something to read.

All my books are packed up in boxes in the garage, and every time I open a box I tell myself I’m going to read whatever I find on top, but inevitably it’s something odd like an illustrated history of ancient medicine or a coverless paperback about Richard Nixon. And I still owe you a post about our closet doors, because that’s been a real adventure! A post about the fact that Jack has so many more clothes and shoes than I do that I finally just let him take over the whole master bedroom closet.

Just to refresh your memory, when we bought the place it had two mirrored doors, right?

And then California Closets came and put in lots of shelves.

And then the new closet doors arrived. Jack ordered three smaller sliding doors instead of two large sliding doors, because, well, I don’t know why — because his aesthetic demanded it, by god.

But guess what? With three sliding doors, the drawers in the closet couldn’t open! So we had to eat the doors, basically, in a manner of speaking which I’m sure you understand, Internet, and order two new big-old-size closet doors from the wonderful, wonderful Glendale Mills (you know what? They’re really wonderful), and one Sunday afternoon while Jack was in Belgium a big, strong, friendly man delivered two massive closet doors that had been fabricated out of four smaller doors that were originally destined for a bomb shelter. Seriously, these doors must have lead cores, they weigh about 900 pounds each. Lance came over and tried to slide them open and he was all, Has the World’s Strongest Man contest heard about these? Because they should add opening your closet as an event next year. As I do own a television and have been known to be interested in watching men pull freight cars with their teeth, I quickly grasped this turn in the conversation. So, yes, if you want to train for being able to carry a Volkswagen fifty feet, running, you can warm up by trying to open Jack’s closet.

Here’s another picture of the dog.

Can you see where the eye on the left has black eyelashes, and the one on the right (your right) has white eyelashes? That’s all I’ve got left today, Internet, mismatched dog eyelashes.

When I was packing everything for the big move I ended up with one pile of stuff that I didn’t really want to pack but was sort of afraid not to — because we had history, this stuff and I. One morning as I dropped Jackson off I was telling another mom, Lorraine, about how I felt as though packing this stuff would be like strapping a bunch of tombstones to my back, and she gave me a great suggestion for getting rid of something to which your attachment is primarily sentimental. “Take a picture of the thing you want to give away but can’t,” she said, “and then give it [the thing, not the picture] to someone who’ll appreciate it.”

Well, “someone” mostly turned out to be the Salvation Army. But here are a few of the pictures.

I remember my mom shopping for this at a woman’s store on South Broadway in Denver, sometime in the seventies when she’d lost a bunch of weight and was rewarding herself with some new outfits. I snagged it from her closet about twenty years ago and I think I wore it once to a party with some black pegged jeans. I love the garish colors and the gold thread, but it also hung on me like a burlap sack, so into the Sally bag it went. But still, I think half the reason I kept it was for the label:

Think young
Bobbie June

Is Bobbie June still around, urging women to think young? When I Google “Bobbie June” I get a lot of obituaries, so maybe not.

A souvenir of the Las Vegas airport. There’s something about spending time in Vegas that makes you think wearing a hat like this is a good idea.

Jack’s going to kill me when he finds out I gave my leather pants away, but I’m too old for these, people. The last time I wore them was to an Eddie Izzard show in L.A., the summer before I got pregnant with Jackson. They still fit, but I’m a mom now, for chrissake.

I got this sweatshirt at Forrest Yoga down in Santa Monica after we’d done a photo shoot with Ana Forrest for the goddamn magazine I used to work for. Can you see what she’s doing? She’s balancing on her hands with her legs in splits. It’s one of her signature poses. We photographed her doing it, which meant she had to hold it for a couple of minutes while we dealt with our puny logistics. At one point I had to adjust the crotch of her leotard very carefully because some pubic hair was bushing out. Boy, she didn’t flinch.

A grey cardigan my mom knit for me. I loved this sweater and I wore it to death. It’s a fair isle, but instead of using contrasting colors for the yoke she just varied her stitches. Fantastic work, mom, but this thing was so full of holes it was pretty much unfixable.

Pregnancy jeans! I wore this pair of 40-waist Levi’s for my entire pregnancy. I was lucky to have been working in an office where shorts and flip flops were de rigeur. I think I spent about $50.00 on pregnancy clothes: two pairs of giant Levi’s and a bunch of big-belly shirts from Target.

One day I was digging through a sale basket at a lingerie store in the East Village that I used to like when I came across these boxer shorts. I had to buy them because they were designed by a woman I dated for about a week in college. I used them to sleep in when I had my period. Finally, the elastic lost all its stretch and they ended up in a wad in the back of my closet, but I always loved those two shades of blue fabric.

Another find from my mom’s closet, this time a negligee. This must be fifty years old. Scratchy.

Here’s my old neighbor Lance accepting an ancient Wilson T-2000 tennis racquet. Lance is a tennis pro and he collects old racquets. My dad won this one in a sales contest back around 1976 and gave it to me after my wooden racquet broke in the middle of a match against a girl in the fourteen-and-under age bracket (I was in the twelve-and-under). I knew I was going to lose, so after my racket snapped returning one of her serves and I had to borrow a replacement to finish the match, I started pretending that my wrist was really sore and rubbing it between (losing) points, the implication being: (1) Quit hitting the ball so hard, I’m injured; (2) Look, everyone! I’m injured! So don’t expect me to win this thing; (3) My coach is an asshole for making me play a bigger, stronger kid who has INJURED ME.

My best friend in high school, Tamara, gave me this sweater; her grandmother had knitted it for her dad, whose name was Skip. I could write 2,000 words on Skip alone, but here are a few facts: he went to Williams and was Donald Hollinger‘s roommate. He taught law at CU Boulder, and he represented the ACLU in their fight to get the Christmas decorations off the lawn of the Denver City Hall. (“There needs to be a clear division betwen church and state!” I remember Tamara shouting once at dinner at her house. Since our family didn’t really talk at dinner, Tamara’s house was high drama for me.) Once when we came in from school Skip was making pot brownies in the kitchen, but he wouldn’t let us have any. Sometimes when I spent the night we’d wake up to Skip playing bongos in the basement and singing along with Stevie Wonder records. Skip wore love beads. I once went on a beach vacation with Tamara’s family and got sun poisoning. The night before we left I drank a pina colada from a slushy machine and danced with Skip on the beach. He came up to about my collarbone. He had a blurry little tattoo of St. Anthony’s crutch on his shoulder, and after he died Tamara told me he’d always wan
ted to turn it into an apple tree. When I heard that, I realized that was the tattoo I wanted to get (as some of you know, my first name isn’t “Mrs.”, it’s Eden.) I got an apple tree tattooed on my shoulder and when I went to Tamara’s wedding I showed it to her mom and she kind of laughed and cried at the same time.

A sweater my parents brought back from Copenhagen. The yarn pilled up a lot, and though it was soft it always looked kind of weird on me so I rarely wore it.

You know what? This is kind of exhausting. I have some more, I’ll do them later.

Jackson has a lot of Jack’s strengths, and I’d be lying if I said I was unhappy about that. If I had a little version of me wandering around the house all day embodying all my faults, well, one of us would have to go.

One of the ways Jackson’s most like Jack is that he’s bloody persistent. I guess all kids are, but Jesus! He sounds just like Jack when we were dating, they might as well be the same person.

Me: Hello?

Jack: It’s me. What are you doing?

Me: Well, I have this project for work I need to finish . . .

Jack: Let’s go get ice cream. Let’s go to the toy store and ride in the Batmobile.

Me: I can’t, I have to finish this thing.

Jack: Come on. Come out for an hour.

Me: I really can’t.

Jack: Come on. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on!

Me: No.

Jack: Okay, I’ll come pick you up in ten minutes.

Me: NO!

The only difference is that at this point Jackson would break down crying, but Jack would just wait me out until happy hour.

The older Jackson gets the more he ceases to take my refusals personally. His skin is thickening, he’s just a happy little bulldozer who bides his time until either (1) I’m too weary to refuse or (2) he can think of some way to make me laugh so I’ll give in to what he wants because I love him so goddamn much.

Men!

The other day a man from a newspaper interviewed me over the phone about this blog. I’m not so hot on the phone, nor am I much for analyzing the big blog thing, so it was basically ten minutes of him asking me simple yet provocative questions while I choked on my own split infinitives.

I did come up with one reason why I started this web site, though, and that was because *drumroll* I didn’t want to join a playgroup. I could go on about that, but really, Flea says it better.

Jack and I finally saw “the most overrated movie in America” yesterday: Sideways. I enjoyed it. If you were looking at me when I wrote that you would’ve seen me shrug. Certainly it was a medium-sized thrill to see a movie that was shot so close to home. One of the things I like about this director is the way he doesn’t glamorize places or people. They have all kinds of shit all over their house; men have flabby asses; humans are weak and they lie to their friends; the sky is often gray. But then you load your movie camera into a car and drive down Foxen Canyon Road on a warm summer evening and you put it in your film and the rest of the world goes, Oh my fucking God that’s one of the most beautiful places on earth, who’s that blogger who lives there, maybe she’ll post some recommendations about places to go when we come visit.

You know what? Sure, I’ll clue you in, I’ll tell you where the real magic lies. It’s right over the hill. And it’s so insanely, perversely, head-burstingly Merlinesque that it’s an insult to call it just a place, for it’s a Land. It’s . . .

I actually took all of these photos last summer and never bothered to post them. But now I will give you a glimpse into the privileged world of a Santa Ynez Valley ostrich farm, which I heard is for sale for a somewhat reasonable $85k. Someone’s dream will soon come true, I can feel it.

You have nothing to fear from the ostrich. The ostrich is your friend.

Your friend that must be fed THE WARM HEARTS OF HUMAN CHILDREN bwa ha ha ah ah achoo!

He used to be one of the beautiful people.

The emu ghetto.

Ostrich Land as a metaphor for life: in the end don’t we all sort of end up as a bag of jerky?

I don’t have a New Year’s resolution, apart from the usual “try not to be such a bitch” and “think before you once again say something completely inappropriate.” I had a good intention last spring, when I was all hot on the idea of loving everyone and telling the truth. But you know what? I kept it up for a week or so, and then I forgot and start acting like a bitch again.

I am trying to be more honest, though, but you know what I figured out? It takes courage to say what’s really in your heart. You’d think it would be easier: after all, it’s a short trip between your heart and your lungs, you should be able to blow out the truth any time you feel like it. Instead, the truth takes a long detour through the neverending construction zone of my brain, and it’s so pissed off by the time it comes out my mouth. And then it drinks too much beer and starts a fight.

There are tricks to telling the truth like an adult, like using tact and resisting maliciousness. I don’t know why I never learned that. Oh, right, it’s because I’m a total coward. You think I’m being hard on myself, but I’m not. I’m kind of joking. It takes the edge of the horror of existence.

Just kidding! I’m giving $50 to Oxfam today, and another $50 to Doctors Without Borders. There’s pretty much no horror to my existence, I have everything I need. An electric toothbrush, for example, to combat gingivitis. That’s serious; my oldest brother is having half his teeth pulled and getting a plate. My dental hygienist told me that using mouthwash is just as good as flossing. That seems to be the stance of the Canadian Dental Hygienist Association, too, so it must be true.

Remember in Ruben, Ruben where Tom Conti says, “My greatest fear is toothlessness”? It’s not mine, but it occurs to me now that the truth needs teeth. The truth needs teeth! I think I’ll have that tattooed on my lower lip.

Not to compare myself to or make light of the devastating international situation, but preschooldaycare is open again, my boss went to India for three weeks, and I am home alone at 1:47 on a Monday afternoon recovering from two weeks in a shrinking apartment entertaining a three-year-old while it poured rain outside every fucking day. Hooray! Should I have a margarita now or wait until it’s five o’clock in Bangor, Maine?

This is a picture of a barber shop on Victoria Street. It’s owned by a man named Franco and he wasn’t there this morning so I couldn’t take his picture for you, but he is handsome and very friendly and has impeccable hair. He decorates his tiny building like a gingerbread house every year in the hope of winning some building-decorating award that I don’t know about. So I don’t know if he won this year or not but the holidays are over and he’ll be taking it all down soon so I thought I should get a shot for you before it was gone.

You asked for it. Here it is:

It’s a terrible picture, I know. It doesn’t come close to capturing the grandeur, so let me explain once again. Lottery winner. Adds white marble facade. And the wooden statue, that you can barely see, unfortunately*, that is not a Statue of Liberty, it’s actually a Native American Woman Cradling a Palm Frond Whilst Brandishing An Orb That Looks Exceedingly Catholic. If anyone has any guesses as to whom that could be, I’d love to hear them. The Christmas decorations are practically invisible, but at night a twinkly Santa and his twinkly reindeer use the front hedge as a runway. The American flag flies year round, as does the California state flag. All in all, a monument to D.I.Y. home improvement. I’m not sure how all this irrepressible glee passed the notoriously difficult Architectural Board of Review, eight local architectural tastemakers who ensure that all new building and renovation in Santa Barbara does not deviate from the prevalent Spanish Oppressor style. Somebody obviously knows somebody.

*Notice the security gates plastered with the signs of various surveillance companies? Not real inviting. Notice my side-view mirror at the bottom of the frame? I stayed in my car.

This is the back side of a kind of famous house in Santa Barbara. It’s a Greene and Greene. What I like about the neighborhood it’s in is that there’s this big honkin’ estate-type thing right here, and then next door is some shingled monstrosity that’s been divided up into apartments where some guy’s always changing his brake pads in the driveway, and then across the street’s there’s a cozy little one-bedroom grandma cottage, and down the way there’s the guy who won the lottery, covered the entire facade of his faux colonial in white marble, and erected a wooden Statue of Liberty in the front yard.

What good is a pirate ship that sinks as soon as you put it in the tub?

All the pirates drown! And turn into pirate skeletons!