Awkwardly Social

I’m going to blog you like Blackbird** this afternoon.

First, if you don’t watch Cities of the Underworld on the History Channel, Mondays at nine, and then repeated throughout the week, you should. Someone I love produced that show. She used to blog, but now she just goes to Turkey and produces awesome shows about the hidden, built-over cities under other cities.

Now for the Blackbird style post.

Lula and I went to the dog park last week.

She was tired when we got there because normally she can be found doing this -

but I made her go on a 1.5 mile walk.The dog park was occupied by a lot of large dogs, but two very small cute French Bulldogs were there with their out-of-work actor owner. I didn’t recognize him, but his coifed hair and expensive sunglasses, jeans and $100 t-shirt gave him away. Only out-of-work actors wear $100 t-shirts to the dog park. Also, he was on his cell phone the whole time, trying to look important. He looked away for one second (obviously in an attempt to look like he really didn’t care that his dogs were going to get filthy at the park) and his dog jumped into a dirty pool of water and drank from it. He was horrified. I laughed and took a picture.

When we first got to the dog park, Lula was greeted with a sound humping from a gigantic pit bull. I think that turned her sour on the park. It really sealed the deal on her dislike for the park full of hooligans and thieves when two gigantic German Shepards tried to gang rape her.

At this point it was clear she wanted to leave. She expressed her wishes by hiding under a bench and scowling at me.Now she just lays on the couch and sighs. Her crisis counselor says I should wait a while before putting her in more rapey situations.

But I took her to the groomer yesterday and the fake Latin guy who took her back to the wash area told me he was going to do a special wash on her privates to make her feel sexy. I think that’s probably the kind of thing the crisis counselor would want me to avoid. Oops.

Truth be told, I only rescued her because she matches my kitchen.

Not really, I rescued her because she doesn’t frown on mid-morning drinking (to get you through the onion chopping.)

I’m off to do laundry at Catherine’s house. When she’s out of town I use her appliances in exchange for fish sitting.*I love it when you pick a song for Karaoke that you know as say a Bon Jovi song or Blondie or someone rock star famous like that, but for some reason it’s either been covered recently or is actually an unknown to you cover of some not as famous song, and they put “In the style of Bon Jovi” on the opening page, key of B Flat. It cracks me up. Someone please buy me a Karaoke machine. My life is lacking only the ability to sing Karaoke at 2pm on a Saturday in the comfort and semi-privacy of my own home.

**Blackbird is a new found blog that I’ve been thoroughly enjoying. She often does posts that combine images and short funny excerpts. I hope you enjoy her as much as I do.

A friend just had a baby, so I’m making some comfort food.  For them, not me.  I figure there is probably nothing more discomforting than a new baby entering your life, so they could use some fattening midwestern love to fill their bellies.  Unfortunately it just got (un)seasonably warm here in Los Angeles, and their apartment holds onto heat like nobodies business.  I hope the casserole doesn’t make them hate me.

I’m also going to make the Mark Bittman recipe for Rice Pudding.  I’ll let you know how that turns out.  If it’s good, I’m not giving it away.

I think about things I should be writing when I’m in the shower trying while I’m trying to remember if I washed my hair. Sometimes I condition it twice because I washed it zero times. It doesn’t make sense.

I hope I can think of something to say soon. There’s a little bit of blue hanging over the apartment. It has something to do with my inability to do laundry and dust. The coffee table has Lula foot prints on it and the laundry basket is over-flowing with black t-shirts, pants and underwear. I guess I’m really taking the ‘black makes you look slimmer’ thing to heart. In high school I longed for more black things to wear. The only clothing store options in Camp Verde left a lot to be desired for a teenager with a tattoo and drinking problem, but if you wanted to wear Wrangler’s or ’southwest designs’ you were golden. One of the perks of being a grown-up is you can buy as many black things as you want. Another perk is that you can buy alcohol without having a creepy 21 year old middle man doing it for you.

I’m haphazardly running with Lula in the evening. She seems to like it, but she seems to like everything that doesn’t involve being left at home alone. I think I’ve read every article on separation anxiety that was ever written. I have a friend who is a vet so he’s getting me some drugs. Rather, he’s getting Lula some drugs. I might take them too.

When Jessica Rabbit says, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn this way,” it’s meta. Right?

I had a pair of jeans in high school from the Gap that I stole from my sister on one of her visits home from college. They were button fly, relaxed fit, straight leg. I felt like I was a super hero in those jeans. I’ve never been able to recreate that feeling in another pair of jeans since then. I wonder if that was a measure of the jeans, their relationship to my sister, or the fact that I was 17 and it didn’t take much to feel like a super hero.

I know I’m a big nerd when I get super excited about news like this BBC Article.  But how can you not be secretly excited about robots that will HOLD MACHINE GUNS AND PATROL BORDERS?  I mean, has no one seen Terminator?  Terminator 2?  Terminator 3?  Battlestar Galactica?

Come on, people.  Robots turn on humans.  It’s that simple.  Let’s not give them guns.  Let’s keep them enslaved as vacuum cleaners and garbage compactors, where they belong.

Not counting my college roommate’s pug, Buddy, I haven’t had a dog in 13 years.  When we had dogs in Camp Verde, like any good upstanding citizen would, we chained them up in the back yard so they wouldn’t eat our neighbors’ chickens.  (Only red-necks chain their dogs in the front yard.)  It’s been a while, you can imagine, since I’ve picked up dog poo on a regular basis.  In Camp Verde, when your dog shits, you keep walking.  There is no shame in leaving your dog’s poo on the ground, quite the opposite, actually.  If you are caught picking up your dog’s poo, you are some kind of Earth Day Hippie Environmentalist emphasis on Mental, who probably shouldn’t be allowed to live or at least should be mocked and rammed with a pick-up truck in the high school parking lot.  Since I left Camp Verde behind 13 years ago, I have been a dog walker and a dog sitter for various families, in that time, I learned that in Los Angeles, one picks up after one’s pet.  Or one gets scolded on the front lawn of an old lady’s house in broad daylight even though one is walking 4 gigantic pit bulls.

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been dutifully scooping up Lula’s excrement after she finishes spraying grass everywhere in some kind of attempt to embarass me further and noticing how many of my Los Angeles neighbors feel no compulsion to do the same.  There is big poo, little poo, runny poo, black poo, every shade of poo in the rainbow stains the grass of the blocks around our apartment.  And because I’m a crazy paranoid weirdo, I got worried that Lula was going to be blamed for the Great Dane Dog Shit of Doom someone left on our little patch of grass that I almost obsessively cleaned it up.  Thankfully, greater reason  prevailed and I left the Great Dane Dog Shit of Doom right where it landed, knowing full well Lula couldn’t be blamed for such a gigantic pile of poo.  It does bother me though.  I mean, these people didn’t grow up in Camp Verde like I did, they have no goddamned excuse for not cleaning up after their pet.  I can understand it if you’re a red-neck and don’t know any better, but you, my friend, are a hipster, ironically wearing red-neck clothing, and that does not get you out of dog shit duty.

It wasn’t so long ago that Allie and I sat on our front balcony cat-calling to ironic red-neck clothing wearing hipsters while smoking cigarettes and drinking White Zinfandel braless, but now I’m seriously considering setting up some sort of blind to spy on the dog walking red-neck poseur neighbors.  After their dog poos their Gigantic Pile of Doom, I will pop up (hopefully with a bra on, but no guarantees, I am, as previously mentioned, kind of white trash) and drop down on them some knowledge about how they are disgusting filthy pigs who deserve to be reported to the public health authorities.  And if they try to give me the business or try to run away, I will snare them in an elaborate netting system that will be rigged from the roof and will force them to lie down with their dog’s poo in close proximity.  Then!  Then everyone in the neighborhood will know where I stand on dog poo and the picking up of it.  It is an elaborate scheme just to prove to my downstairs neighbor that Lula lays nary a pellet without me retrieving it in a baggy, but I will do it.  If nothing else it will give my white trash side a little project, because hell if I know how to construct an elaborate netting system without tapping into that recessed part of my brain where white trash science is kept.

Also, if the net works, maybe I can catch us some coyotes and pigeons for dinner.  The road killed ones leave a nasty stain in my pots.

I think my dad’s heart went pitterpat when he read that title.  He’s going to be even more thrilled to learn I listened to Rush Limbaugh on Thursday.  Even better, I cheered a Republican Senator on Thursday evening.  My mom and sister just had a heart attack.  I guess I should back up.

I am a pinko-commie-leftwing-bleedingheart-takemymoneyintaxes-abortionrights-
freehealthcareforall-savetherainforestandthewhales-liberal.  In this country my party choices are The Green Party (which frankly makes them sound way too one note for me, I like all the notes, I like a symphony of notes) or the Democratic Party (card carrying member!).  I believe in too much government intervention (i.e. I believe in it at all) and I don’t like guns so I don’t qualify for the Libertarian Party.  My dad is a Republican partially because he likes money a lot, partially because he’s from North Dakota, and partially because he thinks the U.S. should use weapons to curb violence (and the threat of violence) in foreign lands.  I think the thing that makes him most Republican is the money part.  There’s a saying that I can’t really remember but it has something to do with tax brackets and Democrats.  It’s not very catchy.  I think a Republican made it up.  The jist is, poor people are Democrats and rich people are Republicans.  Guess what!  I’m poor!  I’m a woman!  I live in Los Angeles!  I’m an artist!  Could I be any more stereotypical?

There comes a time in every young woman’s life when she has to think about things like why she’s a Democrat and why that makes her dad disappointed, and when this time comes she turns on AM radio searching innocently for a traffic report and gets stuck listening to Rush Limbaugh.  I am a staunch Rush-hater.  Dad would turn it on in the car and listen to him spew racist, sexist, anti-human comments just to see my head turn red, my fingers claw my eyes out and my butt bleed.  That’s right, Rush Limbaugh causes anal bleeding.  So when I was innocently looking for a traffic report on a radio station that claims to have the most traffic updates of any radio station ever (LIES, ALL LIES) I happened on the Rush Limbaugh "Liberals Ruin Everything" hour.  To say I switched it off immediately would be a bigger lie than Alberto Gonzalez’s trip down non-memory lane.  I listened.  I laughed.  He’s a bigger wind-bag than I thought.  His current big problem with Liberals and "Drive-by Media" (OF WHICH HE’S A MEMBER!) is that they’re anti-rich.  He went on for 30 minutes about how if the Liberals and Drive-by Media (OF WHICH HE’S A MEMBER!) stopped demonizing the rich, the troubled kid in Virginia wouldn’t have shot and killed 32 people.  Wow, how about you simplify it even more, Rush?  Liberals killed 32 people at Virginia Tech.  Sorry, Dad, Rush is boring, humourless, fat and a drug addict.  The last item is the one thing I don’t hold against him, except for the fact that it makes him a two-faced lying liar.

So, why in God’s name would I cheer a Republican Senator?  Well, normally I wouldn’t.  Aside from my Arizona brain-washed love of John McCain (man, can you imagine if he won the primary in 2000?) I rarely (never) like anything that comes out of the Republicans’ mouths.  That is until I heard the audio re-cap of the Alberto Gonzalez hearing.  Those Senators said things that surprised me.  I guess the public flaying of the Republican party being too in Bush’s pocket made an impression.  They were all up in his shit, called him a liar, told him to resign and that he was an embarassment.  It Was.  THE AWESOME.  I cheered.  I made sure I was alone in my car and no one in LA could hear me, but I cheered for a Republican.

My question about Republicans and Democrats is this, why is it when someone like President Clinton can’t remember something it had to do with getting blow jobs from his intern, but when Bush’s camp can’t remember something it has to do with matters of national security?  Reagan’s people couldn’t remember who ordered arms for hostages.  Clintons - who ordered this McDonald’s cheeseburger for Bill.  I’m not saying the Democrats aren’t lying liars too, they just seem to lie about things that matter less. 

Also, I would like to go on record saying I will maintain my anti-rich, anti-Republican beliefs until I make a million dollars.  Per month.

1.  Carry your 35mm camera all the way to Baja, but do not bring film.
2.  Don’t wash your hair for 4 days and marvel at the beauty of it.
3.  Don’t wash your body for 4 days and marvel at how one can get used to the desert’s sweat drying capabilities.
4.  Bring your digital camera but leave it on shore because you never know when you’ll see a whale and you wouldn’t want to accidentally take a picture of something like that.
5.  Drink the free margaritas, but keep it to yourself that El Cholo does it better.
6.  Worry that Number 5 makes you a shithead gringo.

I’m still trying to get back on L.A. time.  There’s only a one hour difference, but the pace here is 100 hours ahead.

My Spanish is so bad that I have to pretend I’m a deaf mute when I go to Mexico.  It’s embarassing.  What’s even worse is I can kind of understand people when they’re having a conversation near me, but I don’t speak enough that I can add anything.  I just sit there, smiling dumbly, laughing in the right places (sometimes) and then going blank like an idiotic American asshole when asked a direct question.  For some reason, when asked a question in Spanish, I usually can’t understand it.  Eavesdropping, I’m golden, actually included in the conversation? I’m an asshole.

I’m not going back to Mexico until I get my Spanish in order, which is kind of dire because I might get sent back there soon.  (That’s me wishfully putting it out in the universe.)  All I know for sure right now is that my cursing is what I need to figure out first.  If you can curse comfortably in Mexico, you’re in like Flynn.

I’m happy to be back because I can eavesdrop more comfortably on conversations, but I miss the desert and the whales already.

I’m not sure I can really call it roughing it if I have wireless internet access. But I am here. I am safe. And in about 3 - 4 hours I will be roughing it at the lagoon with the whales (we hope).

It’s been a little bit of an adventure, and a little bit of a slog, but it’s good to be here.

More when I return.

There’s a new site in town - it is called Back Alley Tabernacle - it is where you will find all your sins and stamp them out.