This is not a joke so please stop smiling.

It's 3 am and I can't sleep. It doesn't help that my semi-white trash neighbor often leaves her porch light on and the naked bulb shines right into my window, illuminating the entire little house. No, that doesn't help at all. I also should not have watched a bunch of Dick Cheney YouTube videos before retiring.

Any excuse for cocoa, I say, cos I'm a mug half full kind of girl.

My neighbor to the semi-east of me (this town is not on a NS/EW grid and I find it maddening)--you may remember her as "Mags" from an earlier post--has the most horrible screeching voice and reminds me of the Wicked Witch of the West. She also claims to speak in tongues. I bring up this up because she and I have a little feud going and something has scared my poor cat, Jonah. I believe she chased him with a broom, babbling like a brook. Yes, that's how bored and paranoid I am. The feud mostly exists in her head; she seems borderline bi-polar and believe me, I know my mental disorders. Jonah has been hiding in the closet for five days and has only recently joined the rest of the family in the "big room." This sounds ridiculous, but yesterday I kept going over to him and petting him and saying, in all sincerity, "Oh, Jonah. I love you so much. I'm so glad you came out of the closet." And then, of course, I giggle, imagining myself saying that to a person who might be my child. And I feel very much like a progressive parent. I've obviously watched too many Lifetime™ movies. And yeah. It's all about me.

Yesterday, I mowed my 80-year-old neighbors' lawn using their electric push mower. I mowed it last week too, but yesterday it felt like I was pushing around a red elephant with its heels dug into the ground. And the heat. Oy! The heat! Herb likes to supervise the mowing. I feel like a teenager when he says, "Watch the wire, yes, that's the trick, keep it behind you" or trails behind me, holding "the wire," otherwise known as the extension cord. He gets tired and sits in one of his yard chairs, sipping Coke or Squirt. I've never known an old person to enjoy soda so much. Of course, it's another one of his endearing qualities. At one point he said, "Oh, and can you help me put a ladder into my truck? And then we need to oil the two chain saws before we use them again and I've got a load of bricks out back that you can take home for the patio you're making and we should probably take some wood to the bin soon and I wonder if you could look at the broken ice maker because you have much smaller hands." I looked at him and asked, rather pathetically, "Today?"

Terry, his wife, gave me some upside down apricot cake with pineapple for sweetener. She said, several times, "I know you're going to like this cake!" I was like, since when don't I like cake? She showed me some Japanese irises that she's going to dig up soon and give to me for next year. Her garden is worth coveting and losing sleep over. She's already given me several things, including my prized delphiniums. My garden is a poor girl's, made of seeds and starts from my mother and from Terry. It's coming along; the seeded plants are starting to raise above 3 inches and it's thrilling.

Good fences make good neighbors. So do chain saws and upside down cake.

There is so much work to be done here that it's overwhelming, and I get depressed about three times a day. That I can actually point out three times that I am depressed is an improvement over the former state of things back in the city when I could maybe find a few hours here and there when I wasn't depressed. It's like Bizarro world, everything is opposite. At my parents' house my misery was, happily, fodder for blog posts. (Alex might disagree about the "happily" part as he had to coax the funny out of the scenarios.) Anyway, I'm almost done whitewashing and finishing the floors and I've started to scrape the bubbled paint off of the exterior of the house and I'm midway through my ridiculous though valiant attempt to make a patio out of dirt and salvaged bricks. In between, I stop to smell the flowers and check my cats for ticks.

And nah, that's Wilco, not me. Jeff Tweedy is trying to break your heart.

For every calm there is a storm. But it is often out of view.

Tonight I went outside to move my tomato plant from its container into the ground because it's not been doing too well, and I was wondering if maybe it didn't have adequate soil depth for its roots. I said, as I was looking it over, "Couldn't you just come up with one tomato? Just one?" And then I noticed the smallest little green tomato. And another. And then one more. In the life of a gardener, little vegetables or flowers suddenly appearing is a huge deal. I was so damned excited, but it was late in France and there wasn't anyone to tell. My mother didn't answer the telephone, neither did the two friends I called. So, I took a little cam photo of it and posted the announcement to my gardener's profile on the BBC Web site. It's not the same.

I've been reading The City and the House, by Natalia Ginzburg, to Alex through Skype at the end of his long days. It's a beautiful epistolary novel; the letters are exchanged among a small group of Italians -- friends, mostly. According to the Sunday Times (London), "Ginzburg handles the epistolary convention superbly." Yes. She does. The Italians in the book are at times amusingly direct, saying things like: "Disagreeable. You really are disagreeable. You don't want me to bring Ignazio Fegiz to see you, and I won't bring him. So much the worse for you... I'm not coming either. I'm going to Tarquinia with Ignazio Fegiz, to stay with some of his friends who have a beautiful house there." I laugh at these parts.

I'm listening to a song by Damien Rice, called "Delicate." I like it. I've never heard of Damien Rice but that song is on the playlist that Alex made and updates for me. I am a much more sophisticated music listener as a result. Sometimes I use this knowledge to show off a bit and act cool. My octogenerian neighbors don't seem to care whether I'm cool or not, though. So it's kind of a waste. They're more the down-to-earth type. The husband is always stopping by my house to ask me things like "Would you like some fresh apricots?" And when I say I do, he says, "Great. Can you help pick them?" And he wants to leave immediately. I've gotten a little smarter about how to respond, but I did once stand in the bed of his pickup truck in a summer dress, a pitchfork in my hands, pitching large branches into a wood recycling bin. Alex doesn't like that he holds this sway over me. Alex is being silly. The old man and his wife are like surrogate grandparents to me. I'm very fond of them.

I'm waiting for a stick of butter to soften. I'm doing it "naturally" because I always overdo it in the microwave and lose half of the butter to the meltdown. I'm fixing to make banana bread; I wish I'd walked down to the Janzen's house to pick some raspberries for it. Now it's too dark. I have a foolish inclination to take the flashlight and pick some anyway. But I won't. See? I'm becoming sensible. For example, I am sensibly scraping the bubbled paint from my tiny house. I've got to prime it and get it ready for painting as soon as it gets cooler. I've decided I will be painting it what my mother calls taupe and I call cafe au lait. I hate the word taupe. It's as bad as beige. It really is. Someone in my neighborhood apparently has a different plan. Yesterday morning I had a paint color swatch tucked into my screen door. Blue and complementary shades. I thought, "Hmm." This morning? Another swatch of blue and complementary colors. That's weird. Right?

Today, a good friend returned my call of several days ago. He's tried to kill himself a lot with not much real success. A lot is something like 20 times. Apparently he spiffed up his recipe, because he's ruined his kidneys or at least it looks like that. They're doing a biopsy tomorrow. Well, it means dialysis and he's not very old. What I think is this: I'm damned lucky my mother bought me this house. I have been at least temporarily relieved of the day to day stress of trying to survive in the world when I don't much feel like the company. I'm sad for my friend and wish he had taken up my offer to let him sit in my backyard with a glass of iced tea for a few days.

Also? I don't think Nick Cave should sing "Let it Be." It sounds gay. I wonder why it's on my playlist. And nah, that's not me. That's Heartless Bastards. I know why they're on it. And now? I'm blowing a kiss across the ocean as I listen to someone sing "Pink Moon."

It isn't funny if you deconstruct it.

or is it?

"Whatever happened to the white dog poop from the 70s?
It went away but it wasn't ours and it wasn't free.
As the French say, "le blanc doody de la 70s..."

By the way, I HATE those fucking Mustang brothers on Cookie Party!

Foucault has nothing on Sarah Silverman.

Seems I've got to have a change of scene.

Why, hello! I'm moving some of my old posts over here just cos I like them and I don't want them to fade into the lcdset. They will all be pre-move:

In three days, I will be released again into the wild. Or, rather, the tame since I'll be living in a small, conservative town. The only other time in my life when I've lived away from a city, I spent many months in Mexico. That's a different kind of small town. Plus there was plenty of tequila and dancing.

My parents are happy to see me go and vice versa. My nerves are pretty much shot. My dad kind of ignores me unless he's happily stumbled onto something I've done wrong: I don't clean the cat litter often enough; I loaded something into the dishwasher improperly; I splashed coffee on the stairs on my way (desperately) to the shelter of my room. And so on and so forth.

My mother? She alternates from being a-okay to a bitch on wheels. Oh, and she's got that motherly martyr shit down pat. Give the little lady a hand. My mother is very political and listens to talk radio all day long. My dad hates it, so she bought herself some radio headset thing. From about 9 am until 3 pm or so, we are not to disturb her "shows." She listens at breakfast, that is when she isn't talking on the telephone. She tells my dad and me to "talk among yourselves." This would be fine, except every time I attempt to say something to my father, she pulls the headset up and asks, "Wha? What did you say?" I tell her, "I asked dad if he has any big plans for the day." And she says, "Oh." And then puts the fucking earmuffs back on.

I think I've mentioned that my father is very interested in the behavior of wild animals, African tribes, and our lawn. He is apparently uninterested in human behavior, or at least he isn't particularly fascinated with or fond of mine. I ask too many questions, I guess.

Scenario 1:

We are on our way home from shopping for new house crap for me. My dad has stayed in the truck at every store; he got out only to buy gas. My mom is anxious about missing her nap. We have to stop at some lady's house to pick up a loaf of bread she's put out on the porch for my parents, as if they are squirrels. The lady is named Marge. From the back seat I say, "I wonder why she is named Marge..." My mom says, "Uh, because that's what her parents named her. She was named Margaret." I say, "Well, if I were named Margaret, I would go with something sexier, like Maggie. Imagine how different Marge's life would have been if she were a Maggie." My dad said "I like that song 'Maggie May' by Rod Stewart. The problem is you don't hear it much anymore..." I said, "Yeah. I still think Marge is a horrible name." My mom chimed in, "Well, why do you think you are named FailedPromise?" I ignored her.

As we were driving away with the loaf of bread, they started talking about Marge and how she had to go to the doctor today and how did she get there and so forth. Marge needs new glasses. It appears that someone named "Cookie" drove her. I asked if Cookie is a boy or a girl. Cookie is a girl. I wondered aloud about her real name. It was at this point that my dad turned on the radio, probably hoping to hear Rod Stewart.

Scenario 2:

At breakfast today, my dad read a tiny bit in the local newspaper about some woman who was at a casino when her electric wheelchair slammed into the elevator, forcing it open. The woman plunged 30 floors (Update: that's an error. She fell 30 feet). I asked if she lived, laughing a little. Oops. She did. It took 45 minutes for them to get her up. I asked if the wheelchair went haywire or something. My dad said he didn't think it had anything to do with the wheelchair. I asked, "Was she drunk or something? Or angry?" Dad sighed. I asked, "What happened to her, like how many broken bones and so forth?" He said, "It doesn't say anything about that." I asked why the hell they even write articles like that if they don't provide any details. My dad folded up the paper then. I said, "I take it you won't be reading me any more newspaper stories?"

On Friday, I'll be all alone in my teeny studio cottage, reading stories from HuffPo to my cats while I drink coffee. They make a great audience. They enjoy my ad libs, unlike some humans I know.

"I guess I'm here to stay 'til someone comes along and takes my place with a different name, and a different face."

And nah, that's not me, that's Traffic. Alex must like them or something.

I hope you stay in charge of your mouth. I hope you stay in charge of it.

At my other blog in my other life, my physical location is listed as Uzbekistan. I did that because I didn't want anyone to send me emails asking me if I wanted to "make a sex party." After all, nobody actually lives in Uzbekistan, do they?

Well, my shorty moved his profile to Uzbekistan too. He tends to be a copycat. He's also a hep cat, and knows the lowdown on most anything cultural, especially if it's political or involves loud music. I'm in the dark. I look prettier that way. I deliberately avoid the news media, except for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report and watch those only cos they say dirty words and make me giggle. Today he introduced me to the work of some guy who everyone probably already knows: Matt Taibbi. He knew I would like a writer who peppers his paragraphs with words like "horseshit." Yeah. Kind of. We watched him a little on YouTube. He's cute, with a rapidly receding hairline and a gap between his front teeth. Even so, I prefer him on the page where he seems crustier. I like my crust.

I was looking him up on Wikipedia and found out that in 1992, "Taibbi moved to Uzbekistan, but was forced to leave six months later after writing articles critical of the country's president, Islom Karimov." I love that we shared a country, albeit 16 years apart and in my imagination. I think it's super neat that he played professional basketball in Mongolia. And Matt apparently pissed off a ton of people when he wrote "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope." I can identify. Nobody really appreciates it when I talk about Jesus's big schlong and his gift for getting a party started right.

I haven't written anything since I signed off of that other blog. I sort of wonder if I've run out of steam or material. A state of semi-happiness tends to do that, I've heard. (Note the hedged "semi.") As I was tucking myself up in my bed to read through Skype to Alex, I realized "Wow, my life isn't half bad." I mean, I don't work these days, because of my sundry "medical" conditions related to not wanting to be around people much. I'm sure social security is going to decline my application for early support, but for a few months, I should be okay. I have this house and my little garden. I don't have to worry when the month is approaching its end and rent is due. I've got a guy I'm crazy for who makes me feel loved and safe and special, even though he lives halfway around the world, in Paris.

Loved and safe and special don't come easy for me. And why should they? Many of us have our wagons hitched to a somewhat crappy childhood after all. And life certainly can be nasty, brutal and short as an adult. Well, less of the short and more of the shitty. Times are hard. People pretty much suck. My cat killed a bird. My neighbor is psychotic.

But here I sit, ankles crossed and finger in mouth, trying to think of something funny to write. I have a room of my own, for god's sake. (I wish the 500 pounds would follow.) Cat Power is playing on the radio. The mood is set. And all I have to say is, "Hand me a cup of cocoa and a cookie. I'm happy. "

Weird, huh?

More soon on Matt and the media and the state of this shithole we call America. More on me and my moods and my mouth. I swear I'll stay on topic next time. For reals.

And nah, that's not me. That's The Duke Spirit.

Cookie Party

It's late, I guess, and everyone on my street appears to be asleep. I've been working all day cleaning and sorting my tiny new house. I finally put my work space together. This is the first night in the four and a half weeks since I've moved here that I've been able to sit down and write without the overwhelming sense of shit undone around me. It feels good.

I live in a small, conservative farming community. It's so quiet here that I can hear my cats hunting mice outside. (There is a little part of me that is scared of keeping my doors open in the dark, but it's been so incredibly hot that I've got to risk my future murder for immediate comfort. ) My boy lives in Paris and is abed, snuffling and turning over using his slender hips. As happy as my home is tonight, I want to be there, would give almost anything to be there.

Sometimes I laugh to think of us trying to bridge the distance and culture gap over the internet. It seems almost absurd to try. But it's so goddamn compelling this thing we have. He says we could arc lightning across the country and over the Atlantic if we tried a little harder. Do people seem more interesting when they're far away, I wonder?

The Parisian (who couldn't possibly be more interesting) does loads of his shopping at Picard, which apparently makes pretty good prêt-a-manger meals. He wouldn't admit it, but he likes to casually mention that he's going down to the Arab market for something he knows I can't get here. I like to think of him strolling the streets, selecting fruit from an open market, picking out tartlettes at a boulangerie, taking steps out of the metro two at a time. I think of his head bowed over his laptop at a corner cafe, his bangs a little bit in his eyes, ordering a beer. I'm old fashioned, so I envision him buying an International Herald Tribune from a pretty girl who looks like Jean Seberg. My paper has big ads for farm equipment and articles on livestock. I am suddenly reminded of that 60s television program, Green Acres. I've never actually seen the show but I've heard the theme song. "Darling, I love you but give me Park Avenue!" Hey, I can do Paris in a heartbeat. The question is, can he do Smallsville?

My cookies and tea are gone. It's 10 am in Paris. I'm waiting for my cat to come home. And this post was pretty much just clearing out my head. Sorry, y'all.