cupcake central

Nothing

2007-12-12T19:19:00.000-05:00

Over lunch, Cupcake had a question.

“What do you do on birthdays?”

”Whose birthday?” asked Cupcake’s friend, mostly hidden behind a menu.

“Someone from the past.”

Cupcake’s friend, mostly hidden behind a menu, didn’t hesitate.

”Nothing,” she said. “I think I’ll have the grilled octopus.”

“Even if the person meant a lot to you?”

”Nothing. Especially then.”

Bending her head to read it, Cupcake noticed that her menu was surprisingly blurry. It took her a second to realize that she was on the brink of tears.

“Maybe the minestrone?” said Cupcake’s friend. She closed the menu with finality sufficient to bring the waitress immediately tableside.

Her friend ordered with so much conviction that when the waitress looked at her hopefully, Cupcake could only say, “And I’ll have the same.” The truth was, she didn’t really care what she had for lunch.

Cupcake has noticed more than once that days blur into years with alarming frequency. She has also noticed that hours blur into days. Cupcake’s life is so full and rich now—and she is so busily involved in a life she spent a long time wishing for- that she sometimes loses huge chunks of time to a contentedness she had never known was possible.

But the fact of the matter is that the contentedness sometimes relies on the blurring. And when she stops and thinks, sometimes she realizes that she lost something precious along the way.

Sometimes, lurking in corners, or hidden under clothes in her dresser, or in a dust pile swept from under furniture, Cupcake will find a small salmon crystal bead, a tiny holdover from a necklace, once Cupcake’s favorite, that broke and exploded and was lost to time. Devastated at its loss, Cupcake had tried to salvage the beads she could find. She put them in a plastic bag, but she never got around to re-stringing them. And eventually the plastic bag was lost to time as well.

Yet the tiny pieces of salmon colored crystal still appear from time to time, minute reminders of a loss that Cupcake might have otherwise forgotten.

Every time she finds one, she misses the necklace. Badly.

But the rest of the time—when the little salmon-colored reminders do not pop up to remind her- she doesn’t think of that necklace much at all.

The grilled octopus and minestrone were delicious. Cupcake enjoyed her lunch and went back to work, and didn’t think about the birthday or the past, but went on about her day and her life in the happy blur of contentment.

Yet here’s a little salmon-colored crystal reminder. It’s the day, today, so signing checks and reading emails and looking at the calendar, Cupcake writes the dates, and knows, and remembers. And as her friend advised, she does nothing.

Except this.

Cupcake and Squeaky LaRue

2007-05-11T18:00:00.000-04:00

Squeaky LaRue is a mouse. She lives in a clear plastic box on Cupcake's desk.

Squeaky spends her day in predictable activities. She hides in her house, a cardboard toilet paper tube. Periodically, she emerges to look for sunflower seeds and tiny goldfish crackers that Cupcake leaves for her. And at night, when things really get going, she spends a great deal of time running on a purple hamster wheel.

Sometimes Squeaky runs facing left. Other times, she runs right. Cupcake watches in fascination as Squeaky stops suddenly, mid run, to turn around and go the other way. She wonders if Squeaky knows, deep down, that direction doesn't matter. She likes to think that Squeaky accepted the fact that her running won't get her anywhere.

At a certain speed, the hamster wheel goes faster than Squeaky can run, sending the little mouse in a loop-de-loop of centrifugal motion.

Cupcake isn't sure if Squeaky likes the loop-de-loop or doesn't know enough about physics to connect her increasing speed with the sudden loop-de-loop.

And she isn't sure if Squeaky's efforts on the wheel are from pure enjoyment of exercise or desire to stay in shape. It occurs to Cupcake that Squeaky thinks if she runs fast enough or long enough, she'll be able to get away.
.
Squeaky came into Cupcake's life via the dog, Flynn. One night, Flynn, a gentle soul, trotted up to Cupcake looking very pleased with himself. As Cupcake patted him, she wondered why a moving string was hanging out of Flynn’s mouth, whipping furiously around. When she realized that the whipping string was the tail of a living mouse, she leapt to her feet and grabbed the plastic box, which she happened to have.

Upon yielding up his captive, Flynn wagged his tail and watched Squeaky excitedly. Every day since then, he sits in front of the plastic box watching Squeaky on the wheel as though it's his favorite show on TV.

But for Cupcake, Squeaky’s capture presented a dilemma. She didn't want Squeaky running around her house, and it was too cold outside to let her go. But she couldn't bring herself to kill the timid little creature.

So Squeaky remains in the plastic box. Until the arrival of the purple hamster wheel, she rarely emerged from her toilet paper tube. .

The snow has melted. And still Cupcake doesn’t know what to do with Squeaky.

But lately, there's a new complication: the appearance of mouse poop outside of Squeaky’s box.

Squeaky’s family, apparently, have been coming to press their noses up against the plastic.

This breaks Cupcake’s heart. She’s entreated Flynn to capture more mice. But they’re not a pronounced presence in the house. The only place the mouse poop has been showing up is the circumference of Squeaky’s domain.

Now, Cupcake knows a thing or two about longing.

She can imagine Cupcake’s relatives pressing noses against the plastic, wondering how to get in and share Squeaky’s wealth of sunflower seeds. And she can imagine Squeaky, lonely and captive, seeing the visiting relatives and squeaking fervently, wishing she could escape and be with them. It’s enough to make an animal lover cry.

If Cupcake releases Squeaky into the park across the street, she’ll never see her family again. Also, once Cupcake saw an owl swoop down and catch a critter there, a disturbing thing to witness at close range. Cupcake doesn't like thinking of Squeaky getting swooped up by an owl.

Cupcake doesn't know what to do. And so her thoughts spin like Squeaky on the wheel, going left, then right, and then loop-de-looping. And getting nowhere at all.

Winter Coats and Animal Facts

2006-10-22T16:48:00.000-04:00

Hello, Readers.

Today, Cupcake went to meet a friend. To Cupcake's surprise, the friend showed up in a Winter Coat.

Recently, the weather has been capricious. On brisk days, Cupcake has here and there espied the occasional Winter Coat on the sidewalks of Jersey City and Manhattan. But today was this seasons first face-to-face encounter with a Winter Coat, which is undeniable proof that yes, Winter is upon us.

Cupcake discovered that this encounter with Old Man Winter (in his disguise as her friends grey wool coat) wasn't as bad as she'd anticipated. It was rather like turning thirty: having long braced herself against its inevitability, she found that once it occured- there was actually something enjoyable about it.

And so we beat on, boats against the current....

Cupcake also wants to apologize for the long weeks between her postings. When you don't hear from her, it usually means that Cupcake is keeping busy and happy. Perhaps, reader, you guessed that already, having already noticed that Cupcake frequently uses this blog to compensate for her not playing the piano. Meaning that, if she did play the piano, Cupcake's pretty sure that many of her late-night angst-ridden postings would have showed up as thirty minutes of Beethhoven pounded vehemently out into the night.

Then, Cupcake's angst would have drifted like bubbles into the night, leaving, a few seconds later, no evidence of their ever having been, rather than sticking around on her blog to make Cupcake roll her eyes at her own occasional penchant for melodrama.

Nevertheless, there must be a reason that Cupcake never learned to play the piano and turned out to be someone who bangs away at a typewriter keyboard instead. Perhaps it’s that she likes leaving a paper trail (because she's thorough) though she squirms at that trails entrapment(because she's a commitmentphobe).

However, today,-- perhaps out of guilt for not having posted in several weeks, Cupcake has decided to entertain and edify her readers with a few Fascinating Animal Facts. As Cupcake delights in obscure facts, she believes everyone else does too. So here are some interesting zoological tidbits to titillate you until time passes enough that Cupcake posts again. (Perhaps that will even be before all this year’s Winter Coats have been put away.)

Fascinating Animal Facts:

- the tongue of a blue whale weighs as much as a Volkswagon.

- urination is not an instinct in rats.

- The first thing a baby giraffe experiences is a six foot drop to the ground.

- In Malasia, a breed of boar has horns that wrap around its head like Princess Leia. The horns grow for the boar’s entire life. If the boar lives long enough, avoiding being prey to man or other animals, surviving drought or flash flood, earthquake or any other natural disaster or illness—it will eventual die from its horns impaling themselves into its brain.l

- The intelligence of an elephant is 90% learned and 10% instinct.

- The dog sat on the tucker box nine mines from Gundagai.

That last one is a shout out to my Aussie readership. I have been to Gundagai, so you can count that I fact-checked the assertion, at least so far as a sculpture memorial and a plaque count as fact-checking. Austalia rocks!

Fun things

2006-10-01T21:47:00.000-04:00

Cupcake just re-read her previous post.

Yeah...don't listen to me when I post anything after midnight. If I'm up in the middle of the night and sitting at the computer, it means I'm restless and have no outlet for my restlessness. Angst is trite but effective. Sorry to drone at you, folks.

These have actually been quite happy weeks for your Cupcake. She's been working on a new project which is interesting to her, and hanging out with fun people. Earlier this week, in fact, she went to lunch with Cool Friends In The Film Industry who are in from LA. To her surprise, they brought along an Extreeeeeeeeemely Influential Person. Cupcake spent the rest of the week dining out on Lively Anecdotes revolving around Lunch With The Extreeeeeeeeeemely Influential Person. And she's been having a lot of fun with her friends.

So rest assured, concerned Readers (I guess that's you, Brandon, darling)that the Bayonne Bridge plays a limited role in the general show of Cupcake's life.

There's a funny story I want to tell you but I'm too lazy to type it out at the moment. (It's not a Lively Anecdote revolving around the Extreeeeemely Influential Person. But that's only because, from the nature of the anecdote, you'd guess who the person was. While I love name-dropping in real life, it seems tawdry to boast on the internet, or to divulge the whereabouts and dining preferences of someone of that stature.)

At any rate-- sorry about that glum posting. I'd delete it but deleting entries simply out of embarassment strikes me as cheating. So I'll sit with my own shame in my nocturnal melancoly and hope you'll put it down to poetic temperament, not emotional self-indulgence, even if they are pretty darn close to the same thing.

The Price of the Ticket

2006-09-29T03:23:00.000-04:00

Well, boys and girls, tonight Cupcake is having a Bad Night.

It's four a.m., and in the cellar of Cupcake's emotions, fierce dogs are barking. Their howling is high-pitched, intolerable and loud. Cupcake wishes fervently that she knew someone else who stays up as late as she does (i.e.-- pretty much always)-- because then she'd call that person and bawl her eyes out. However, it's a casualty of aging that, as time passes, one's friends grow older and inevitably go to bed earlier. Even Cupcake's friends in California will have long since turned out the lights.

No real reason for this Bad Night. At least, no new reason. It's simply the Price of the Ticket.

That's the bit of consolation that's keeping Cupcake at the keyboard instead of perched on the railing of the Bayonne Bridge.

What price? What ticket? Oh...It doesn't matter.

A friend said to Cupcake recently on another Bad Night-- "But didn't you know, somehow, when it began, that at some point you'd be standing exactly where you are?"

Cupcake admitted that yes, that had crossed her mind.

"But even so, you needed to be there, right? To see what would happen?"

Cupcake admitted that that too was true.

"Then," said Cupcake's wise friend, "At least you know that this was a choice. This pain wasn't thrust on you accidentally. You knew you'd end up here. And knowing that you'd end up here, you still thought it would be worth it to see what would happen if you went after the thing you chose."

She was right.

This wrenching agony Cupcake feels is simply The Price of the Ticket.

Was it worth it? Kinda. Sorta. You betcha.

If the thing Cupcake chose hadn't have happened, her life would be so boring that -- well, she doesn't know what. But it did happen. She swallowed the red pill. And here she sits, agonized but at least alive.

Because the opposite of Death is Pain, right? William Goldman wrote that, in The Princess Bride.

He also wrote, "As you wish." The sword upon which Cupcake has fallen.

Wrong time, wrong place. Fuck. I should have been born in a different time, and then the way I feel would make sense and I wouldn't have to defend myself constantly to the few people who know what I'm talking about in these rambling posts.

The Bayonne Bridge is looking better and better.

Just kidding. Kinda. Sorta. FUCK.

I hate you for this. I HATE you. (Don't worry, readers. Not you. The person for whom those words were written will never read them.)

And Cupcake's going to stomp off to bed and growl alongside the tigers that come at night with their voices full of thunder. It's not that she thinks she'll fall asleep. It's that she's a practical girl, and a somewhat lazy one, and she knows that if she gets horizontal she'll probably not find the wherewithal to drive to the Bayonne Bridge. At least not before sunrise, and once the sun rises all this shit will seem less important. Kinda. Sorta.

I hate you so fucking much, but I can't stop crying.

Proof of Life

2006-09-19T14:45:00.000-04:00

Lately, every night I have a dream asserting that something or someone isn't really dead.

As one might suppose, when I wake up, I remember that-- oh, yeah, he, she or it really IS dead. There's an hour or two of head-scratching "huh?" disorientation.

This, presumably, is simply because it's only dead people that my subconscious mind feels a need to go to bat for. Those still living can generally speak for themselves.

Here are some recent subjects of dreams:
Errol Flynn
According to my dreams, Errol Flynn has left his body but has not passed on to the Other World. He's floating around this one waiting for his posthumous Oscar. At night, he visits people who admire him. I've recently enjoyed his company on two nights. The first, he took me to Disneyland. We shouldn't have had to stand in line (because he's a celebrity) but we did (because he's dead and none of the 20-something ride attendants knew who he was, anyway). He was a perfect gentleman about all of it.

In the second dream, he wanted to take me scuba diving. When we got to the water, it was frozen, so I demurred. He went on it. Said it was "refreshing." I suppose when you're not incarnate, subzero temperatures are less daunting. There's something to look forward to for all of us.

Long-time readers of this blog (and hail to you, if you have persevered through my inconsistant publishing record) will not be surprised to learn that my subconscious mind also refutes the death of Casey, my beloved border collie.

In a series of recent dreams, I learned that in fact she's been staying with a Boston-based lesbian couple that (apparently) I'm good friends with in my dreamlife. It seems that I asked them to take care of her for a while while I went to Poland to buy shoes. The trip took longer than expected because I couldn't find any pairs of shoes that matched. (Please regard my international shopping trip as a compliment to the Poland's excellent leather craftsmen, and overlook the implied insult to Polish intelligence. It was my fault I couldn't find matching pairs, as I was in a huge hurry.) But by the time I got back from Poland, I'd forgotten where Casey was and I never went back to get her.

That was a sad dream. She looked at me with such melancoly eyes when I ran into the gay couple walking her.

Another night, she was also seen running with the Wildebeest on the African savannah. That was a much happier dream. I was in a helicopter and saw her amongst the herd, stampeding. She looked happy. I debated about whether or not to bring her back to Jersey City. The helicopter pilot pointed out that it would be difficult to lassoe a running border collie in a herd of wildebeest. I reflected on whether I was being selfish...but I woke up before I made a decision.

Also, I've had some strange dreams about Clover, my rabbit who died last month. It doesn't seem to matter if she's dead or not. She's taken on a sort of Yoda personality in my mind. She's mentoring me in being stronger and wiser than I am. (If you haven't known a rabbit, you may suffer from the misconception that they are timid. To that I say, "Ha!" It takes a brave soul to be born in a relatively defenseless body, and Clover was one of the most amazing personalities I've been priviledged to meet. Think Gandhi meets Stephen Frye. She was profound and powerful, and sassy as all get out. When alive, she was able to convey all this with only body language and expressive eyes. Now that she's communicating through dreams, she gets a lot more oomph behind her message.

I don't think this is a very interesting post, and I doubt you will either. But my conscious mind felt I needed to assert that I too am actually alive. And I found a cool picture of Wildebeest, which Blogger wouldn't upload. But here I am. Alive, for what it's worth, and dreaming.

I'll write more soon. With any luck, it will be interesting.

Cupcake and the Rook's Dilemma

2006-08-30T13:19:00.000-04:00

One of Cupcake’s favorite literary characters is in Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed.” The character, Kirilov, is a man who never sleeps. This is because he knows that some day he’ll kill himself. Until then, he stays awake, so he can live as much as possible.

Cupcake enjoys this irony. This isn’t because Cupcake is suicidal. (Cupcake makes no judgment about suicide; she’s certain there are times when it’s the most reasonable solution. In Cupcake’s opinion, suicide is a far less heinous way to squirm out of your problems than telling untruths, or, say, bulimia.)

Cupcake likes Kirilov because she understands being caught in the middle. As faithful readers of this blog know, Cupcake’s perspicacity has at times confused her.

Her first year of college, Cupcake went to Hampshire College, a “hippy” school. At that time, Hampshire’s student population was so predisposed towards the radical that wearing matching socks was seen as hyper-conservative. There, Cupcake didn’t fit in. She discovered that she was one of the most shockingly moderate students. (This largely because it’s Cupcake’s practice to buy dozens of the same socks. No matter how she shuffled them in her drawer, they always matched.)

Cupcake’s second year, she went to a Jesuit college in Rome. There, Cupcake still didn’t fit in, discovering herself to be one of the most radically left-wing students. (She believed abortion was a personal choice; she still does.)

Mind you, Cupcake didn’t modify her behavior in any way. She’s simply never managed to fit in, which is why she tries so damn hard to be invisible. (It never works.)

In The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster (a Hampshire professor, at least at that time) created characters who were “World’s Shortest Tall Man,” and “World’s Tallest Midget.”
Cupcake liked those literary characters a lot, too. She understood.

So now, Cupcake is in a quandary.

Cupcake prides herself on her realistic outlook on life. But there are some aspects of Cupcake’s personality that defy logic. (Cupcake presumes her readers will agree that that realism is primarily logical.) These aspects often pertain to affection felt for people who’ve done nothing to “deserve” her affections. (See Winding Roads of the Heart, posting from November '05. I think. It's somewhere.)

Cupcake knows that a sure way to a confusing life is to change who you are all the time. As a playwright, Cupcake knows that Consistent Character Choices are crucial. And even though she is consistent, Cupcake is still often confused.

Like— in this particular case, Cupcake’s personal values mandate that she recognize and value another person, because person’s personality and values represent everything she's ever valued. Her choices in behavior are limited, as they must represent her values. Cupcake strives to enact her own ideals in all areas of her life. But in this area specifically, because it's all ABOUT values, she must behave according to Who She Is. To behave otherwise would be to make a Rook move in a diagonal line like a Bishop, or an L-shape like a Knight.

But by virtue of acting within the construct of her own personality, in a certain aspect of her life (which Cupcake demurs to confide to you), she’s screwed.

Someone has her over a barrel, or a desk, perhaps, like at the end of Secretary where the girl can’t move because she can’t disobey James Spader. She just can’t, because if she does, she won’t be herself. And then all hell will break loose and chessboards everywhere will churn with chaos and she’ll find that she IS suicidal or she might as well be because she’s simply no longer herself and she has no respect for herself and the sun will rise in the west and nothing will matter any more.

Or something like that.

Look, it's not that she's afraid of change. Cupcake’s not a coward. Cupcake was once mugged. Her companion was screaming so loudly that Cupcake couldn’t hear the mugger’s demands. So she walked closer to him, put her hand on his arm in a friendly way, and said, “I’m so sorry- - I can’t hear you. What is it you want? My whole purse or just my wallet?”

This caused the mugger to jump in terror, drop his knife, and run away.

Cupcake once stood on the deck of a burning tour bus which was about to explode and patiently assisted a handicapped passenger out of the lavatory. She felt only annoyance that the diesel fumes were so obnoxious.

Cupcake’s no chicken.

But she can only move with a certain range of motions, and that limitation is holding her in a holding pattern. Which is she supposes what limitations are supposed to do. Usually, that's just the way the game is played. In this case, it means that she's unable to move at all. Like a Rook blocked into its corner, she has no choices.

It's very hard for a smart girl like Cupcake to admit this. She's used to being able to figure something out. In this case, it seems like she just has to sit there and acknowledge that the game is over. But she can't leave the board.

Still. Maybe there’s some bright positive aspect to this that Cupcake hasn’t recognized yet. Sometimes perspicacity requires processing time. In this case she’s been processing for a good 90 days, but it’s not like there’s any urgency. Cupcake has the rest of her life to ponder this matter, and even though she has no plans to kill herself, she doesn’t sleep much anyway. So like Kirilov, she’s got extra time.

Cupcake must act like Cupcake acts, the way a Rook must act like a Rook. (Perhaps that’s what the crows were trying to tell her.)

I suppose when the game is over, the Rook can move any damn way it likes. But then it’s usually put away into a box, not left on the board.

What to do? What to do.

August strikes again

2006-08-24T12:49:00.000-04:00

Obituary

August 24, 2006, Jersey City, NJ

Died: BUNNY, Clover- Age 8, of cardiac arrest while undergoing massage therapy on the floor of the bathroom. Clover was in debilitated condition due to a prolonged battle with either cancer or a chronic urinary tract infection. At the time of her death she was also experiencing severe constipation, which sometimes responds to gentle abdominal massage.

Though perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed performance as "The Rabbit" in The Effect Of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds during its short 2004 run on 42nd Street, Clover's life in retirement proved that her sass, intelligence and philosophical outlook made her a star in any environment.

Clover died in the arms of her care-taker and friend, Cupcake, who was administering the well-intentioned but apparently fatal massage. (The case is currently under investigation, but police officials comment that there is no suspicion of foul play at this time.)

In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to the Rabbit Society. Or you can just send happy thoughts to Clover as she hops through the Other Meadow.

She will be sorely missed.

Cupcake and the Dog in The Elevator

2006-08-20T02:08:00.000-04:00

One day, on her way to visit a friend in a Manhattan apartment building, Cupcake was standing in an elevator awaiting take-off. She saw a woman and a dog approach the elevator. The woman stepped in normally, but the dog stopped and looked at the elevator warily, growling a little.

"Come on, sweetie," the owner cajoled, giving a little tug on the leash.

Uneasily, the dog stepped over the metal crevice and moved into the elevator, his eyes intent on watching the doors. He came and stood beside his owner, glaring at the doors. When they closed, he quietly growled again. He leaned against his owner, who bent down and gave him an encouraging pat.

"The doors closed on him once when he was a puppy," the owner explained to Cupcake. "He wasn't hurt, but since then he's never quite trusted the elevator."

Cupcake's friend's floor arrived before the dog got off, so she did see his negotition of that necessity.

As Cupcake walked down the hall to her friend's apartment, she felt bad for the dog. Afraid of elevators, it nevertheless must ride in one several times every day. Cupcake hoped for the dog's sake that one day the owner would move to a house in the suburbs with a big yard. Or at least to a lower floor.

But then Cupcake's friend opened the door, and there was much merriment, and Cupcake forgot about the whole thing until August rolled around.

That's because Cupcake feels about August the way the dog felt about elevators. She doesn't quite trust it. August has caught Cupcake in its metal jaws more than once. Always, they've been completely impersonal attacks. She can't really BLAME August. And yet she finds that when it rolls around, she is slightly uncomfortable, and wishes that, now and then, to help her endure the ordeal, God would reach down and give her a reassuring pat.

Cupcake's friend, the Renowned Psychic, says that regardless of what day calendars begin on, the actual New Year is September first. The Renowned Psychic points out that starting a new school year sticks with you, after 12 years of programming. And Cupcake agrees with her. This is partly because Cupcake used to be a realtor in Boston, where all leases run from September 1 through August 31. The Saturday and Sunday nearest those dates are called "U-Haul Weekend", and traffic moves even worse than usual as every block is impeded by double-parked vehicles with mattresses strapped to the top.

But Cupcake also reckons that it makes sense because, if school starts on September 1, it makes August like a giant Sunday night. And Sunday nights before school, Cupcake recalls, are the anxious hours when one jams in all the homework that one ought to have done over the weekend, but one has happily neglected.

However, it's not because she's scrambling to repay social order and approach justice that Cupcake distrusts August. It's that more often than not it's been a month where dogs die, or lovers make Exits Unexpected, or Cupcake realizes that her job is Beyond Bearable, or checks bounce, or meter maids go on writing frenzies, or nails break, or other dogs run away and are eaten by coyotes, or Cupcake has to admit that something she thought was a harmless little prank actually had evolved to something not particularly sensible (or sane) and potentially hurtful to someone she cared about, or mentors turn traitors, or--- damn, you name it.

Just thinking about various Augusts in her history makes Cupcake bare her teeth and brace herself for attack.

This August (so far) has been skipping by, innocent and unblemished by unpleasantness. But Cupcake nevertheless is uneasy. Her days have been passing happily-- and yet intensely, as though there's unheard background music hinting at ominousness to come.

Cupcake believes in emotional echoes. She understands it to be natural that she would remember, consciously or un, last year's death-vigil over her most beloved dog, and tearful nights post revelation of duplicity to her beloved friend. And other years, of despair that was the sickness unto death, and lovers who seemed abducted by aliens and replaced by heartless replicants, and long walks down country lanes calling helplessly and hopelessly for the little deaf one-eyed geriatric dog who had last been seen outside around the same time the coyote pack ran through howling like something out of Hitchcock--

So just now Cupcake's not much in a mood for writing. She anticipates that she'll return, happy as a package of newly-sharpened #2 pencils, as soon as September 1 rolls around.

Until then, she is growling warily, stepping over cracks, leaning against what reassuring knees she can find, and knowing that next year, she'll have to go through August yet again.

Cupcake's Theory of Disposable Men; or, why Cupcake likes having one of those little look-out peepholes in her front door

2006-08-09T13:23:00.000-04:00

Among Cupcake’s circle of acquaintances is a Renowned Psychic. For the sake of discretion, Cupcake withholds this person's name. Her friend enjoys celebrity, but also finds it ennervating.

Recently, this Renowned Psychic (whose social conversation is usually not dripping with predictions) said to Cupcake, “You know, someone is coming for you.”

Cupcake stared at her in horror.

“No, no, Cupcake—“ said the Renowned Psychic. “Not the IRS or Homeland Security. This will be a good thing.”

Mollified, Cupcake considered the possibilies.

”Could it be UPS?” she asked. (Cupcake is both a cautious optimist and an Ebay shopper.)

“No, it's a man. A romantic partner. You’ll be in a relationship in the next few months.”

Cupcake’s heart sank.

“But—but--how can we stop it?” she spluttered. But the Renowned Psychic had smiled a mysterious smile and floated away like Glinda the Good.

Cupcake’s been carrying this prediction around like a hair shirt she refuses to put on. She rejects it outright. It ain’t possible. She don’t want it. Take that cup away from Cupcake, for she doesn’t wish to drink its poison.

See, Cupcake prefers to work in the model that reflects her Theory of Disposable Men.

It’s a brilliant scheme. It came to her in the bathtub, that venue of discovery lauded by Archimedes and Napoleon alike.

Here's how she came upon it:

Cupcake was shaving her legs. But she kept nicking herself.

She looked at her razor. She realized that, although she had plenty more razors in the cupboard, she’d been using the same one for weeks. And it was dull.

Cupcake started to throw the razor away. But she felt a pang of loss. She and the razor had taken so very many baths together; they’d shared months of intimacy. She felt attached to the razor, even though it kept wounding her.

Cupcake loved this razor. Even though her legs were hacked and bleeding and she had more razors in reserve, she hated to see the little fellow go.

Suddenly, an understanding of the futile brutality of codependence dawned in Cupcake’s mind.

And with a whoop of recognition, Cupcake yelled, “Eureka!” She leapt from the tub, tossed the has-been razor into the garbage, and grabbed a shiny new one off the shelf.

As she continued shaving, she marveled at the smooth, close swipes, the easy path through stubble, and the lack of new blood. By the time she emerged from the bathtub, Cupcake had devised the Theory of Disposable Men.

Which is this:

Men, thought Cupcake, are like razors. They work best if you don’t keep them around for too long.

Oh, they’re useful. But after a few uses, they should be tossed. And why not? There’s plenty more where that one came from.

When a girl keeps one around too long, she reflected, it becomes dull. And then bad things happen, and a girl can get hurt.

This realization opened a whole new world for Cupcake.

She moved forward through a rather happy decade in this frame of mind.

But then, despite her satisfaction with a dispassionate status quo, a bad thing happened anyway.

One sleepless night, Cupcake drove to a nearby the 24-hour Walgreens. The razors were kept in a locked plastic case. (Cupcake lives in the Ghetto, so many stores take precautions with easy-to-lift items.) Having been informed by an unapologetic staff person that the previous shift’s manager had accidentally gone home with the keys, Cupcake resigned herself to not buying new razors that night.

But wheeling her cart through the aisles, she discovered a lone package of razors left on a display of flip-flops. So she put it in her cart and bought it. Having many purchases, she didn’t notice the suspicious expense of those razors when the cashier rang everything up. She just paid and went home.

When she went to open the razors, however, Cupcake learned that it was not razors (plural) but razor (singular). The package held an expensive, nice NON-disposable razor, along with several replacement blades. This gave her momentary pause. But she figured, heck, she could still throw it away if she wanted.

The first pass that high-quality razor made over her shin, though, made Cupcake aware that there was a reason this was a NON-disposable razor. It was GOOD. It was better than the disposable ones. It was WORTH KEEPING.

So I’ll cut to the chase.

Having spent a decade or so going through razors, men, and condoms with a callousness that would do the Bush administration proud, Cupcake had grown attached to her dispassion. She wasn’t in love with it (and that was entirely the point)-—but it was a steady gig.

And then one dark unfortunate night, Cupcake met a man who, like the superior razor, was a cut about what she was used to. Someone WORTH KEEPING.

In both of these cases, Cupcake still is puzzling it out.

Cupcake lost the NON-disposable razor. She was sort of relieved, because the replacement cartridges were expensive. And she lost the NON-disposable man, too.

In neither case is she entirely sure what happened.

But the thing is this.

The Renowned Psychic says that Love is coming for Cupcake, and this does not make her happy. She would rather have heard it was the Grim Reaper. (Or at least the IRS or Homeland Security.) She repeats to herself, almost hourly, her own belief that the Renowned Psychic is wrong. Because she’s pretty sure that unless it IS the UPS man, when he rings the bell, she won’t let him in.

It’s safer that way.

Cupcake and more Readers' Questions

2006-07-09T13:00:00.000-04:00

Readers, Cupcake is flattered and touched by the numbers of you who confidingly share your secrets and ask her for advice. She thanks you for your belief in her sagacity, and she aspires to deserve the admiration and trust you've so lavishly brought to her feet. Certainly, she is very fond of you for doing so.

Still, the sheer volume of correspondance required for Cupcake to answer her many admirers means that she must write only cursory replies, like that of C.S. Lewis to an admirer:

"Mr. Lewis acknowledges your letter and states that he has simply nothing to say in response."

(Cupcake apologizes to the many who've received similar replies from her. Her computer came with a program that spits out such emails, but she only just discovered it and isn't sure how to rectify the situation, being not at all technical.)

So here, Cupcake will answer a few more questions that seem to be a common theme amongst her readership, in the hopes that the generosity of her inevitably lengthy reply will smooth the wounded spirits of those who apply to her for succor.

"Cupcake, what is to be done about love? I'm all in a muddle over it."

Ah, my poor, dear reader. Cupcake offers you her sympathy. And if you were here, she'd offer you tea to go along with it.

Cupcake has many theories about love. In fact, if love were physics, Cupcake reckons she'd be a pioneer of Quantum. She thinks that because her perceptions of love so radically jar with the concepts she observes in the world around her. And so she warns you that applying to her for advice on the subject will not give you a pat rule, like "Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle of matter," or "Object A and Object B cannot occupy the same space."

Cupcake thinks the Newtonian theory of love has long since been supplanted, but that few people have caught up with her on that idea.

What's that, you say?

(Because Cupcake believes that Object A and Object B actually can inhabit the same space, she sometimes overhears readers' thoughts.)

Somewhere, a reader is snidely thinking that perhaps Cupcake thinks she has such a highly evolved and complex understanding of love because she's struck out so very many times in that particular game.

Well, quite so, reader. That's exactly it. Cupcake has spent many an idle hour daydreaming over her desk at the patents office, and staring into space while the game goes on before her as she's sitting on the bench. (Cupcake wryly notes that she's so far removed from the game that she's actually been sitting in the nosebleed section in recent years, nowhere near the bench. This thought is a private joke, funny only to herself and another person as likely to read this blog as Kenneth Lay is likely to get his passport stamped at the Pearly Gates.)

But here's what Cupcake thinks about love.

Love is not about being with someone forever. She thinks Love is about seeing them for who they really are. If you see that, and appreciate it -- if you really really get them-- then it doesn't matter if you see them every day, or even ever again. You carry a hologram of them in your heart.

"But, Cupcake, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Of course you want to be with the people that you love."

You're probably right. Cupcake agrees that a hologram scarcely keeps one warm on a cold night, nor is it much fun to bounce ideas off of when, for example, you're thinking of taking a new job. But a hologram is complete. And if you can take the hologram out, you'll see how beautiful it is. Rather than being irked, for example, that the hologram left dishes in the sink, or used the last bit of toilet tissue and didn't replace the roll, or said the wrong thing. Those sorts of things obscure the beauty of the person you love. They keep you locked into small, incomplete pieces rather than the glorious whole, which is what you really love about them.

"Cupcake, you're just being silly. One wants to be with the person one loves."

Yes, but Reader-- if you think that Object A and Object B can't occupy the same space, and if you're always with this person that you love, then you're always apart from them too.

"Cupcake, you're missing the point. A relationship is just that: the way two people relate. It's about interaction. Which means you stick around to -- you know, interact."

It's true. Cupcake doesn't understand attachments. She's very Zen that way. (At least, that's the positive spin she puts on her commitmentphobia. Because remember, Cupcake's determined to focus on her Simply Ripping Qualities.)

Cupcake doesn't really understand Quantum Physics, either. But as it gives her an excuse to zone out of the world around her and stare into space in deep meditation, she's been contemplating Quantum lately. She finds it soothing, and certainly the odd concepts of "spooky actions at a distance" are easier to grabble with than the vicissitudes of the human heart.

Cupcake likes the quote from Lawrence Durrell:

"Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged."

Still. Cupcake thinks physics and love have a lot in common, and in both topics, she thinks she must see things in a very peculiar way. Like, even in conventional physics, Cupcake observes that the most interesting part of the equation is often overlooked: that just as the apple was drawn to the earth, the earth was drawn to the apple.

"Cupcake, you said you were going to answer my questions, not drone on randomly about love and physics."

How right you are reader. Cupcake digresses. You were saying--?

"Oh, never mind. You're pissing me off."

Oh, dear. Cupcake regrets this. But as there's not a lot she can do about it at this point, she thinks perhaps it's best if she ventures outside for a walk in the park. If it makes you feel any better, the crows will surely scold her, and you can pretend that all their screeching is the result of her vexing you.

2006-06-25T23:36:00.000-04:00

A long time ago, a pledge was made between Cupcake and an old friend. The pledge was that if one of them should ever take up birdwatching, the other would immediately shoot to kill.

It was a sunny day, and they were sitting on a rocky outcrop in Swaziland. Tall yellow grass swished around them, and it was all very Lion Kingesque. Earlier, they had been enjoying a lovely hike. But suddenly someone in their party thought they heard the chittering of a Yellow Phantom-Breasted Tweet-Warbler or somesuch, and all hiking ceased as binoculars were whipped out and the majority of the party (both in numbers and age) surveyed the landscape for idiot avians.

The group stood arrested in captivation for what seemed hours, while Cupcake and her companion baked in the hot African sun, bored and annoyed.

The pattern of stopping to whip out binoculars, and everybody standing around for ages talking about birds repeated throughout the day. The experience imprinted on Cupcake hostile associations with birdwatching and birdwatchers.

And yet lately, Cupcake has started watching birds. Not birds in general, so much-- and she couldn't really give a hoot about ever spotting a Crunchy-beaked Twizzle-Dipster, however rare.

It's not a hobby, really, that has Cupcake thinking about them, and interested in them. And it's not even "birds" in general (although she fears it might come to that, eventually)-- it's crows. Just crows.

See, a couple weeks ago, Cupcake found a baby crow. He ended up dying, as baby birds one finds usually do.

But since then, crows follow her.

Cupcake is not being paranoid. The crows follow her. It's his family. In particular, his mother. But she gets the rest of them going, too.

Faithful readers will recall that Cupcake lives next to a beautiful park. It was in the park that Cupcake found the baby crow, as a number of adult crows were swooping and making cries of alarm all around.

Cupcake saw a cat skulk out of the brush. From the agitation of the crows, she knew someone was in trouble.

So she walked over and saw him, this baby crow. Fledgling crow, really. He was sitting in the grass, hopping. So she named him "Grasshoppa."

That was her first mistake. You should never name them.

Things happened that would make an unwieldy blog post. To spare both reader and blogger, here now appears a montage of the next 48 hours: Cupcake carried Grasshoppa to vet across park-- adult birds follow overhead, cawing. Vet says fine, fell but unhurt, too young, return and parents will care for as long as he caws. Must eat every two hours. Cupcake returns bird, but he doesn't caw. Cupcake waits hours, til dark. No cawing. No feeding. Parents glare from branches overhead, cawing. Grasshoppa is silent. Cats lurk. Uncertain what to do, Cupcake goes home to read up on crows. Brings Grasshoppa with for fear of cats. Calls bird rescue. Voicemail. Digs up worms and feeds him all night. No cawing. Still voicemail at bird rescue. Morning. Takes Grasshoppa home to tree. (Google says if humans make sure parents see baby every day, they will take back when he can fly.) Still no cawing. Won't eat. Sits under tree with Cupcake watching from distance. Parents hover, uncertainly but don't feed. Grasshoppa silent and silent. Then falls over. Grasshoppa dies. Cupcake cries.

There's more about how cool that little bird was. I just can't bear to type it.

I thought-- I don't know what I thought. That I could keep him alive for the week or so it would have taken for his tailfeathers to grow in so he could fly. That's what the problem was, you see.

Baby crows leave the nest at 18 days. But they can't fly until about day 25. That means a week of hiding. And in that park of feral cats--I can't imagine he'd have survived if I had left him there overnight. Although his parents chased away the one I saw, so I probably should have left well enough alone. Except that he was also right by the path, next to an apartment building full of families. He would have ended up being somebody else's shoebox funeral, even if not mine.

The thing is, now--

Almost every day, Cupcake takes a walk through the park. All this week, the crows have found her. They follow her, cawing.

Cupcake wishes she were making this up. She thinks it would be a really good story, if it wasn't really happening to her.

Sitting in a field, Cupcake discovers that Grasshoppa's mother is circling overhead. She circles and caws until she has assembled the whole flock (which seems to number five). As Cupcake rises, the crows fly further up. And then they follow her, still circling.

The next day, napping in the sun under her favorite tree, the distinctive cawing passes overhead. Grasshoppa's mother eyes her angrily. (And who can blame her?)

And so it's gone all week. They assemble and decry, and Cupcake, dressed in her habitual black, walks below them, guilty.

Today she brought them peanuts, but they would not be bought. But at least other people in the park could happily assume that all the commotion going on was that the crows knew someone had brought them peanuts. They didn't realize that the noise was not celebration but accusation.

And please, don't anyone post a comment about "eating crow". Cupcake's as remorseful as she can be.

She really liked the little bird. He had dignity, and sass. The eyes were intelligent and expressive. Before Grasshoppa, Cupcake never really knew a bird she liked. This one, she thinks she could have grown to love.

She said, as she was dropping worms into the rabbit cage she'd put him in, "When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, Grasshoppa, then it will be time for you to fly away." Readers unfamiliar with the old TV show Kung Fu, of course, won't get that. But Cupcake was very amused by her own cleverness. Until she realized that the lesson to be learned was her own, not the bird's.

That's the end of the story, I guess. Cupcake hopes this doesn't count as taking up birdwatching because then her friend will have to shoot her. And it's not so much that she's watching them as that they are watching her. And who can blame them.

The Great Poetry Safari; or, Why Cupcake Loves Tylenol PM

2006-06-19T22:29:00.000-04:00

Cupcake likes words.

She likes them because they grab thoughts by the throat and pin them to the page.

And Cupcake likes thoughts.

She believes that thoughts are flickers of energy. She thinks it’s a pretty nifty trick that words can transmute them from energy to matter, just like that, wit' no explosion or nuttin’.

So, to Cupcake’s way of thinking, the written word is pure power. It’s a little blip of pure thought (energy). And when you’re reading, you’re looking right at it.

Man, that’s cool.

Music don’t do that. One can write music, but it’s the experience of music, not the reading of it, that counts as music. And that sound of music – that is not matter.

Dance don’t do it. One can translate choreography to language but it’s not the experience of dance. And dance, as one experiences it, whether dance or audience, is not matter.

But the written word. That's matter.

And as Cupcake is living in a Material World, she is a Material Girl.

The written word, man. That's its own experience. It’s prime: divisible by itself and one.

Cupcake, who is easily confused, likes things that break down only into themselves. She applauds such integrity. It's easier to fathom.

Poetry, Cupcake reckons, has a shitload of integrity. It is the purest form of the written word.

Therefore Cupcake finds poetry (good poetry, that rarest of orchids) to be as close to pure energy as one can get short of getting zapped with electroshock therapy.

And to Cupcake, a good poem is better than electroshock therapy, for knocking her to her senses out of muddled thinking. (She's never had electroshock therapy. But without the written word-- ah, she might very well have needed it.)

Recently, in a fit of melancholy, Cupcake ransacked Google for hours. She was crazed and desperate, like a chain smoker after the shops have closed, digging in desks for a hidden cigarette. She thought that in all the internet, surely there’d be one poem, one goddamn poem good enough to assuage her unsettled spirits.

She longed for it; she was having DTs for it. She needed the poem, to apply like a poultice to a wound in her psyche. She wanted to wrap it around herself like a cashmere shawl on a windy day, a shawl smelling faintly of a long-lost beloved friend, patchoulie and jasmine. She longed to curl up under its downy warmth, resting in an emotional fetal position so she could cry herself to sleep, knowing that she’d wake up in a new day, a new state of mind.

But Cupcake’s read a lot of poetry. Cupcake’s at the point in life where she scans the Penguin Classic section in any bookstore and heaves a heavy sigh. There are just only so many times a girl can read Agnes Grey or The House of Mirth. Cupcake and Penguin Classics go way back. If Cupcake were dating Penguin Classics, she could finish Penguin Classics’ dinner party anecdotes by rote.

Word for word. Thought for thought.

So there’s Cupcake, scavenging like a wild thing for food, shrieking at Google, “No! No! No more sites where people submit their own amateur poetry, please I BEG you!!!!!!!!!!”

But there was no new poetry to find that was worth reading.

There was plenty of "poetry" to be sure. But most of it was crap.

Water water everywhere.

But the thirst that from the soul doth rise doth ask a drink divine...And dry as a bone, that internet search was. Dry, dry, as a desert.

And her eyes searched the land with her cup full of sand.

Cupcake was sure there would be one poem, one poet, someone say with the delicacy of a cummings, or the stern but complete mastery of Wallace Stevens, or the ability to capture the very scent of a meaning like Anne Sexton.

Instead, Cupcake discovered (to her disgust and horror) that one of the foremost contemporary American poetesses looks like Divine and has written a book of poetry about menstruation.

It is not, ahem, a beautiful work. (Cupcake was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and read some. It was gross. Not even interesting, not even well-written. It was just stupid and dull, and somehow this writer passed it off as poetry. Astounding. Perhaps it’s because she’s secretly Meatloaf’s twin sister.)

Cupcake also discovered that an aged lady who is Cupcake's own neighbor in Vermont is renowned as a poet. Cupcake knew she wrote poetry, but not that she was an icon in contemporary American literature. And Cupcake agrees that this lady has a knack with words. But sadly, the words spill all over the place without delivering meaning, rather like a cup of coffee half sloshed into the saucer, delivered by an unconcerned waitress who avoids eye contact as she moves quickly to another table.

Exhausted, Cupcake conceded defeat and curled up into the arms of Tylenol PM. Cupcake has been sleeping with Tylenol PM on and off for years, but only recently has she fallen deeply in love with him. She can risk it because, since he's only a casual partner, she's pretty sure she can get over him with minimal effort if he decides to ditch her for unexplained reasons.

But who knows. Perhaps she's wrong. She's been wrong before.

Still, that night, the night of the Great Poetry Safari, he was the best she could do. And sometimes one takes comfort it The Best One Can Do.

Although other times it sucks. Like bad poetry about Menstruation. Jesus wept.

So Cupcake implores her readers to recommend poets they enjoy. (Post 1980 poets preferred because anyone before that from Psalms to Brautigan, Cupcake’s been there, done that.)

Little blips of pure energy. Words.

Yes.

Just one thing

2006-06-14T07:34:00.000-04:00

Cupcake wants to know something.

If you do one thing perfectly— say it’s skating a perfect spin, or weaving a flawless carpet, or loving someone completely selflessly—If you do just one thing right— doesn’t that sense of rightness, of symmetry and grace somehow raise the standard of who you are?

Even if it’s all fucked up at the end. Even if, say, the judges at the ice rink look away while you are in the air, missing your glorious spin, your leotard's sparkling, your ponytail's leap, your perfect stance— Even if no sooner is the rug lifted from the loom than some kid with a glass of grape Kool-aid wanders in and trips, spilling the whole thing on your masterpiece— Even if the person you loved somehow randomly decides that you are toxic to them even though you only ever gave them sweetness—(and in nature, not one thing that's poisonous tastes sweet, not one—)

Then don't you still get credit? Somehow? Somewhere?

Fuck.

2006-06-11T13:23:00.000-04:00

Hello, Readers.

In the weeks since her most recent post, Cupcake has thought of you often. But other matters have upstaged you in Cupcake's thinking, so that the pie-chart of Cupcake's mind shows blogging as a very thin slice indeed.

The lion's portion of Cupcakes attention have been to cleaning up and clearing out other areas of her life. She progesses with astounding accomplishment in that endeavor, and shares with you that she's awfully damn proud of herself for what she's managed to tick off her Things To Do list in a short period of time. She is happy, and she knows her life is moving forward. And she is very grateful.

However, all this cleaning up and clearing out takes emotional energy. When Cupcake sits down to type out a blog entry, she feels like an exhausted mother who's promised her children a story, but who nods off over The Cat In The Hat.

So all Cupcake can do is assure you, her readers, that she will be back. But right now she needs (metaphorically speaking) a cup of tea and a hot bath, and perhaps after those (and a short nap?), she will return and give you "quality time."

All she can say is that she believes this blog will be a happier place when she is on the other side of her project.

The job in Lisbon is on hold for the moment. Cupcake's friend who had offered it to her is not in the best of health. For that and other reasons of time, he had to back-burner the initiative. Cupcake is somewhat disappointed but also slightly relieved, as other irons in other fires would have been left unattended in her absence. Still, the sudden prospect of having to leave the country is undoubtedly what set Cupcake moving with the cleaning up and clearing out stuff, and so she's very pleased with the outcome of having to leap out of her stupor and get stuff going to prepare for leaving-- and then to discover that she doesn't have to leave just yet, after all.

All in all, Cupcake is happy. Life has been throwing her some interesting lessons, and though sometimes her papers come back marked with red pen suggestions for improvement, over all she has been applying herself and is pretty sure she'll pass the class.

She may have to give stuff up. But she's aware that it will make room for shiny new things.

And she sends you wonderful, happy thoughts. She pictures your lives being filled with shiny new things, too.

Time Travel

2006-05-16T23:01:00.000-04:00

Readers, this afternoon a peculiar thing happened.

Had anyone been with her (and for most of the day, no one was), Cupcake could have been observed on her hands and knees scrubbing a kitchen floor. Whose kitchen floor it was shall remain a mystery. But that is not the most mysterious thing about this occurance.

No, the mystery is that in fact though it LOOKED like Cupcake was scrubbing a kitchen floor, in fact she was not. Cupcake had jettisoned through time and space. Cupcake was in fact sitting at a table in Lisbon, Portugal, some months hence, enjoying a glass of wine and a sweeping vista.

Cupcake knows with complete certainty that the Lisbon day/table/glass of wine/vista will come. And that as she sits there watching the far-off Portuguese sea, she will jettison through time and space back to the afternoon of scrubbing a kitchen floor.

How does Cupcake know this?

She just does. It's happened before.

Years ago, in the months before she took a job in Rome, Cupcake dreamt every night that she was already in Rome. In one dream, she was at a railway station. Uncertain which track her train was at. She stopped a tiny nun to ask.

"Dov'e il treno per Firenze?" asked Cupcake, who used to speak Italian fairly well. But as the words formed she focused on the nun and realized that where she'd expected to see a wizened crone, there was in fact a petite young beauty with dazzling blue eyes.

And the nun said in a sweet, clear voice, "Il treno per Firenza parte da binario sette."

Months later, in Rome, this happened. Exactly as Cupcake had foreseen.

"But Cupcake," questions a reader. "If you knew what was going to happen, why didn't you already know the train was at track seven?"

Ah. Well you might ask. Because I'd already asked the nun before I noticed she was the same one as in the dream.

Now, Readers, please understand that the basis of the new premonition is the time-travel back to scrubbing the kitchen floor. That she is going to Lisbon seems to be a done deal.

Remember the White Stag of Adventure that Cupcake suspected was about to appear before her door?

It done showed up. Last Saturday. In the form of an intriguing text message from a rich friend in England:

"Please call me when you wake up. I have a proposition for you."

Ever a fan of propositions, Cupcake called him. And he offered a job. In fact, a share in a new business he's creating. But in order to chase this particular White Stag, she has to go to London for a month, and then spend several months in Lisbon.

So in a matter of weeks, Cupcake departs. (Fear not, my animal loving friends-- Cupcake's roommate will take good care of the doggies in her absence.)

When the White Stag appears, one follows it.

More on this soon. Cupcake is tired and must sleep. Time travel is a wearying pastime, as is scrubbing floors.

In which Cupcake pays homage

2006-05-10T11:00:00.000-04:00

A shop window in Paris held a shirt I wanted you to wear. It was a pirate’s shirt, with open ruffles at the chest, and billowing sleeves that from the elbow to wrist, tied tight with criss-crossing laces-- the better to swashbuckle with.

A shirt like that demands a certain something. Not many people can carry it off. Napoleon, maybe. Errol Flynn. And you. You could wear that shirt. It would show, outwardly, who you are.

I didn’t know you then. I saw the shirt while I was waiting for my friend Rupert to buy a sandwich. We were walking to Napoleon’s Tomb, and we made two stops along the route.

The first stop was for Rupert to buy sandwiches. They were beautiful sandwiches, in long thin baguettes. He bought two and offered me one.

”Thanks, but I’m not really hungry,” I said.

He smiled. “I knew you’d say that,” he said. “The real reason I bought the second one is so I could eat it. If I pretend it was for you, I’m not indulging myself.” He made me take a bite of it to give credence to his self-deception. The sandwich was delicious. Made more so, no doubt, by my having already given it up.

The second stop was at a flower shop. I bought three pink roses. They were large buds, like babies’ fists. My friend had finished his sandwiches by this time, so he came in the shop with me.

The florist was a dignified elderly gentleman who wrapped the stems carefully, as though it truly mattered to him that the flowers were fortified, safe within the paper for their journey to the rest of their lives. .

“Ces fleurs sont pour l’Empereur,” dit mon ami Rupert. “Ils sont pour Napoleon.”

The florist had been quite formal, almost stern. But upon Rupert’s words, he smiled. He handed the flowers to me with a flourish and a little bow, and as we left the store he watched us, approvingly, from the window.

We walked on to Les Invalides, to the Tombe where Napoleon rests.

Buonaparte died and was buried at St Helene in 1821. In 1840, his nephew (who’d just appointed himself Napoleon III) had him exhumed and returned to France and laid in for eternity at a celebrated veteran’s hospital and war memorial called Hospital des Invalides.

The tomb is on three levels. The crypt itself, made of porphyry and self-consciously grand, sits on the ground level. It is encircled by two galleries where observers can lean against the banisters and look down, standing above Napoleon. (This seems a cruel final irony to me, as we know he was self-conscious about his height.)

Rupert and I stood there at the tomb. My idol lay within a big marble Victorian box. I started to unwrap the roses, thinking to drop them, naked, onto the floor of the well encircling the crypt. But Rupert looked at me skeptically.

”You’ve come this far,” he said. His look was a dare, but it was not mischievous. It simply asked me to reckon what this gesture meant to me. His look said, “This is where you decide who you really are. What you risk shows what you value.”

This startled me. I knew he was right. But I hadn’t been thinking in such terms and was unprepared. Still. What would Napoleon do?

I glanced around quickly to make sure no guards were looking, and then climbed over the marble barricade and jumped the five or six feet to the floor below.

I laid my offering beside the tomb. I reached up to lay my arms along the marble side of it, thinking of the Little General within.

A flash went off, and I looked up anxiously, afraid it was an alarm. But it was only a Japenese tourist taking my picture.

Rupert helped me back up to the other level.

I’ve always been glad I leapt down to deliver the flowers in person. And that I touched the tomb, paid my homage to Napoleon. I admire him so.

I admire him because he dared himself to embody the magnificence he knew was inside him. Because he knew no obstacles and would not, himself, have hesitated to leap into the well. It would never have occurred to him to do otherwise. Whereas me—I have to be reminded of things like that. That’s why I keep a framed postcard of Napoleon on my desk. My office, in Vermont, is filled with prints of him—two of which I bought there at Les Invalides, right after I delivered the flowers.

The thing is, I have always remembered that shirt. The shirt I saw while Rupert was buying his sandwiches.

When I see you in my mind, you've always worn it, Pirate that you are, taking on Destiny with brilliance and courage, and the daring,relentless spirit that inspires legend.

I would buy you the shirt, if I could find the store.

Cupcake trees and cupcake racks

2006-05-07T09:17:00.000-04:00

A lot of people find my site because they're looking for creative ideas for cupcakes. Cupcake trees, or cupcake racks.

This inspired me to do a little google search on my own for what the heck a cupcake rack is. (The first thing to come to mind was my own decolletege. And I couldn't imagine that phrase being such a popular search based on my bosom alone. A perfectly reasonable bosom, but nonetheless....)

At any rate, reader, if you are looking for a baking ideas regarding creative cupcakes, or using cupcakes for your wedding cake or birthday cake, my foray into Google suggests that the most thorough collection of cupcake trees, racks and decorations is at this website:

http://www.weddingfads.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=42

Feel free to come back and read the musings posted in this blog. I seem to think a lot about men and dogs. I probably should think more about creative projects like writing and cupcakes. But each day has its own pale pastel wrapper to pull off, and dogs and men seem to be what's lurking under most of mine.

Have fun with the cupcakes!

The Rubik’s Cube: or how cupcake finally admitted her Simply Ripping Qualities.

2006-05-05T14:38:00.000-04:00

Cupcake has always admired and puzzled over people who have vast reserves of unquestioning self-esteem.

In wonderment, she has watched shows like Springer, where women Cupcake perceives as decidedly unattractive get dumped on national television but have no visible resulting thump in the stomach to their self-esteem. She has seen them say to the man leaving them (usually for her best friend or sister, or sometimes his best friend or his sister) –“Oh, really? Well screw you! It’s your loss, asshole, because who needs you? I’m hot and I’ll get a new one of you in ten minutes. A better one.”

Cupcake admires this attitude, but has never experienced it herself.

In writing workshops, people whose writing Cupcake found decidedly mediocre have extolled their own literary genius with such sincerity that though she first thought they were kidding, she went on to credit them with a laudable ingenuity, if an unfortunate lack of talent and standards.

Be it noted: Cupcake, in her rigorous pursuit of accurate self-appraisal, does concede that she's a good writer. In that way, she excels. And is confident. And is willing to stick her neck out in self-admiration. But this is because she is an excellent judge of writing, not an excellent judge of herself. And if she were not a good writer, she would admit it, just as she acknowledges sadly that she cannot draw to save her life.

(Be it also noted: Cupcake’s vanity, so rarely allowed to take the podium, demands that this blog's reading public be reminded that Cupcake is also a damn good actress.)

But other than for acting or writing, Cupcake permits herself little self-congratulation. This is perplexing to her, as she lives in the United States of America, a country that takes self-congratulation very, very seriously. (A little too seriously, in Cupcake's opinion.)

Whenever Cupcake bolts out into the world to blow her own horn, she stumbles on the front porch before she can sound a note. Her coat gets caught on the doorknob of perspective. She is handicapped and held back by her wish to examine things from all angles. So she sits on the porch and looks at the horn, and rarely does she blow it.

For example-

Suppose Cupcake says to herself:

"I am very intelligent. That’s cool."

She then says, "“Ah, yes, but what have you DONE with said intelligence? By their fruits shall you know them. Your accomplishments fail to measure up to your potential. And so, at the end of the day, Cupcake—isn’t that a sign that for practical purposes, you (or I, for that matter), are pretty DUMB?"

So I lay that assertion on the table.

Then I say to myself,

"Cupcake, you know you are an extremely loyal friend.”

To which Cupcake answers, “ Oh yes. Oh, undeniably so. You stand by friends come hell or high water. They sleep with your boyfriend—you stand by them. They offer small poisonous barbs at your self esteem, you stand by them. You show no discretion in your loyalty, Cupcake. In fact, one wonders if it's loyalty at all. Perhaps, my dear, the correct term for your brand of loyalty is CO-DEPENDENCE.”"

At this I sputter a little. I begin to assert that most of my friends are wonderful, that the examples mentioned were outside the norm— And then I think,“Yes, but that’s where loyalties are questioned, isn’t it? When there is a challenge to them? When one must choose to stay or to sever? Like a gardener who carries both the watering can and the pruning shears to work.

And so I lay that on the table, too.

I consider many qualities. Ambition becomes selfishness. Generosity becomes a way to deal with guilt. Being laid back becomes laziness. Honesty becomes a lack of tact.

All the virtues twist themselves into vices if you look at them too long. Even the intention of perspicacity can be seen as a failure to committ.

So this is the problem: Cupcake tries extremely hard to be fair in her assessments. Especially when assessing herself. And because I look at things from so many angles, I sometimes forget my own point of view.

Like, am I living my life in the first person, or is Cupcake living hers in the third?

But the Rubik’s cube is solved. From now on, I will simply choose the point of view that makes me happy. And if I am slightly unfair, well—indulge me. I have been such a harsh judge of myself that I deserve a little leniency for a time. (But I still reserve the right to write in the third person. Because I like it. And for the record, it stems from literary playfulness, not psychosis. Honest.)

And so, friends, Cupcake bows before you and most humbly asserts that she is a Simply Ripping girl, full of admirable qualities. And that anyone who wishes to contradict her in this may email her, putting in the subject line: Contradiction. And Cupcake will delete your comments, because she's decided to stick with her own opinion on this one, in the most blatantly self-congratulatory way.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

Or something like that.

Rise and Shine.

2006-05-01T23:38:00.000-04:00

It’s morning. That undeniable fact is— well, undeniable. Your unopened eyes sense the presence of light. It’s as if someone hovers outside your door, waiting to knock. And then it does knock, does light, blazing into you the understanding that if you opened your eyes, there'd be no going back. Like it or not, you are awake. It is, indeed, morning.

But you lie there, wishing that it weren’t. You keep your eyes closed, your arms wrapped tightly around the pillow. You wish consciousness away.

Sleep slips out like the tide.

Hug the pillow though you might, pretending that its part of you, the part sailing in unconsciousness, keeping eyes closed with pure intention— you are awake. The day takes no refusal.

Someone elsewhere is making coffee and its fragrance calls to you like a siren.

The eyes—all on their own, they open. Traitors.

The pillow reminds you of its separate self.

In your bed, you are cast adrift. The flotsam and jetsam of dreams scatter, float off, irretrievable now.

And so you rise, and it’s a new day.

Like it or not.

Sorry I’ve been incommunicado. I’ve been drifting in such a holding pattern as those days when you just don't want to get out of bed.

Listing my Simple Ripping Qualities was a Rubik’s Cube. I’ll tell you about it later. It took some doing, organizing my thoughts on that topic.

And in the middle of that, a friend died. And that was, understandably, sad. (The good news is that my house has never been cleaner, as I've been dealing with grief by scrubbing the be-Jesus out of every surface. At the Vermont house, too.)

In this last month since I've posted, each day, I’d say, “Hey Cupcake, why don’t you blog or something?”

To which I’d answer myself, “Hey, Cupcake, sod off.”

Then, last week, I went away. I went to another country where I looked at a city I hadn't seen in a while. I walked streets where the chatter around me was in a language not my own, and frowned over calculating the cost of things in another currency.

But it was after an amazing lunch, sitting in a patch of sun stretched out through a restaurant window, that I sat drinking port and smoking cigars with an old friend, the sort of friend one knows well enough that the conversation can aspire to silence. We sat and sipped and puffed, and in that post-prandial tranquility, I clicked the final squares of the Rubik’s cube together.

So now I’m back.

And in the life of my blog, it’s a new morning. Rise and shine.

"I have a dog."

2006-03-28T13:30:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I find a scene in a movie that seems like a film clip of my own life.

As I’ve been trying to assemble the list of All My Simply Ripping Qualities, I’ve been remembering one of those scenes.

It’s from Slaves Of New York, which I found a charming film and which made me realize that Bernadette Peters really does deserve her fame. Besides, it’s a film decidedly plunked in the eighties…and many have accused your own Cupcake of having dug her heels firmly into that very decade. (Cupcake wears a lot of black clothes and rhinestones, listens to Stevie Nicks, and despite decades of evidence that it's probably not a good idea, has never lost her faith in casual sex.)

In the film, Bernadette’s character is sitting home alone listening to motivational tapes. She lives with her boyfriend in his artist’s loft apartment. (It’s the fact that he is the leaseholder of this desirable space that makes her be the “slave” in the relationship.)

He’s a dickhead, but she loves him. (There’s a filmclip of my life, right there, in six simple words.)

She’s sitting on a swing in the loft, as I recall sitting in the dark, while the film shows us snippets of the boyfriend off having wild sweaty sex with Bernadette’s frenemy.

The voice on the motivational tape booms optimistically: “Say something nice about yourself!”

Bernadette pauses, then offers to the world the following hopeful statement. (Though she offers it hesitantly, almost as a question.)

”I have a dog. (?)”

I’ve think about that scene a lot. Which I shouldn’t admit to you as I am resolved to show up as Someone To Be Admired.

But perhaps I can Be Admired for this: that I am not too proud to admit my flaws, my hesitancy, lack of self-confidence.

I’m still working on this. I am determined that I will start raving about myself on these pages, at least for a while. I want to experiment with it, see what it feels like to look in the mirror and at least pretend to think “Superstah!”

In the meantime…I have a dog. Actually, I have three of them. And they do indeed make me happy. So I am going to go outside and throw a certain stuffed dinosaur around the yard so that Boss and Felix chase it, and little Momo will hover uncertainly at my feet, wanting to play but not really knowing how, and afraid he’ll get damaged in the fray of joyous chaos.

Oh, Momo. How I understand.

Two types of people (and the invisible third)

2006-03-27T22:28:00.000-05:00

Readers, lately Cupcake has been feeling as if she’s waiting for something. But she’s not sure what that thing is.

Perhaps it’s the appearance of the White Stag, which will summon the hunters to leap upon their mounts and gallop wildly through the forest in pursuit. (Please see previous entry about Unknown Country for Arthurian reference.)

She is not quite sure how that would manifest in modern terms. Cupcake does now live overlooking a beautiful park with some quite majestic trees. But she reckons that if one was galloping on horseback, it would take mere minutes to traverse what seems to be quite an expanse for an urban-dwelling pedestrian.

As the owner of a beagle (Boss Dog, given to her by the folks at the Job From Hell and the only good thing to come out of that period of time)- Cupcake is familiar with the braying of hounds. Neighboring beagles echo Bosses howls, so that Cupcake is certain that, should the White Stag appear and the horses magically appear at her doorstep, she could at least be certain of the requisite barking to accompany the hoofbeats.

And yet there is no White Stag.

Cupcake waits.

As a femme d’une age certaine, Cupcake often presumes to give advice to her younger friends.

Today she observed to one of them that there are two kinds of people: those who want to show up as someone to be envied, and those who want to show up as someone to be pitied. There is actually a third type of person: the group of people who want simply to show up as a regular person, likeable, unpretentious and unremarkable. People who want to “fit in.” But the thing about being unremarkable is that…no one remarks upon you. And therefore this third group of people is relatively invisible, although very likely they number the largest population.

Cupcake realizes that all too often she opts to be someone who shows up as someone to be pitied. She points out the places in her life where she feels she has erred or failed. That’s because these are the places that her mind goes to, feeling out remorse like the tongue moving to a toothache.

And Cupcake wishes that this were not so.

So Cupcake has resolved to write a bit about things she thinks are cracking wonderful about herself, areas and accomplishments where she perceives herself as simply ripping.

She reckons that perhaps this will even things out. And perhaps it will simply amuse her. But perhaps the change in the air, the deliberate turn of consciousness, will be enough to summon the White Stag so that Cupcake can mount and merrily dash towards an adventure.

The Party; or, how cupcake fell off her surfboard and survived to tell the tale

2006-03-14T00:38:00.000-05:00

In high school, Cupcake’s friend Bryan invented a game called, “The Party.”

It was a game you could play alone in your head, or outloud with friends.

The game is to imagine that your whole life is to be constructed as an event. Where is it held? What food is served? Who’s on the guest list, and what costumes do those people come in?

At the party, what do the guests do? Who sequesters herself in the corner flipping through books? Who stands becomes the unofficial bartender? Who organizes the volley-ball game? (Assuming that volleyball would fit into your party.)

This weekend---oh, friends. If I could tell you about this weekend. It was a bizarre shining weekend full of magic and trouble. I can’t tell you about it.

But I can tell you this.

One of the guests at Cupcake's party will be a tall man wearing a Hefner-esque satin smoking jacket. He will flirt and dazzle, glancing sidelong over his shoulder to make sure I see the line of women hanging on his every word. And then at some point during the party, he will sidle over to Cupcake and whisper, “You know it’s you that I want, don’t you? It’s always you. When I am with the others, I am always thinking of you.” His breath will be hot against Cupcake's cheek and he will graze her thigh with a brush of his hand as he moves back to his place before his admirers.

He will leave her flushed and breathing heavily, confused by desire. Hope and despair mingling in a toxic combination.

Another guest will be a hired entertainer, who will do stand-up comedy off in a side room. But he will catch Cupcake's eye in the crowd and when he looks at her, she'll know he SEES her, that he doesn’t miss a thing. But he will always be onstage. Even when he takes a quick break, his conversation hides behind jokes. And he will quickly climb the stairs to the stage and start performing again.

This comedian guest is my friend Sherrod. Part of the weekend was Sherrod coming to see my new house. He looked at one of my old standup videos and told me that I had showed promise, that I should have stayed with it. But that I needed to tell fewer funny stories and show more of my own agony.

It’s not good comedy if it doesn’t expose the darkest parts of your soul, he said. Or words to that effect.

Sherrod’s a great comic. You could google him, but he doesn't have his own website. He’s on TV a lot though. Maybe you’ve seen him.

Anyway.

The darkest parts of my soul just don’t seem funny at the moment.

Maybe that’s due to the lunar eclipse tomorrow, which according to astrologyzone.com will be one of the most upsetting days of the year. This is a week for ending things, it says. In two weeks, things will start again. We can move forward. But here are two weeks left hanging, weeks suitable for staring into space and planning The Party.

I have loved someone, apparently pointlessly, but to the best of my ability. I feel like a surfer whose feet clamped the board and whose body rode the waves as long and hard as possible. Until the sea tossed me and I woke up bruised on a beach, like Greg Brady in the trip to Hawaii episode.

I can’t do it any more. I suppose in two weeks I’ll be sitting up and knowing where to go.

Right now I’m just lying there realize that the sand and rocks have scraped my elbows and legs, and that my muscles feel torn. And that I can’t swim back out there again because I see shark fins in the water.

There’s going to be great comedy in this, someday.

Someday.

And for the record—you’ll all invited to the Party. What will you wear? What will you do there?

2006-03-08T11:17:00.000-05:00

I'm having my own little Oscars over at my new house.

In the category of "Who will do the sheetrocking?"

The contenders are:

1. Carlos, the friend of my new neighbor Roy.

2. the guy whose ad said, "No job too small!" but who told me that my job was too small.

3. the guy whose ad said, "We Always Call Back!" who - you guessed it- didn't call back.

And the winner is-- Carlos! He speaks English well enough to be understood, he gave a fair price, and he actually showed up when he said he would.

In the category of, "Who's going to do the roof repair work and give an estimate of replacing the roof?"

The contenders are:
1. The company with the very large, professional looking ad in the yellow pages, who promised someone would call back to set up a time for an estime. (No one did.)

2. the guy with the ad screaming, "We're cheaper than anyone else!" who I dialed by mistake. (A roof is not a place to economize, I shouldn't think.) He showed up on time to give the estimate. But the first words out of his mouth to me were, "You own a dog?"

"I have three dogs," I said.

"Oh, yuck!" he said.

I wanted to say, "You know son, that was the wrong response. I don't need to know your estimate, because you're not going to be working on my house."

But, to be polite, I went along with his telling me where he'd put the flashing and all that. As I seethed.

There's so much more. In fact, I have to go back to it. But that's why I've not been posting all that much. Perhaps later I'll think of something interesting to post. I doubt you guys want to hear the various possibilities of home repairs I'm considering. I know the topic bores me to tears, and it's my home.

Stay tuned. I swear I'll be back in sassy Cupcake form. Soon I hope.

Unknown Country

2006-03-01T14:06:00.000-05:00

Someone who reads my blog, according to Sitemeter, peeks in at it from an "Unknown Country."

Whenever I see that, I get happy chills.

It makes me hope for continents and poles yet undiscovered. Or even, on a non-geographical level, it makes me anticipate some great new adventure. Like a period of time when, every time I walked home, I'd imagine that there'd be a note left on my door. Who the note was from, or what it would say, was never clear. But I was always SURE it would be there, and that somehow through that note my entire life would change.

Once there was one, but it was just from the building super saying that there was going to be a firedrill the next night.

When I was a kid, I used to read Arthurian legends, and it was the appearance of the White Stag that used to herald great adventure.

So when I see the visitor from the Unknown Country, I get a tingle. (Peefer, I suspect that it's you--which of course would give me a tingle anyway.)

Unknown Country. Terra Nova. The white stag glimpsed in the woods surrounding the castle.

Ah.

Toast

2006-02-26T18:56:00.000-05:00

Long ago and far away, when men wore eye-make up and sequins in a world known as “The Eighties” —Cupcake lived for a few months in a hotel in the Scottish Highlands.

Summer nights are long in Scotland. The sun doesn’t set until 11:00 PM, and it’s back again at 3:00 AM. That only leaves 4 hours to get into the sort of mischief that usually accompanies a night of drinking. And in a small town in Scotland, there's not a lot else to do but drink and look for mischief.

Cupcake was living in the hotel because she’d got a job as a waitress. How this came about is unimportant. It was a small town, very pretty, but full of people who had never lived anywhere but a small town. Cupcake soon learned that some people viewed foreigners, even (or perhaps especially) Americans, as exotic, interesting specimens. And others viewed them with mistrust.

At any rate, Cupcake found her reception in the small town to be confusing. The locals were either fawning over her and over-the-top nice, or downright hostile.

But that’s not the point of this story. The point of the story is this.

The town was small, but had a steady tourist trade. Cupcake worked at the nicest hotel. The restaurant there was very posh, with full silver-service, very formal. Cupcake usually worked the breakfast shift, which was okay except when she was hung over. Then, the smell of kippers was particularly unappealing.

The dining room being as formal as it was, each breakfast came with toast delivered in a silver toast rack. Cupcake had never seen a toast rack before, and found this custom not only charming but also practical, as it keeps the toast from getting all squishy from the piece above it.

Now, in this particular hotel, all the toast was made by an old man named Terry. Making the toast was Terry’s entire job. Legend had it that Terry had worked in the hotel from the time he was a young boy. He was now in his eighties. Terry had been supposed to retired at 65, but when that day had come, it was discovered that poor Terry had no savings, no family and nowhere to go.

This being a small town and an old-fashioned hotel, the decision was made to keep him on. To justify the expense of his staying in the room he’d always lived in and continuing to eat all his meals in the staff dining room, he was awarded the job of making the toast.

Terry was not quite right in the head. At first Cupcake assumed that he was slightly senile, but she realized that more often than not, she smelled alcohol on him as he groped around at the toaster. He was a smidgen grumpy, though then again, she usually encountered him at 6:30 AM, and many people are not at their best at that time of day. So Cupcake was uncertain about the details of Terry's personality. But she was certain of one thing: he was not exactly overattentive to his personal hygiene.

Day after day, Cupcake would watch him struggling to keep up with the demand for toast. The toaster was nearly as old as Terry, a huge, tall machine where the toast was laid out standing up, to ride up as if in an elevator on a continuously moving belt which it rode past glimmering hot burners until, when it reached the top, it would somersault out the back of the machine. There, Terry would reach for it with his slow-moving fingers, put it in a rack and put it out for the staff to carry to the dining room.

This involved Terry touching the toast twice: once when he loaded the bread into toaster, and then again when he placed the toast into the rack. He touched it twice.

Cupcake was not sure, in the three months that she worked at this hotel, that Terry ever took a shower. He wore the same filthy, torn shirt day after day as he stood at the hot machine loading the toast. By the end of the breakfast shift, from the exertion of his labor and the heat of the toaster, Terry would be sweating profusely. Yet she never saw him looking as if he'd bathed or even tried to wash up.

For a long time after Cupcake left Scotland, she dreamed every night about this town and this hotel.

Some may think that’s because the mixed social reception she encountered there was puzzling and troubling, and she could never figure out if those who liked her liked her for herself or for her country. Ditto those who went out of their way to make sure she knew they disliked her.

Some may think it’s because those short nights of summer were so often intense with the passions of youth, as there Cupcake met a boy whose beauty dazzled her. (And Cupcake, faithful readers will know, is a fool for beauty.)

Still others may think that Cupcake’s genetic memory made her very cells reverberate with the beauty of the mountains and valleys. (The Highlands look remarkably like Vermont, where Cupcake’s treasured sanctuary is located. This is no coincidence. If the Highlands could be a mere 5 hour drive from New York City, Cupcake would have bought her home there.)

But the real reason that for lo these twenty years now, this town and this hotel haunted Cupcake’s sleep- and sometimes still her waking hours, is this: since her brief stay in this tiny hamlet, her stint as a waitress in a formal silver-service dining room where the waitstaff bowed stiffly as they served the meals—She has never been able to eat toast in a restaurant without wondering if it was made by an ancient and filthy old man who hasn’t washed his hands in a very, very long time.

Brief Update from the Eye of the Hurricane

2006-01-27T17:12:00.000-05:00

There was a sketch in the 70's play "Pfeiffer's People" about a guy who dreams about "boxes upon boxes upon boxes. And as I stood there gaping and staring at all those boxes, they all came tumbling down on me!"

Welcome to my world.

The movers are coming at 8:00 AM tomorrow. This week has been really weird-- not sleeping at night, pacing restlessly, sleeping from dawn til 10 or so-- I'll be glad when it's all over. Assignations that fail to actuate. Letters I haven't answered.

Nothing's seemed straightforward. Except perhaps the boxes.

Today I spoke harshly to someone I love. Who truly deserved harsh words, and perhaps a smack upside the head. But because he was a dick, I didn't follow through with something I'd promised to do for him. And now I feel conflicted. Like I should do the thing even though he was a dick, because I said I would. But I don't want him to think it's okay to be such a dick. And yet-- He does think it is, because I've always shrugged off his dickishness before. He IS kind of a dick. I've known that for a long time. It's all about him. I've kind of liked that, the way I like it when someone orders for me in a restaurant. It takes the pressure off. And unless they order lambs balls stewed in squid ink or something, I probably don't care that much what I eat.

See-- this is why my New Year's Resolution was BE SELFISH. I'm too damn easy-going about most things.

But now-- Now I don't know what to do. Follow through on my word? Or say to myself, "I'll save my energy for people who are nicer to me."

Yeah, I know. I know what the Dear Abby answer would be. I also know it's more complicated than that, and that I don't have time to embark on a rambling tale of karma and committment. (Much to your collective relief, believe me, my blog-reading friends.)

I have to go back to the packing. I'll write something more later, perhaps. I just wanted to reach into the blog-world and send out a word to clear the pipes to the larger world, like in Horton Hears A Who.

We are here, we are here, we are heeeeeeeeeere!

Oh, friends. Send me good thoughts. I am sad, and my world is swirling. I am in the eye of the hurricane, but the storm still scares me. A little. Well, okay. Maybe a lot.

Another Ex-boyfriend Story

2006-01-21T01:30:00.000-05:00

My ex-boyfriend Pat's father died when Pat was twenty-two. They hadn't spoken in several years. His relationship with his mother was strained by this, though with her he kept in touch by telephone. Not often, but enough. Still, she was his mother, and the night his father died, even though he hadn't spoken to her for months, not even over Christmas, he could tell from her voice even before she uttered the words.

He hung up his phone and looked at his roommate Steve. Steve was sitting on the sofa reading an album jacket (B.B. King, as I recall--) and Steve said, "What is it, man?"

Pat's stricken expression told him everything he needed to know. "I'll get the car," Steve said. "I'll drive you home."

It was January, and they drove for two days through endless snow and blistering, bewildering cold to get to Pat's home town in time for the funeral. Pat did a lot of crying in the car, and Steve did a lot of not saying anything, the good kind of not saying anything, where you know the other person knows there's simply nothing they could say.

The funeral was going to be in the morning. Pat didn't want to go to the church part, but he knew the graveyard where his parents had plots. When he was a boy, his mother had pointed the cemetery out to him as they'd driven past.

"Someday, your father and I will be in there," she'd told him. "It would be nice if you'd stop by once in a while."

It was still early when they pulled into town. There were a couple of hours before the funeral time. Steve suggested breakfast, but Pat didn't feel like eating. He asked Steve to drop him off at the cemetery. He wanted some time to himself after the long drive, before being welcomed back to the bosom of his estranged family.

He hadn't been back in years, but he remembered how to get to the cemetery. Steve let him out at the gates. They'd agreed Steve would meet him back later, when the funeral was happening.

The cemetery was set on a hill. A winding road plowed through the snow, circling through the gravestones. Near the top of the hill, a lone grave had been dug, solemnly awaiting a new arrival. The dirt looked odd, turned inside out, sitting on top of the snow.

Pat climbed the hill and waited for the procession to arrive. The cold somehow emphasised the desolation of the scene.

He looked in the empty grave, imagining that soon his father would be in there for the rest of time. It was hard to put the man in that spot, and hard to imagine that he would stay in one place. He couldn't imagine his father tolerating that sort of impertinence, pictured him rising up out of his coffin to yell at Pat for somehow orchestrating this eternal insult. Pat of course had nothing to do with it. But that had never stopped his father's ire before.

It was overwhelming, the confusion of feelings tumbling around like socks in a dryer. Loss, and love, and anger. The guilt of being a disappointment, the outrage at having done nothing to deserve that designation.

Nearby, there was a tree. Pat walked over and leaned against it, burying his face in his arms and wailing to the open sky.

"Why?!" he yelled to the invisible ghost of his father. "Why did you have to be such an asshole and then die before I could figure out how to like you anyway?!"

It was freezing cold and his nose ran and the tears stung his face, but he wept and railed, railed and wept. His father had been a stern man, a dentist always finding fault with his only son, drilling away at Pat's self-esteem as if it was some form of decay that needed to be removed and filled with some device of his own, better design.

(Forgive the appalling conceit. I heard a lot about the Dentist in the course of my relationship with Pat.)

Finally, after the hours of fury and desolation, when his feet were solidly frozen and his teeth decidedly chattering, a hearse appeared on the road beneath. Behind it trailed the cars of the funeral parade. Slowly they mounted the hill, parking near the grave. And one by one people emerged from vehicles, talking in the hushed voices of the living in the presence of the dead, or golfers at the putting green.

Pat had not been home in many years. And when he had lived in this town, amongst the people who were his kin, he'd never quite fit in, always feeling like the odd man out. As his family members walked towards the grave, he felt no tie to any of them. They looked like strangers. No one even looked at him, acknowledging his presence. He was an outcast even at this funeral, and he felt it sorely.

And then he looked again at the crowd, and realized that in fact, he didn't know any of these people. He had never seen them before in his life. He was at the wrong funeral.

Eventually Steve arrived and picked him up. He'd brought an Egg McMuffin, which Pat ate as they drove to his parents' house. There, they found the tribe assembled over a post-funeral brunch, where neckties were incrementally loosened as the tone of conversation lightened up.

"Well, where the hell were you?" Pat's mother asked as he and Steve opened the back door and stomped the snow off their shoes. "I thought you were going to try to make it for the funeral."

It turned out that years before, his parents had sold the plots in the cemetery his mother had pointed out. They'd bought other ones in a graveyard across town. Nobody'd thought to mention this to Pat.

"So even in death, I disappointed him," Pat told me sadly, shaking his head.

"But you didn't have all the information," I reasoned. "How could you have known?"

"It wouldn't have mattered. To Dad, it would still have been my fault."

Ah, Pat.

He was a beautiful man. He looked like he'd stepped out of a Frederic Leighton painting of a knight. Chiseled cheekbones and long dark lashes, tall and effortlessly muscular. And he had a sad, dry wit that appealed to me, although at the end of the day I would have had to kill him if I'd stayed with him any longer than I did. I'd meant to break up with him for months, but every time I saw him, thinking, "This is the day I'll tell him"-- his beauty would stop me in my tracks.

And there's something beautiful in this story, I think. The innocence of hope-- the wish that we can somehow fix things that may nevertheless forever remain broken.

But God, there's just something so damn funny about this story too. I can't put my finger on what it is, but if you need me to point it out, you'd never understand anyway.

Swimming back to shore

2006-01-17T01:46:00.000-05:00

Last week I had one of those dreams that hangs around. Like when you sleep with someone and the next day keep smelling his aftershave in your hair. The dream weaves in and out of my thoughts, coloring everything a little. And then the dream pops up in focus unexpectedly, or I find it at the corner of my thoughts. And it's all back again.

In the dream, it was a gray day, and I was walking along a beach with my sister. (In one of those inexplicable details of dreams, I know that we were walking north.) And my sweet dog Casey was running along side us, playing where the waves reach as far as they can, stretching onto the shore until they are shallow and thin, a tiny lace of bubbles disappearing into the sand. She was barking at the froth it left behind.

I was talking to my sister about something else, something unimportant. But I was enjoying watching Casey play at the water's edge. And then I remembered the awful fact that Casey's dead.

My sister saw me stiffen and take in my breath.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Casey," I said. "She shouldn't be here. She's dead."

It was horrible realizing that she was dead, that she'd have to leave me again and couldn't play on the beach. It was like opening a wonderful present and then being told it has to go back to the store, you can't keep it.

"No, it's okay! " said my sister. "Don't you remember?"

"Remember what?"

"That we THOUGHT she was dead, but she really wasn't. She'd just been pulled out to sea by a big wave. But she swam back to shore. She was just down the beach, and we found her. Remember?"

In the dream, suddenly, I did remember, and I was happy again. And we continued our dream walk, and Casey played with the little waves.

When I woke up, I was smiling. And then of course I remembered that oh yeah, she really IS dead. And it was horrible again, as it always is when I remember that.

That fact is like spilled mercury. It's broken into so many pieces that I can't quite grab onto and collect, because it keeps rolling away from me and breaking into more pieces for me to retrieve. And all of them are cold poison.

But there's another way of looking at it, and I'm trying to focus on that. Maybe dying is like being swept out to sea by a big wave. And maybe somehow in time I'll find her again down the beach.

You wouldn't think it would hurt this much, would you?

Jesus wept.

Listen to me. That's three morose postings in a row.

It's this moving thing. Really. It's stressing me out. I mean, I am not walking around crying into my teacup. I'm making lists and hanging out with friends. My best friend's wedding was this weekend and I had a great time. I've got some money coming my way, and the guy who plows my driveway in Vermont called today to tell me that my house is still standing and that as of 9:30 this evening, the heat was still on. (This is a very good thing. An empty house in Vermont in sub-zero temperatures can be a costly proposition.)

But all I have to do is sit down to write and I become Miss Doom and Gloom. That's the way the tension comes out, I guess.

Time passes and things change. I know that. And as James Taylor sang, "the secret of life is enjoying the passing of time. "

It's just that on top of the rest of the planning and organization stress, and the ordinary stress of change, this move means that I will be living in a house that Casey will never live in. Whereas now, here, there's a space that is her absence. I know all the places where she once was, and all the places that, now, she is not. One corner of my bedroom is where Casey used to sleep, and a tree in my backyard is where Casey every morning she used to stand, looking up, barking at squirrels. Next to the sofa in the living room, there's a smudge on the wall (that I can't bear to wipe off) where she brushed against it every night, turning around three times before lying down.

I'm moving. And someone else will find that smudge and wipe it off. Someone else will just see it as a smudge on the wall, not knowing that it was left there by the sweetest dog who ever lived. One squirt from the bottle of Fantastic and swipe of a paper towel, and that will be the last of Casey. Except in my heart, of course. There, her mark is indelible.

Maybe the last day I am here, I'll wipe the wall smudge off. Take control of that, doing it myself instead of leaving it for the new owner of this house, who won't know that it's a memorial of sorts. Who won't look at it and wonder what happens when we die, if the tide can bring us back in, if we can swim back again to be with those who love us.

Good Lord. That's it. Tomorrow I'm challenging myself to write something uplifting so you guys don't think I'm about to jump off a bridge.

Stay tuned. Better, happier thoughts ahead.

a lesson from a fuck-up

2006-01-14T12:54:00.000-05:00

The first time I saw the boy who became my first love, he was moving into the house next door. The moving van was stuck in the snow, and he appeared around the corner of the van, talking to the movers, probably about ideas to extricate the vehicle.

He was beautiful. He was tall and blond, and he gestured with graceful animation. When he smiled, the gray day appeared to be transformed to dazzling sunlight, like sunflowers laughing in the sun.

I started baking cookies right away. It was a snow day from school. I had time to be neighborly.

As soon as they were finished, I took them over. It was love at first sight.

We spent the next two weeks together whenever I wasn't at school. He was helping his family unpack and didn't start school right away. When he did start, things got weird because I ran with the theatre crowd and he was a stoner. It didn't mesh. We still hung out. He had a bad relationship with his stepfather, and sometimes he'd come over to my house after they'd had a fight.

He'd sit, brooding, and we'd make a fire. Sometimes we'd make out. We still liked each other, but the chasm of our high school groups made it impossible to be together in the holding hands in the hallway kind of way. Finally I lost my virginity to him on the floor of my basement. I loved it. I loved him. I knew it wasn't going to change anything about the situation, but I was glad to have that kind of closeness with him.

That night, he went went home slightly after curfew. His stepfather yelled at him. My boy turned on his heel and left, hitching to the highway and going to live with his brother in Albany.

He wrote me to apologize. Then he enlisted in the navy. He wrote me once from a battleship in the Pacific.

Collette wrote, "First love is the only thing we die from."

She was right.

Sorry I'm so depressing. I'll get over it. I think it's the stress of the move, plus something someone wrote to me yesterday that was like a kick in the gut. That's what made me think about that boy.

Here's why. A couple years later, he came back from the Navy, showing up at my house out of the blue. His family still lived next door, but he kept most of his waking hours at my house. It was summer and I was home from college.

I wouldn't say it was his finest hour. He was a trainwreck. He'd been awol for months, and was drinking and doing a lot of drugs. He'd been doing porno to survive. When he showed up at my house, he was overly animated and flushed, talking too fast and saying nothing. After he'd been around for a couple days and I saw that he was in pretty bad shape all around, I took it upon myself to set him straight. I lectured him severely. Told him he was flushing his life down the toilet, etc. I was pretty harsh. He didn't say a word.

That night, I took him to a party I'd been invited to. He was a total embarassment. He was stoned and sloppily, charmlessly drunk. He knocked over a table full of drinks and my friends were glaring at me like "WHO IS THIS IMBECILE?" Finally I said, "Let's go home."

In the car, he didn't say anything for a long time. But then he said, "You know Cupcake, I have a lot of faults. But one thing I never do is make someone feel bad about themselves."

He said it quietly, and clearly, and with more dignity than I'd have guessed he possessed at that time. And I realized he was that drunk and stoned because what I'd said had upset him tremendously. I realized that I'd made him hate himself. Which only made things worse.

There were other ways I could have said the things I said. I could have tried to have compassion. He must have been really confused at that time. He must have been regretful about dropping out of school, and about other things he'd done. He was probably scared. And he was probably hanging around at my house because I felt safe to him, and he trusted me to love him unconditionally. But instead of helping him find his way out of pain, I told him how his ways of dealing with his problems made him a fuck-up. And feeling like you're a fuck-up just makes you fuck-up more.

and then he went away. forever.

I wonder how he is. I wish I could tell him, now that I know a little bit more about life, about how sometimes pain and loneliness and confusion make us do strange things-- I wish I could tell him that I'm sorry.

Things That Rankle

2006-01-14T02:16:00.000-05:00

It is night. Now do the leaping fountains of life leap higher.

It is night. And my heart too is a leaping fountain.

When I lived in Glasgow, the summer I was 20, there was a multi-tiered Victorian fountain on a hill in a park, near Glasgow University. They didn't have it running, so it was dry, sort of like a stone wedding cake. I used to climb up there and sit, reading. That was my summer of Nietzsche and Iris Murchoch. I read Nietzsches words about the leaping fountains of life there. So I've always pictured that fountain when I've thought of those lines. Though naturally I pictured it with water in it.

Now, when it's night and my heart surges longing, sometimes I feel like I'm still 20, still sitting there in Glasgow.

It was a long time ago.

Iris Murdoch was alive, and I wrote to her. She wrote back. I asked her if she considered herself a feminist, and she replied, "If by feminism you mean that women should sit up and join the human race, then I'm all for that."

I wish I still had the letter. It got lost in a move somewhere. Or I think an ex-boyfriend appropriated it. (I've no idea why. He'd never heard of Iris Murdoch until I found the letter one day and showed it to him. As far as I know the only books he'd ever read were "Mastering Pac-Man" and a series about the right way to gut fish and tan hides.)

Why am I telling you all this? Because my heart is surging with that same longing, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Sometimes there's just so much longing that I think I am drowning in it.

I wish so much I could go back to that summer I was 20. I know now which forks in the road I ought to have taken. That when the head of the Amherst theater department said he'd get me into Amherst because he wanted me in his department, I should NOT have said, "But I'm going to Rome next year. Sorry."

That I shouldn't have bought a certain property that I'm longing to dump right now.

That I should have agreed, when an old boyfriend asked me to move in with him, rather than bolting to another state and then wondering why the relationship didn't move forward.

Hindsight being 20-20 isn't necessarily a good thing. I wish I was just blind to the mistakes in my past. Instead, sleepless nights like this one.

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
for unremembered lads that not again
will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

I shouldn't write after midnight. I just get morose.

Boxes upon Boxes

2006-01-11T11:10:00.000-05:00

I'm moving soon.

I don't know when exactly. The house I am moving to is not vacant, and the family living there hasn't said exactly when they're leaving. Every day, I ask my realtor and my lawyer if there's a set date yet. Every day, the answer is vague. "Towards the end of the month." "You can be sure they'll be out of there by the first." Stuff like that.

Every day, the people moving into the apartment where I am now, (the new owners of the house) call to ask when I am leaving. I tell them I don't know yet. As soon as possible. That as soon as I know, I'll let them know.

I've moved a lot in the last eight years. From Boston to a farm in Vermont. From the farm to the house on the mountain. From that house to the West Village. From there to Tribeca. From Tribeca to an apartment in Jersey City. From the apartment to this house. And now to the new house.

Someone told me once that three moves is as good as a housefire. You get rid of all the stuff you've been carrying around-- the A++ book reports from Eighth Grade, the college text books you'll never look at again. It's true. I just through away the handouts from one of the most interesting classes I ever took. Figured I haven't looked at them in a decade. Why would I look at them now?

But the houses get bigger, so the furniture gets bigger. Which means the bookshelves get bigger. Which means...more books. And one thing about books: they're not light.

When my Uncle Arthur died, his sister Louise flew in from Oklahoma. His house was wall-to-wall books. (He hadn't moved in 50 years.) Louise looked at them, snorted, and said, "I always told him these things were nothing but dust-catchers."

While I was out of town, she sold all the books to a dealer for $300. He had a collection of first edition Hemingways. Heaven only knows what else. I've always regretted that I didn't get to go through the books before she got rid of them. But I just realized how many more books I would have if she hadn't done that, and in a way, that's a relief.

Anyway, I didn't want to post about books. I wanted to post about how, because I've become such an experienced mover, I decided I wasn't going to wait to the last minute to start packing. That I would pack a box or two a day as soon as I knew I was going to move. I thought that would be less stressful.

In a way, it is. And in another way, it isn't.

I am surrounded by boxes. It's surreal. I keep thinking that this would be a very good time to die, because it would be easy for my family just to call the bookdealer right now. And the furniture dealer. And -- well, that's about it, other than clothes in various shades of black and a couple of very eccentric dogs.

But it's strange to see cumbersomeness of possessions. I spend so much time wishing I had things: a Michelopoulos painting, a bust of Napoleon, better TV---- okay, well, that's it, really. Jesus. That's all I want? That should be easy enough.

Yet what I have is barricading me in. I can't stand to be at home because it's like being in the back room at a warehouse. Everything is encased in cardboard. Towers of boxes lurking ominously in corners. I catch them out of the corner of my eye-- actually, out of ANY angle of my eye, because wherever I look, there's another stack of boxes. And I want to yell, "WHAT???? What do you want from me?!!!!"

So it's just a different kind of stress. I guess there's no way around the stress of moving, however you box it up.

When this is over, I assure you, patient readers, scads of delicious, witty, well-written interesting prose. You'll say to yourselves-- "That Cupcake! Such a prolific and insightful girl! So very entertaining!"

You'll all link to me, mention me in your own posts. My readership will triple (somersaulting into the double digits!) and all will be well.

When we get to the promised land, that future where my new life will start, where I can unpack these boxes and begin again.

The Big Box of Bananas

2006-01-05T16:19:00.000-05:00

When my exboyfriend John was turning five, he was very excited about his birthday.

People would say, "What do you want for your birthday, John?" And he'd dance around the room and think about the toy firetruck he wanted more than anything in the world.

But he never told anyone he wanted it.

John's parents were very young when they had him. And though they loved him very much, he had already learned that they were somewhat irresponsible. (Another story is about how he begged his dad to lock up his bike, but his dad said, "Nobody's going to steal it, son..." And guess what? Somebody did.)

So when the birthday was looming deliciously on the horizon, John knew better than to entrust his wish for the firetruck to his parents. He knew they'd just mess it up. And he knew that the hope of having the firetruck was beyond anything he could dream of. At five, he already knew that the bitterness of disappointment was worse than the bittersweetness of longing.

He told them, when they persisted in asking, that he wanted "a big box of bananas." When he told me this story, many years later, he held his arms aloft to show how very big a box of bananas he wanted. He was such a good story teller that I could see him as a small box, stretching his arms out, the look of excitement on his face.

He figured they couldn't mess that up. There were usually bananas in the house, and he did like bananas.

The parents and other grownups marvelled at what a cute request this was.

"Are you SURE that's all you want?" they kept asking him.

That was all he wanted, he assured them, showing tremendous enthusiasm for the request.

His birthday fell on the same day as another little boy's birthday. The neighborhood was invited to a joint birthday party, where they had two cakes and sang the birthday song twice. And John was presented with a big box of bananas, which he acted really happy about.

The other little boy got the toy firetruck.

"What was that like for you?" I asked him, many years later when I knew him. "That must have sucked."

"Oh, it was okay." he said cooly, not looking me in the eyes. "I did really like bananas, and we didn't run out of them, of course. We had that box til they got brown and mushy. There were fruitflies in the house for months."

"But what about the firetruck? Didn't that piss you off that the other kid had it and you didn't?"

"Nah. I used to go over to his house and play with it. I just pretended it was mine." There was something in his tone that let me know it was time to change the subject.

I think about this story an awful lot. I thought about it at Christmas this year, when making my Christmas list. I'm not a child of five. Things I really want, I can getfor myself. Part of my gift to my parents is to ask for easy things, and to not really care about the presents, anyway.

But there are always those things I want so much I don't ask for them. Not from God, not from anyone.

There's a certain thing that for years I've wondered why no one buys me. It's so damn stupid. I should just buy it for myself, but year after year I wait to see if anyone ever figures out that it's the perfect gift for me. Nobody ever does. Here's what it is: but don't tell my friends in real life, because that would be cheating.

It's that refrigerator poetry kit, the one for dog lovers. How my friends can pass that in shops and not thing, "Wow! Is that Cupcake or what?!" That baffles me.

Yes, yes. I know I could buy it for myself. But I don't. It's sort of like Tiffany's, in a way. I personally feel that if a woman has to buy her own jewelry at Tiffany's-- well, it's just a little sad. Now, I'm a big fan of costume jewelry. I wear it almost every day. But if I ever go to Tiffany's and buy myself a bracelet, it's because I don't think anyone will ever buy me one as a gift. (Mercifully, someone has done so. And when he gave me the robin's egg blue package, I felt the same relief that I felt the minute I'd lost my virginity. "THANK GOD THAT'S OVER. AT LEAST I PASSED THROUGH THAT RITE OF PASSAGE.")

So I wait, wondering who in the future will buy the dog-poetry refridgerator magnet kit for me. Someday, someone will. But I haven't ever asked for it.

And there are so many other things like that. Toy Firetrucks so dreamed of and cherished that I dare not name them. In some cases, I have played with other girls' trucks and pretended they were mine. I understood John's coolness. When you think you can't ever have something, the nearest you can come to it is still pretty good. Or at least better than nothing.

And yet--- what if I asked? What if I said, "This is what I want, destiny be damned! I claim my right to it, even if it's never truly mine!"

Nah. Easier to eat the bananas. And then the fruitflies buzz around, nipping at you like tiny reminders of fear.

Things I remember

2006-01-03T14:26:00.000-05:00

Some memories keep showing up like pop-ups on the computer. Some of them go away when you click on the x-box in the right hand corner. But some don't. Sometimes they even crash the system.

Here are some pop-up memories in the computer of my brain.

Good things:

1.)This one night after the company Christmas party I went home with this very sweet, smart, handsome guy that I had a secret crush on. We made out under his Christmas tree. We never ended up together, but he became a good friend. I wonder how he is.

2.) Watching the sun rise over Waikiki Beach and thinking that maybe everything would be okay. I was reading, then, the same book I am reading now. I just realized. Glamourous Powers by Susan Howatch, a book about ego and redemption and finding one’s true relationship with God. A novel. But it’s easier to learn from someone else’s mistakes, eh?

3.) An American girl in the Sydney airport who paid the $3.00 Australian so I could take the shuttle to the other wing of the airport, because I was afraid I’d miss my flight to Perth if I went to change money. She didn’t even hesitate. On the shuttle, she told me that she was Jewish and it was the first day of Hanekah. And suddenly I understood why I had impulsive bought a dreydl the day before I left, slipping it into my purse with a confidence that I would need it soon. “Happy Hanekah!” I said to her, tossing it to her as I got off the shuttle. Her face lit up.

4.)Walking down the Avenue of the Americas (aka 6th Avenue) my first day back in the states after 6 months abroad, a doorman approaches me and wordlessly hands me a huge bouquet of red, white and blue balloons. I walk down the street thinking, “Home. I am home.”

5.)Standing on a rock in a state park, too afraid to climb down or jump into my cousin John’s arms. John went to get my dad, and I jumped to him, knowing he would catch me, that I was safe.

Bad things:

1.)Last February when Casey was having a seizure and my new dog Meredith ran away. By the time I got Casey to sleep and went to look for Meredith, she’d been hit by a car and killed. I found her just as the snow was starting to cover her little body, and I carried her home with such a horrible feeling a sadness and guilt. I didn’t even have a chance to get to know her. She ran away because she wanted to go home. And I guess she finally did.

2.)Driving in the car with Andrea, wondering how long it would take her to get around to mentioning that she’d slept with the guy I was involved with. I’d smelled him in her sheets. I was looking out the window at the traffic thinking, “Jesus, girl, at least have the graciousness to admit it. At least step up to the plate and declare yourself.” She never did. Finally I said, “So…are you ever planning on telling me you slept with my boyfriend?” And she babbled out a stream of excuses but not one of them stood up to a straightforward, “I’m sorry.” We’re not friends any more, though I really had loved her like a sister and could have forgiven her (eventually) for the betrayal. (That boy just wasn’t programmed to keep the thing in his pants, but he had many redeeming qualities and I learned not to take it personally.)The betrayal was one thing. He was too damn seductive. But the cowardice afterwards? That showed me more about her character than 100 episodes of sleeping with some guy.

3.)The day my “partner” at the job from hell viciously accused me of lying on my resume to get the job. I said, “I think our manager should be present for this conversation.” When I came back with the manager, my partner calmly told her that I’d made up the entire previous conversation, that she would never be so unprofessional as to say such things, and that she really didn’t know what to make of me as it was apparent to all that I was a pathological liar. I nearly puked. I realized that I’d made a terrible mistake in taking the job without a better idea of who the players would be.

4.)My car sliding through the deep slush beyond my control into the only other car visible on the road for miles. The crush of the metal.

Perplexing things:

1.) The dream I had that my aunt came to me crying and said, “I don’t know what to do, Cupcake! Help me!” and I said, “I can’t help you. I have my own mess to sort out.” I woke up to the sound of my nightgown flapping against my shins as I ran down the hallway. In the morning, I got a phone call that she’d died that night, quite suddenly.

2.) My playwrighting mentor telling me that even though my play was better than a certain other girl’s play, he was putting hers in the final round of the festival and not mine. I still grapple with that. It goes around in my brain like a continuous loop. He is not my playwrighting mentor any more.

3.) A certain boy telling me he loves me. I can see his perfect lips forming the words, but it seems like I’m watching it from the wrong end of a telescope. Everything is wrong about the admission. The next morning, he kicks me out of his house. Which is the point at which I realize that in fact he was speaking the truth. In his own way, he loves me. And for him that’s a treachery I’ve committed, which he’ll never forgive me for.

4.) The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. How? Can? That? Have? Happened? And how will we ever get the power back?

Deer in the headlights

2006-01-02T12:45:00.000-05:00

Always, the first weeks of January make me feel like a deer in the headlights.

My New Year's was quiet. I resolved (again) to BE SELFISH, to take up more room in my life rather than playing Jeeves to the Bertie of Life. Someone I trust once told me that I have attributes which could put me in the limelight, but whenever that light turns toward me, I slink away. It's true.

And yet I love to sit next to the person in the limelight. I realized this again last week when I hung out two nights with a friend who is going to be very famous very soon. I won't say who he is because many of you will have seen him on TV -- and if you haven't, you will. (Right now he's one of those faces you recognize without knowing the name. But you'll know the name soon-- believe me.)

Everywhere we went, people would come up to us on the street and say, "Oh my God, it's YOU!" He'd shake hands and chat. Most of these people were out of towners because New Yorkers don't even act that way for DeNiro, usually-- but it was sweet and he'd blush a little and they'd take pictures and leave us full of "I can't wait to tell my friends back home!" exclamations. There were points where we couldn't get 20 feet down the sidewalk without people rushing him. It was funny, in a way. Mostly it was exciting to watch, because I've known him since I first moved here and his star just keeps rising.

And I felt a weird sense of pride that I'm not sure I like, being the person with him. I mean, I am really happy for my friend, and I am psyched that he's getting there. He works hard and he deserves it.

But getting in a taxi with my friend after a gushing group of Texans encircled and leapt around him, I thought, Cupcake-- yo! Why aren't YOU working that hard? What in fact are you doing with your life right now?

It's not that I want to be a star. I'm too shy for that. I do theatre because I've always done it and I feel safe, for the period of time I am onstage. It feels secure to me because for that period of time I am performing, I know exactly what will happen to me in the next several minutes. It's a relief. I feel invulnerable because there are no surprises. I'm a very good actress, and with a longer set of nails and thinner thighs, I might have pursued it as a career and been successful. But I don't have long nails, and no one ever called me svelte. And at the end of the day I am a realistic girl, and I know that the lack of those things-- and mostly the lack of driving ambition-- means that it wouldn't have worked out.

But like everyone, I want to feel good about what I am doing. And right now, all I'm doing is waiting. And the waiting gets me in a funk, and then I don't write and I don't feel good about myself when I'm not writing.

What am I waiting for, you ask? I'm...

Waiting to sell a crappy apartment building I own in Vermont. The deal may be dead in the water, or it may simply be moving at the speed of continental drift. I can't tell, but it's driving me nuts. Vermont has it's own time-frame and continental drift seems speedy there.

Waiting to move out of this house where I'm sitting, the one I used to own and into the house I am buying. As I type, the new owners are working on the illegal apartment they're building in the basement. I went down earlier and discovered that yes, they are still using my electricity to do their construction. I am surrounded by an ever-growing forest of stacked boxes, and it's starting to feel surreal.

Waiting to delve into three free-lance jobs that I've been sort of working on for two months but not really able to move forward on for various reasons.

Waiting for my best friend's wedding which is Jan 14.

Waiting for my car to die.

Waiting for a check for $6000 for work that I did three years ago. The person I did the work for died, and the judge has to sign off on the invoices that were sent in by the lawyers. It's been "any day now" for the last year.

I feel like my whole life is on the other side of a glass wall. Every day I make calls to push things forward, to try to jump in the pool that will be my future and then just as I'm about to leap off the edge I look down and notice there's no water in there.

Shades of Seymour Glass.

I miss Casey. I felt at least while she was alive that I was grounded. I knew where I belonged, because Casey was there. That loss messed with my head, more than you'd think it would. Now I'm feeling like I need community and I don't know where to get it. I guess I should try to find a job that isn't essentially self-employment, but I also know that nobody gets rich working for somebody else, and I am hesitant to join another firm that might be as soul-killing as the job I left in October.

Listen to me. I'm in a funk. It's the damn First Week of January thing. That's all.

I'm shutting up now and going back to make phone calls to move things forward.

My acting coach says "When you encounter something that that gets in the way of your work-- That thing is your work."

So I'm going to have to work on my attitude, I guess.

Send me good thoughts, guys. Fan positive energy through the ether in this general direction.

Happy New Year. Meh. Okay. I guess I mean that.

Best laid plans...

2005-12-29T11:38:00.000-05:00

I'm back in New Jersey. Despite my previous posting saying that I'd be driving up, I flew.

Why, you ask? Because, as I also noted in the previous posting...plans change, sometimes quite unexpectedly.

I never should have posted that I was driving up here. Even though I made concession to the possibility of mining accidents or other fateful occurences, my declaration forced the gods to thwart me. I made it 200 miles north of my parents house before the car broke down. It's got less than 10,000 miles on it, but it's been having problems since Dad was in a front-end collision. (Which is why he's decided not to drive any more. His vision isn't what it used to be. Which is why he was giving me the car.)

So the Ford garage 200 miles north of my parents' house fixed it, and I drove back to my parents house, and they're going to continue driving it short distances until they're sure all the little post-accident kinks have been found and they trust it enough to get me 1130 miles from their house to mine.

In the meantime, I will keep applying prayer and power steering fluid to the mini-van, which may get me around another few weeks. I am relying more on the prayer than the power steering fluid, but we'll see.

I am restless. Towers of boxes overpower my apartment, so that I can't relax in any room but the kitchen. I got back last night and discovered that while I was away last week, the people who bought the house built an illegal 2-bedroom apartment in the basement. My roommate said they've been moving their stuff in. So apparently now they will really be underfoot.

In building their apartment, they blocked off my dryer. And in fact it's now THEIR dryer, though I never agreed to that and am not real happy about it. When they made the offer on the house, they asked for the washer and dryer included. It wasn't included on the listing sheet, and the realtor forgot to tell me that they wanted it. I signed the contract in a hurry, as I was literally getting in the car to fly to Florida to visit my parents at the beginning of November, I didn't read the contract (I know, I know!) because the realtor explained it to me and then said, "Sign here." The realtor admitted it was his error and says he'll buy me a new washer dryer when I move to the new house. (The two there are 15 years old, and mine was brand new.)

In the meantime-- now I can't do my laundry at home. I suppose I can drive to Vermont, 279 miles, and do it at my house there. I'm not above using a laundromat. It's just that I didn't realize I'd HAVE to because I didn't know they were illegally building another apartment in the basement, and if you go back to my posting "Occupied!" you will see that the New Owner (wife) said I was perfectly welcome to continue using the dryer. That was of course before they build a wall around it.

I don't know where to go today, but I don't want to be here. I have business calls to make but I feel displaced. And I'm sad about something else, too, a decision I have to make about a situation that brings me little joy. (That little joy it brings me is dazzling. But there's so very little of it that it just ends up confusing me.)

And I hate this time of year because like everyone else I compare what I meant to do this year with what I actually accomplished. As I was caught up in and consumed by that horrible job I quit in October, 2005 was a wash for me. I wish there was a way to do it over. But I guess there is, and it's called 2006.

Headin' Back

2005-12-27T10:05:00.000-05:00

Because my father is no longer driving, and because my stalwart minivan back in Jersey City is doing the automotive equivalent of coughing up blood, my parents are giving me my dad's car. So I am driving from Florida to New Jersey, starting out in, oh, an hour or so, and getting back there at some point or another, probably in the next 48 hours, if the Lord is willing.

(In my family, we never say anything is definite. This because once my Uncle Gary said that he and my Aunt Rose were going somewhere the next day, and no sooner did he utter the remark than there was an accident in the coal mine and he lost his finger. It was not a major handicap to him and in fact made him really good at tricking children with that "disappearing finger" trick grown-ups do-- but it set the precedant of cautious descriptions of plans. Besides, even without mining accidents, plans change...As I'm sure you've noticed, dear Reader, in your own life.)

But I am headed north, fortified with about 32 hours of books on tape. Dad has a Ford Focus and it will be strange to sit low on the road, versus high up amongs the birds and SUVs, as I have for 5 years in my minivan. I like tall cars.

I bought the minivan in 2001 when I thought I was going to head to Mexico to live on the beach with a 23-year old Australian surfer named Cameron. There were any number of reasons why this seemed like a very good idea at the time. I'd met Cam in Athens. He was pretty and fun, but not real bright. Still, I'd recently been in a horrible car accident (think 6 inches of Vermont slush and a hydroplaning Subari crashing headlong into a speeding Cavalier)-- and I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. First, I bolted to Greece, having heard in The Jewel of The Nile that, "When the going gets tough, the tough go to Greece"-- and there I met this cute surfer boy, and after several bottles of the local wine, we decided to move to Mexico.

As I said, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I came back, bought a laptop and a minivan (to replace the ill-fated Subaru), and was supposed to pick Cam up at JFK a few days later.

Instead, I got a rueful phone call from Perth. It seems my young Adonis packed his passport in his suitcase, which he then checked for his flight. Being as I said, not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, he copped an attitude with the Greek immigration guys. This is, dear Readers, an ill-advised course of action in any country, a fact of which I encourage you to make due note. They roughed him up a little and held him for a night in a cell at the Athens airport. And after that the poor darling wanted his Mummy. He changed his flight and hightailed it back to Australia.

I considered going to Mexico anyway. Instead, I went to New Orleans. The accident had me pretty freaked out about snow and anywhere south of Vermont sounded better than I was going to move there. I looked at apartments and found one I really liked about the Voodoo Museum-- all high ceilings and French doors opening onto the French Quarter and one of those dark inner courtyards. But instead fate intervened again, this time in the form of a bitch named Christian Crocker (know her?) who intercepted and stole the letter containing the Postal Money Order for my security deposit. We know it was Christian Crocker, who would have been my neighbor if I'd moved to that apartment above the Voodoo Museum, because she was stupid enough to white out the name on it and put her own. She cashed it, probably at the Ritz where she worked. Although the US Postal Inspector chased her down and made her repay me the money, the landlord, having not received my letter and money order, thought I'd flaked out. He rented the apartment to someone else. So although I'd priced the U-haul and had my Casey-girl shaved for the warmer weather, I had no apartment to move. In view of recent events, perhaps Miss Crocker was acting as an angel, not an asshat. Perhaps her intervention in my destiny was a blessing. At the time, it was not a thing that made me happy. And I still am pretty sure she was just a bitch with a coke-habit, even if it all worked out for the best.

So since I didn't want to go back down to NOLA look for another apartment, I moved to NYC. I arrived on August 11, 2001. Got a great apartment in the West Village, with a nice view of the Twin Towers.

Need I go on?

And here I am, driving back today. If anyone's looking for me, I'll be in the car heading north on 95. Mass, I'll honk as I drive through DC to say hi. If you hear a horn-- that'll be me.

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday. I did. But I'm glad to be headed back, all the same.

Happy blogging, til we meet again.

Buckeyes

2005-12-20T11:18:00.000-05:00

Buckeyes

I am in Florida for Christmas. My sister is here, too. Bored with Barcelona, she spent last month in a small town in France, then is moving to Thailand next week. She came back for December to spend the holidays with us for the first time in 3 years, and to do PR for her book that came out the beginning of the month.

I got here Sunday night. Mom drove me in from the airport. When we turned into the driveway, I noticed the Christmas lights weren’t blinking from the tall hedge next to the house. First December those haven’t been there.

”Where are the lights?” I asked, a little frozen, waiting for her response.

”Oh, the hedge is too tall now. I decided not to bother.”

I registered this. Mom’s eighty-one now. Things are winding down.

I came in and my father and sister met us in the kitchen, with the little Pomeranian, Fang, who I brought down here from New Jersey when my mom’s other Pom, Tyler, died. We sat around the kitchen table talking, and because I always like to have a plan (whether or not I adhere to it), I said, “Okay, so what are we doing this week?”

One of the things I wanted to do was mail a box of Buckeyes to a friend. Mom said, “I didn’t make buckeyes this year. It seemed like too much trouble.”

I can’t say I was surprised to hear this. But I still had a physical reaction to it—sort of like a small electric shock to my neurological system. Every other Christmas since I left for college, when I got home for the holidays, there were trays and trays of buckeyes taking up space in the freezers.

Buckeyes have been a tradition in our family for as long as I can remember. They’re peanut butter balls dipped in a chocolate casing. The recipe makes about 10 trillion dozen, so it takes forever to make them. (And longer before they go away.) First you roll the balls and then dip them individually into the chocolate coating. When you're finished, there are so many of them that it’s like home-grown tomatoes in August: though they're delicious, they exist mostly to be given away. There’s more than one family can possibly eat.

Let the reader know two things:
1.) That my parents were childless for many years, and then having abandoned hope of producing offspring, were suddenly surprised, late in life, by producing two in quick succession, after all. (I remind you of this because those of you good with numbers may be trying to estimate Cupcake’s age—and that’s a difficult thing to do anyway, as Cupcake has TADD, Time Attention Deficit Disorder, and as a consequence her aging process has been random, so that one year she is might be much younger than she was in the previous year, only to leap several years ahead and back again in following years. This has created a certain ambiguity in her appearance which has delighted casting directors for years, as she can sort of assume any age, as required. (Cupcake would also like to thank Clarin’s sunscreen products for their assistance in her chrono-chamileon abilities, and to encourage her readers of any age to WEAR THE EFFING SUNSCREEN, YO!)

AND 2.) Cupcake, for the first time, made the Buckeyes herself.

It was a little sad. But a little joyful. At least Mom was there to supervise, and it felt somehow like a rite of passage. Perhaps all rites of passage have an element of sadness to them.

In Swaziland,the boys wrestle a Yak to the ground when they come of manhood. I wonder if as they are doing it, they also have a sense of wonderment, at going through the motions as if watching themselves. If they think, “Am I really doing this? Is it now my turn?”

At any rate, the chocolate coating mixture in the top of the double boiler was the color of the Swazi mud in the corral where the wrestling is done. (I know because after the wrestling is done there is a ceremony, which I went to, where all the women had to stand barefoot in the ankle deep mud, the color of which I will never forget.)

So the Buckeyes are made. I didn’t make the full batch, so I only have 5 trillion dozen to disperse through the universe as tokens of Cupcake’s family holiday goodwill. If you would like some, email me and I will send you some. I like the thought of a readers sitting at their computers, reading blogs while eating chocolate peanut-butter balls I rolled, one after another, as emblems of holiday tradition. They’re very good. (Although I actually haven’t eaten one for two decades, since I noticed a long time ago that whenever I eat sugary things, I get a headache and often start to cry for no reason.)

There is surely more to come on being home for the holidays. And there’s more I could write about right now, like the fact that my roommate in Jersey City was awakened this morning by an intruder opening the door to her room and turning on the lights. She reports that when she sat up in bed and said "What the $*#@?!”, he screamed like a girl and ran away. (After saying so silly things that I don’t feel like explaining right now.)

There are reasons to wonder if perhaps this “break-in” is connected to my lovely new “landlords”, the people who bought the house from me. And I cannot WAIT to get out of there.

But that’s for another time. Right now I just wanted to let concerned readers know that the Buckeyes have been made. I may even go out and decorate the hedge with twinkling lights.

It’s great to be with the family, though. I wonder how long that will last. I hope the whole time I am down here. I hope I can get through all the days without losing sight of how precious this time with them is. Then it really would be the best Christmas ever.

2005-12-15T15:18:00.000-05:00

Nobody lives on my street. Not even me.

I’m referring to my street in Vermont, a dirt road flattened annually by the town roller as “Mud Season” ends. A road faithfully plowed and sanded during the winter. A road that runs a mile off a state highway and offers up to the forest only four houses, all of them empty.

I suppose animals live there. It is true wilderness, though, and they are mostly itinerant. Like the bear my old roommate saw asleep in the driveway one sunny day. Or the three moose that knocked down my six-foot fence as they leapt over it. Or the wild turkey, gobble-gobbling right outside my front door one morning when I opened it. Or the pheasant that stroll through the yard at times. Or the tiny, orange tree salamanders that look like they should be in a jungle somewhere, not on a mountain in Vermont.

Those seem like random visitors, such as myself.

There was an active beaver dam down the hill when I moved here, but a few years ago they gave up that place and built another one upstream.

I suppose the mice live here full time. I encourage them to leave, but they persist, lavishing chocolate jimmies on my countertops. Last time I was here, against my animal-loving heart, I left De-con out to thin their ranks. It breaks my heart, but they’re squatters. Literally. The jimmies are evidence. All houses in Vermont have mice, at least in winter.

The first house sits closest to the road. The people who owned it (the “Goldens”, I believe the name was) moved to Florida two years ago. It’s for sale. The locals think it’s overpriced. ($285K, but with 10 acres of land and abutting National Forest.) It will probably be bought by “outtastaters” like myself, who will either come up sometimes, as I do, or try to live here full time without going stark raving mad, as I did. (That’s meant to read, “as I tried to live here, not “as I went stark raving mad.” Even though I have now cleared it up, I like the ambiguity and am leaving the sentence as it is.)

Past the Golden’s old house, there’s a little bridge. If you go over that and down about 100 yards or so, you come to Elsie’s house. Elsie’s house look like Disney built it to be the perfect Grandmother’s House. She used to sit on her screened in porch amidst her plants, watching the birds come to her numerous birdfeeders. She was rosy-cheeked and bespectacled, like one of those dried-apple dolls they sell in Ye Olde Vermonte Tourist Shoppes. I liked her so much.

She died last spring, two weeks after her 100th birthday. She lived alone until the very end.

Last time I saw Elsie, she asked me if I was going to sell my house, now that I’m living in New Jersey most of the time. I said no.

I said, “Elsie, I intend to own that house til I’m about your age, at least.” She nodded approvingly.

“What about you?” I asked. “You selling anytime soon?” She knew I was teasing.

She said, “Cupcake, when I leave here, I’m going feet first in a pine box.”

She was almost right. She went feet first, but on a gurney. She’d broken her hip, just a few days after her 100th birthday. Shortly afterwards, it was lights out for Elsie. (When you’re that age and you break something, it spirals downwards fast.)

Her family plans to keep the house. There was a truck in the driveway when I drove in yesterday—somebody doing work. I should have stopped and asked what was up. (You can do that in Vermont, and it’s called “Being Neighborly.” In New Jersey, it would be called, “Being Up In Somebody Else’s Business” or “Being An Asshole.” )

Then there’s Eden’s house. It really belongs to her family, but I think of it as Eden’s house because she’s my age and the only one in that family that I know. They live in a brownstone on the Upper East Side (read as: not poor), and their house is big, renovated with bells and whistles like Jacuzzi and granite countertops, they have tennis courts and a swimming hole (which I would like to sneak into some hot summer night, if I ever came up here with someone to sneak into it with) and acres and acres of sprawling scenery, so gorgeous that you want to put whipped cream on it and eat it up with a spoon. When there’s snow, you wouldn’t even need the whipped cream.

And then the woods start. That’s where the Beaver Pond was, in the little brook that marks where the cleared land and the forest meet. If you go up the hill about half a mile, you come to my house. After my house, the road is what they call “Class 4”, meaning “drive at your own risk.” It goes all the way over the mountain to another town, but I’ve never gone over it. I think it’s about 15 miles as the crow flies.

But where the maintained road ends, there’s a big black gate. And behind the big black gate is my driveway, which leads to my house. My sanctuary. My home.

It’s a quirky house, built in three sections over three decades. The builder was Elsie’s brother-in-law, who everyone called Uncle Tom. First it was just a hunting cabin. But he kept building and finally moved up here full time for a while. I don’t remember why he sold it to the Nace family, but he did. They lived here for 15 years or so. And then they sold it to me.

I plan to keep it forever. I don’t think I could live in New Jersey and spend all that time in Manhattan if I didn’t know that I had somewhere to go where I can decompress. As I am writing this, I think there probably isn’t another living person for at least a mile in any direction. Just me, Momo, Boss, and the mice. (They’re still here, and they’re retaliating against me by trying to poison Momo and Boss. I keep finding blue De-Con pellets around the house, in the middle of the floor, and on the sofa cushions.)
I have to figure out who can deliver firewood, and motivate myself to shovel a path down the stone walkway to my car. But everywhere I go, I am surrounded by beauty, silence and solitude, and as always, I walk around here with my heart in my mouth, reveling at the gift I’ve been given by having this refuge.

Nobody lives on this street. Not even me. But I think those of us who are not here, think of it constantly, the longing for running through us like the mice through our houses. I know Eden does. She told me. And Elsie’s granddaughter, Leslie, who begged the family not to sell the house when Elsie died. And Amy, a girl who visits my house to write sometimes. And me. And last time I was here, I was driving to town at sunset, and I could swear I saw Elsie sitting on her porch. She’d passed away several months before. But I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I waved.

I would leave either, given the choice.

Coffee, and Desire

2005-12-12T12:40:00.000-05:00

I think I am going to Vermont tonight. That’s good.
Let me explain to you about Cupcake and coffee: Cupcake’s a tea-drinking girl. Why is that, you ask? Because Cupcake loooooves coffee. Too much. When Cupcake lived in Italy, she drank at least eight espressos a day. (Technically, the plural is “espressi.”) Coffee can be a costly habit, and Cupcake tends to be thrifty.

It was not, however, the money that made Cupcake abandon coffee. It was the realization that the pleasure of the coffee she was drinking went unnoticed. She was always looking ahead, longingly, for the next cup, and the one after that.

And let me explain to you about Cupcake and dogs: Cupcake likes dogs because they live in the moment. As a girl who climbs up into the treehouse of her thoughts and won’t come down for dinner, Cupcake finds that dogs remind her to Be Here Now. Cupcake finds living with dogs to be a valuable practice. She comes home every day to be met by wagging Zen Masters, who keep her focused on the NOW. (When she can snatch the pebble from Momo’s paw, she knows it will be time to leave.)

When Cupcake realized that drinking coffee kept pushing her out of the present, she gave it up for years. She now drinks it only on special occasions, while muttering a warning to herself to be on the lookout for repercussions of unwarranted desire, which inevitably follow. For Cupcake, coffee is an addiction. She recognizes the defining maxim of addiction: “one is too many, and a thousand isn’t enough.”

As Cupcake says to herself when she is eschewing the siren’s song of coffee: “Anything I want that much has to be bad for me.”

Desire is fine, when it’s a pleasant tug on the sleeve of happy anticipation.

That’s the way Cupcake feels about tea. “Oh, goody! Let’s have a cup of tea, shall we?” That’s the way the thought of tea approaches her.

Coffee slides its hand up her thigh and says, “You know you want me.” She squirms, hoping to get away from its intoxicating scent, its guile, its practiced, expert seduction. She wants it desperately. But knows that if she succumbs she will give up her soul to have it; she will become slave to it. It will overtake her life. Again.

She must be guarded against it, despite her passion for it. It is a passion that will never be satisfied. Cupcake knows that one of the secrets to a happy life is to avoid, as much as humanly possible, desiring things that will lead to disappointment in the end.

There was something I wanted to do this weekend, something that never manifested. The entire weekend was about this thing (which is somewhat complicated, and inexcusably ridiculous, and too revealing for me to name). As I sat in the café staring into space over the newspaper, or listlessly packed another box of my possessions for my imminent move, or stood in the four-person-deep line at Tiffany’s to buy a present, this thing I wanted to do pressed against my head like an external migraine.

This thing offers no polite tug on the sleeve sort of anticipation. This weekend, Cupcake’s desire for this unnamed thing was arm-wrestling her roughly, practically tearing the cartilage in her rotary cuff. And it failed to find fruition, as such rough-tugging desires so often do. Cupcake was forlorn and weary of wanting, til about 3:30 am last night when she felt suddenly elated, for reasons she still doesn’t understand, seeing the humor in the situation and suddenly relaxing.

Her metaphorical arm hurts and bears a number of bruises, but she is otherwise unscathed.

Still. I am going to Vermont. It tends to reset the meter of my mind, and I think I need that. My brain turned over thousands of miles this weekend. I was not in the present, and the place where my mind took me was not a pretty or comfortable place.

Anything I desire that much has to be bad for me.

Oh, and bad for me it is. Time to hit that reset button, and drive.

About the dogs...

2005-12-09T10:35:00.000-05:00

Okay, I know that the dog thing in the last post was silly. You'd have to know Momo (aka "Frecklebelly") for it to make sense. He's an imperious little dog with a split personality, alternatingly kissing your ass with the most adorable noises and facial expressions, and then growling and muttering through curled lips, threatening to call in the ASPCA because you didn't put the right amount of Blue Cheese Salad dressing on his kibble. He won't eat the kibble without the salad dressing, you see. He's a little priss.

Boss is a sweet good ol' boy, a rescued beagle from Georgia. In March he was scrawny and sick. Now he's fat as an overstuffed sausage, partly from eating the kibble that Momo turns his nose up if I haven't prepared it properly. Boss came to me from my old job-from-hell, where he lived in the Alzheimer's unit. He got confused and peed on the floor there. (Just twice, but it got him fired.) He was confused because some of the residents were were doing the same thing. That's also where he started getting fat. Nobody there could remember if he'd already been fed. He ran with that like the puppy in the toilet paper commercial.

Enough about dogs now. I just wanted to explain. My roommate apparently was the only one who thought any of it was the least bit funny.

Should you have wondered, yes, I do keep a drawer full of sugar free strawberry Red Vines for moments of angst. They seem to do the trick.

Actually, I used to keep them for Casey. They were her favorite treat. When she died, I started eating them myself.

Enough about dogs, already, Cupcake.

Okay.

This weekend...have to see a play, have to pack some boxes. Hope to avoid the inevitable Al Quaeda meeting that will be held in my basement. Have a little present shopping to do. Have to back Seven-Layer Bars because the oven at the cafe is broken and there aren't enough pastries to sell. Every now and then I make Seven Layer Bars because Leila, who owns the cafe, only makes yuppie stuff like croissant, scones and madelines, and damn it, the people want junk. Sometimes I'll be sitting there struggling over Su Doku or my novel, people will come in and look at the pastries and say, sadly, "Isn't there anything chocolate?"

It was under duress that Leila, the owner, started making a few chocolate croissant. She's not big into sweets.

The Seven-Layer bars are nothing but sweet, and they sell flatteringly well. And the cute barrista-boys eat them, too.

It snowed last night. I wish I was in Vermont.

Have a great Friday everybody.

Cupcake Answers More Readers' Questions

2005-12-07T22:44:00.000-05:00

Again, dear Readers, I cannot thank you enough for the constant influx of mail. Nothing sets Cupcake's heart quite a pitter-patting as when she clicks on her e-mailbox to discover dozens of friendly epistolary greetings. Your collective generosity is exceeded only by your collective curiosity, and therefore Cupcake has decided to answer several frequently asked questions all at once, publicly on the blog, hoping to save other inquisitive readers the effort of typing more than is absolutely necessary. She wishes carpel tunnel syndrome on no one.

So, in no particular order-- let's see...

Cupcake, you often refer to "the dogs", and yet other than the late departed Casey, you've given us no descriptions of these creatures. What's up with that?

Well, reader, you've landed on a very sticky point. The dogs I presently live with have a very sharp lawyer, who made me sign a confidentiality agreement when I adopted them. For this reason, I have to be very careful what I disclose about them until it is cleared by their canine PR department. What I can tell you is that both are small and male, one is a purebred and one is a mutt. One is very sweet and goofy, and the other is deceptively "cute", but has the heart of Baby Stewie from "Family Guy" and is undoubtedly plotting the destruction of, if not the entire human race, at least the humans living in this house.

Hang on a sec.

What? I can't say that? Crap.

Okay-- scratch that. I'm just going to say this: While Cupcake confirms that she does presently live with two dogs, she can offer no further information about them at this time. The press will be notified when a statement has been prepared. Thank you. No further questions on this topic.

Tell us about your sister's book, Cupcake.

How timely of you to inquire, Reader, as my sister's new book is being released only this week! It is called What Every American Should Know About Who's Really Running The World, and is published by Plume. My sister's name is Melissa Rossi. And in case you're wondering, for various reasons that usually end in an animated family faux-argument, Cupcake does not share her sister's surname.

As for the book, it's timely, well-written (Cupcake edited several chapters herself)- and contains information which is available to everyone but which has not, to Cupcake's knowledge, hithertofore been assembled in one tome. Generally speaking, the further one reads into the book, the more one raises one's eyebrows at the bizarre happenings of the political and business machines around us. Cartels everywhere, and not a hero to turn to, to ride the bad guys out of Dodge. Let's just say that Cupcake's family encouraged Cupcake's sister to email chapters to friends as soon as they were written, as there was some concern that she might be snuffed out during the book's writing. Perhaps paranoid, but...read it and judge for yourself.

Did you contribute anything to the book?

Oh, Reader-- you had to ask, didn't you? I blushingly admit that yes, one or two sidebars were my idea and composition. (Cupcake curtsies low to rumbling applause.) Thank you, friends. Thank you.

Cupcake, would you say you are happy?

Oh dear. How to answer that one. Overall? Yes, I'd have to say yes. My days pass pleasantly enough. I have family and friends that I love, a little intrigue here and there, and a desk full of sugar-free strawberry Red Vines, which, at only 1.125 net carbs per Vine, offer a compensatory pick-me up if something tweaks Cupcake's heart and leaves her momentarily blue. So, yes, overall, Cupcake would affirm that she is happy. Though like many people, sometimes she longs for something more.

Something more than what?

That's just it, isn't it? Something more than sugar-free strawberry Red Vines, even--- some great quest of love or adventure-- something like when Cupcake was younger and traveling through Africa with a handsome Canadian rake whose boundless zest for life made him simultaneously the most fascinating of companions and the most maddening of them. It was a time like Jackson Browne's line, "When the roads were as many as the places I had dreamed of, and my friends and I were one."

Yeah.

Cupcake still dreams of those nights in Swaziland, with the fog tiptoeing up the hill, seducing everything to soft-focus, and convincing Cupcake and the Canadian to drink more whiskey and play chicken with lit cigarettes. (Cupcake won.)

Now, life on the edge has subsided to a desk drawer full of Red Vines. Only a few months ago, Cupcake used to think, chewing on the edge of a Red Vine, "I'll just pretend I'm in New Orleans, smoking a cigar and staying up way past my bedtime over a snifter of some expensive brandy, while listening to a brilliant guy explain like pure poetry the physics of a bullet's trajectory ---the way it presses forward, flying, moving up until it falls. And fall it will."

Now, even that dream of escaping to a brandy-swirled New Orleans is gone. Because, of course, New Orleans is gone. Cupcake has enough morbid curiosity to want to go to New New Orleans. But she sadly reflects that it is likely to disappoint, the way she suspects that Swaziland now has turned to a series of strip malls, built up with KFC and Taco Bell and Dollar Stores. Before, when there was just a KFC in the middle of nowhere, it was kind of funny. She suspects that, now, it would be kind of sad.

And the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting. Soon they will be gone, before Cupcake can get there. With or without the Canadian, who long ago promised that they'd ascend that peak together someday.

Cupcake's heard a lot of promises from a lot of men. That one, you know, she kind of did believe. But no matter.

The trajectory--- the bullet always falls.

Damn. Something more than what, you ask? More than Jersey City real estate. Though, now that she's dug the Red Vines out of the desk, Cupcake concedes that perhaps she's just being sentimental about the past.

Why don't you post a picture of yourself on the blog? What do you look like?

Hm...yes. I do keep meaning to do that and then I think of reasons not to. Like that I enjoy being a woman of mystery. And that I hate commitments. I'd feel like I'd actually have to look like the picture. Which is hard for me, because every three months I look different. It's always been like that.

If you want celebrity references, then I'll tell you this: I am sometimes told that I look a bit like Natalie Wood (presumably before the boating accident)-- and I am frequently told that my mannerisms and diction remind people of Jeanine Garafolo (hopefully before she became the embarassingly strident co-host of Air America's evening show, Majority Report).

What? Oh. Yes, I'll read it.

Okay, guys. I've just been handed a memo from the dogs' legal and PR advisors. Let's see what it says:

To the Readers of Cupcake Central: It has been determined by the parties of the First Part, hereafter referred to as "Boss" (a beagle) and "Momo" (a dachshund/poodle mix)that the party of the Second Part, hereafter referred to as "Cupcake" or "that bitch who said we're getting pudgey and halfed our kibble portions at dinner tonight"- ahem-- the party of the Second Part-- where was I? -- oh yes, has permission only to reveal at present the name, breed and sex of "Boss" (beagle, male, neutered) and "Momo" (dachshund/poodle mix, male, neutered)----

What? Well, it's written here-- RIGHT here: "neutered" -- See? I was just reading the memo--- Then you shouldn't have put it IN the memo, if I wasn't supposed to read it--!

Fine!!! I'll just cut the posting short then.

Bye everyone.

Occupied!

2005-12-06T14:31:00.000-05:00

I am occupied.

No, not in any “keep busy, for the Devil finds work for idle hands” sense. (The Devil, believes me, tosses plenty of bad behavior balls my way. I catch as many of them as I can, but I have a short attention span and often wander off, even on him.)

I am occupied, as in occupied military zone. The invading force? The people who bought my house. They keep coming over and trotting around as if they OWN the place.

Okay, so--- they do own the place. But I didn't think they were going to be all up in my face so quickly. I'm thinking that I'd better put 911 on my speed dial, because if it escalates, there might be an INCIDENT.

The agreement was that I was staying in the house til the end of the year. That was part of the offer. They asked if, pretty please, we could close early. They’re doing a 1031 Tax-Deferred Exchange, whereby clever real estate investors like myself get to deprive the IRS out of a whole lot of money. But there are time limits and restrictions, and to comply with theirs, they had to close before Thanksgiving.

I’m an easy-goin’ gal. I said, “Sure. Why not?”

I’ll tell you why not. Because as soon as the papers were signed, they started breathing down my neck. The day after closing, Cupcake comes trotting happily down the stairs to let the dogs out the backdoor. She is wild-haired, half-asleep, and wearing (THANK GOD!) a ridiculous set of PJs that she got for Christmas last year—sky-blue satin boxers and top. She releases the dogs to the great outdoors to perform their ablutions, and then discovers that the new Owner (husband) is standing next to her. Where did he come from? Why, the basement.

It’s a bit jolting to find a virtual stranger that close to her when she’s wearing PJs. Usually, when Cupcake awakens to find a stranger next to her, she’s in her birthday suit.

Just kidding. Those days are gone. (Ah, the 80s. You kids don’t know what you missed.)

But Cupcake had been known, occasionally, to trot down those stairs wearing a thong and t-shirt. Or just a t-shirt. Or even just a thong. Those days, too, are gone.

Apparently, the basement is a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of treasure and mystery. At least, so it appears by the interest the new owners show in it. They keep coming over and hanging around in it. In the two plus years Cupcake lived in this house, she used the basement for three things: 1.) Storage; 2.) Laundry; 3.) Cavorting with the delightful rabbit-in-residence.

The basement also served, briefly, as rehearsal space for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, a play Cupcake produced and starred in. (With the help of a heck of a lot of makeup to make her look older, she adds hastily, for the benefit of anyone who’s read the 1971 Pulitzer Winning play by Paul Zindel.) The play is the reason that Cupcake acquired the delightful rabbit-in-residence, but nothing, nothing, nothing could persuade her to part with that rabbit, whose charms Cupcake was quite unprepared for. Cupcake is smitten. She admits it. She’s in bunny-love. And highly recommends rabbits as pets. Cupcake herself never thought it would be all that interesting to own a rabbit. She asserts emphatically that it is.

The basement, you must understand, has for the past nine months been the domain of Miss Clover Bunny. Last year, while Cupcake was on a long trip to Vermont, a previous roommate staged a coup on behalf of Clover, liberating her from her hutch and giving her free reign of the basement. (Perhaps “rein” is the appropriate spelling, but from Clover’s point of view, it’s “reign.”)

UNTIL NOW.

Last week, on the afternoon of the sky-blue satin pajama incident, Cupcake was accosted again on the back stairs by the new Owner (wife). While she seems well intentioned, no one has ever accused this woman of concerned with tact.

New Owner (wife): Oh, Cupcake—about the basement. I’ll just arrange to have all your things down there thrown away, shall I?

Cupcake: What?

New Owner (wife): I’m assuming that you don’t want any of that old stuff. Don’t worry about a thing—We’ll be having a dumpster come, so we’ll just pitch it for you.

Note to reader: the stuff in basement consists of boxes of old documents like tax returns, etc (approx 6 of those), suitcases containing Cupcake’s summer clothes, two chairs and a futon Cupcake isn’t using at the moment, and various stage props, laid out on a table: a plaster skull (Hamlet), the skeleton of a dead cat (Marigolds), an old rotary telephone, a piggy bank, etc. And power tools such as befit being in a basement. Not an overflowing basements full of crap that would take a huge amount of work to deal with, or anything indicating that Cupcake confuses basements with garbage dumps. Largely, it was a vast terrain of emptiness, suitable for a happy bunny to hop through.

Cupcake: Um…what are you talking about? I’ll go through it before I move out. But thank you for the offer. But I have plenty of time because I am staying til the end of the year, as was agreed. In the contract. The end of the year.

N. O. (w): Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. We said you could stay IN THE APARTMENT for the rest of the year. The basement isn’t part of that.

Cupcake: Actually, the agreement was that I could “stay” til the end of the year. And as I USE the basement every day, and my rabbit lives there, I took that to mean the basement, too.

N.O. (w): I made it very clear to everyone that I would need to get into the basement as soon as we closed.

Cupcake: Well, um… this is the first I’m hearing of it.

N. O. (w): As I said, don’t worry about a thing. I’ll just have someone come next week and throw all your things away for you. Don’t trouble yourself over it. Although you’re PERFECTLY WELCOME to continue doing your laundry until you move out.

Cupcake: And if I give you the Sudentenland, do you promise we’ll have Peace In Our Time?

N.O. (w): What?

Cupcake: Nothing. Just…I need to think about this.

N.O. (w): Well, I have an exterminator coming next week. Just in case there’s some sort of vermin crawling around. You know, with the rabbit down there and everything, heaven knows what’s crawled in. The exterminator will be spraying the basement quite thoroughly. Just so you know. Spraying the basement. Thoroughly. The rabbit—well, just so you know.

I went upstairs and called my lawyer, who heaved a heavy sigh and looked at the contract and told me that “stay” was not defined, and it was the first he’d heard that I had to vacate the basement, too. Called the realtor. Ditto.

But she kept calling about it. And coming over with no notice. Twice she's brought her mother, who only speaks Arabic and who walks through my apartment pointing at things and shaking her head, clearly telling her daughter in loud, shrill Arabic that the place is a dump. (Yes, the floors need to be re-done. That's one of the reasons I'm moving. And I hate the layout of the kitchen, too.)

The new Owner (husband)keeps showing up and "fixing things." Twice now, he's "fixed" the back door so that it won't open at all. And once he "fixed" the front door so that it wouldn't open, either. Mercifully, he never fixed them at the same time, so one or the other has been usable. It's just a matter of time til they lock me in or out completely. Accidentally, of course.

I swear to God there was an Al Quaeda meeting in my basement on Sunday. There was a large group of Arabic people in my basement for five hours. With my rabbit, no less.

I bolted, coward that I am. I abandoned my rabbit and dogs and fled to the café. When I came back, they were still there. FIVE hours later. When the back door slammed behind them, I ventured down the stairs to de-brief Clover about the experience.

Al Quaeda had pulled all the ceiling tiles down. The rabbit was sitting in a pile of ceiling tile rubbish, washing her face.

I’m not even French, but I surrendered. I called a friend and we brought all my boxes, power tools, summer clothes, and stage props upstairs. And I brought Clover upstairs, too. And now she’s in a hutch. And she looks very very sad.

I can’t let her run around upstairs because of the dogs. (She calls them “the predators.”) So she’s in a different room with a closed door, surrounded by boxes and in her hutch. (She calls it “prison.”)

When rabbits are very scared and upset, they pant. You never want to hear a bunny pant. It’s like having a child with a high fever. There’s nothing you can do. And it’s agonizing. Clover was panting last night.

I took her down the basement for a while, and she seemed okay. But I can’t let her play down there, once the exterminator comes. I’m afraid she’ll step on poison and then lick it off her paws. Rabbits are very clean, like cats.

Vermin, indeed.

The original sales agreement gave me the option to rent my apartment for a couple of months. The new house will not be vacant til mid to late January. So there’s a months gap.

But I am not staying at my old house. It would end in bloodshed. I might go to Vermont, but my roommate and I were talking last night about maybe subletting a place in the City for a few weeks, because it would be fun.

What have we learned, Reader? We have learned (again) that clean breaks are the best. That as it would be foolish to, for example, divorce someone and then remain living with them, it is also foolish to sell your house and then remain living in it. Blurry lines = no good.

So I am occupied. I wish there were street signs to change. I dream of putting tiny, invisible pin pricks in the plastic pump of the washing machine innards, the day before I leave. (But I won’t.) I think of Penn and Teller bringing a box of cockroaches onto the David Letterman set, and I wonder where they got them.

Vive la Resistance!

I hope you never have to hear a rabbit pant. It’s a sad, sad sound.

Winding Roads of the Heart

2005-12-04T16:20:00.000-05:00

There are some people I will always love, no matter what they do. And some of them are strangers.

Prince Charles, for example. I feel very affectionately towards him. Am I the only person who saw Diana’s charm but nevertheless sided with Charles in the divorce?

It’s not his public side that I feel connected to, though. I feel like I know him, like we’re friends. Sometimes I dream about him. Once, I dreamed that I was Prince Charles and I was digging sod. It was a very vivid dream. I remembered it when I woke up—the feeling of the spade in my hand, the way after a while it begins to burn, even through gloves. The sensation of pushing the blade through the sod, the crunch it makes, satisfying movement of shoulders and upper arm. Later, that day I heard on the news that he was in Scotland at spending the day working at a peat farm.

That seemed a touch coincidental.

In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck says that love is when we extend our egos enough to include another person. If someone hurts my friend, I get angry. That’s because the person I love sits within my ego’s boundaries.

Sometimes, those boundaries of mine seem rather randomly set. It’s like the erratic winding roads of Boston, following the paths of early citizens taking their cattle to graze on the Common. (Thus it is a city designed, not by urban planners, but rather by bovine ones.)

The roads of my heart wind like that, circuitous, random, and sometimes defying logic. My affections include some very perplexing people, both known and unknown. Where unknown, it's just that my awareness of their existence is imbued with adeep and inexplicable tenderness. This is bewildering enough when the object of my inexplicable tenderness is a celebrity— the aforementioned Prince of Wales, and others. Bono, for example, who I feel I know- not through his music, but because years ago I had a series of dreams that I was his girlfriend, waiting in his hotel room for him to get back from shows. In the hotel, I watched CNN, I called friends while hanging upside down from the hotel bed, I flossed my teeth and scrutinized my face in the hotel bathroom. I put on make up so I'd look dazzling when he got back. I ate peanuts out of the mini-bar. Eventually I’d hear the boys all coming down the hall, shouting and stomping in the corridor, and I’d run to the door, or he’d open it, and I’d say, “Hey! How’d it go?” And then we'd hang out, either with or without the rest of the band. (That Edge guy has B.O., by the way.) And then we'd end up very satisfactorily in bed. (Though the dreams usually end before the R rating was jeopardized.)

This makes sense to me because if I WAS dating Bono, I’d be unlikely to go the shows. I like U2 (who doesn’t?) but I don’t particularly like concerts. One of my earliest memories is plugging my ears and shouting over deafening music, “Daddy! Make that black man stop playing the guitar so loud!” Years later I would realize that the black man was Hendrix, opening for the Monkees at Cincinnati Gardens in one of the freakiest musical combinations of history.

And there are others I feel connected to. Minor Kennedys. Not the big players. Rarely-heard of Shrivers and— I don’t know. It’s weird. It seems random.

But sometimes this inexplicable tenderness is for non-celebrities, ordinary people I’ve never seen before. When I meet them, the feeling hits me over the head. Usually, the first time I meet such people, it's like I am recognizing them. The recognition is different from the tenderness. Some people I just “recognize.” But others are not only strangely familiar but already beloved. As though my love for them preceded my awareness that they actually were alive.

The boy who is probably the great love of my life was one of those. He was Australian, and his name was Robert. The first time I saw him, he was walking up my driveway to come over for coffee. He was my roommate’s girlfriend’s roommate’s houseguest, and she said, “I think you might like this guy. Let’s invite the boys over to your house.” So she called them and did.

There he was, walking up my driveway, and I looked at him and had an immediate reaction. I turned to my roommate’s girlfriend and said—I remember this quite clearly—“What on earth were you thinking? He’s not my type at all!”

So much for love at first sight.

Then he walked in the door and our eyes met. My first thought then was, “Oh, THERE you are.”

Our first conversation was about whether I should marry him so he could stay in the US. We had a thing for 2 years, though we never saw each other in the same country twice. It started in the US, then I went to Australia, then we met in Belgium and finally Norway.

It ended, as such things often do. But it ended very amicably. Having loved him before I met him, it wasn’t like I had any choice in the matter. In fact, I did the ending, because under the circumstances (that he was living in Norway) I thought he'd be happier without worrying about me. I suggested we date other people. The circumstances changed, but the emotions were ever constant. I always only wanted him to be happy. And by all accounts he is, married to a Norwegian girl, now the father to a baby daughter named Hedda. I know this because when I met his family, we all felt the same sense of recognition and affection for each other, as if we’d always known each other. They keep, occasionally, in touch.

Robert's someone else’s husband, and we haven’t spoken in years. And yet I love him with that sincere inherent tenderness. How could I not? I delight that he is happy. Though I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I hadn't been such a jolly good sport about everything. Still, God, who does seem to have a sense of humor and of justice (who knew?), winked at me by having Robert develop a sudden, intense, adult-onset allergy to dogs. I’m sorry about that for Robert’s sake.But I think that's God saying, “See? He wasn’t the one. We’re still working the plan here. Not to worry.” ('Cause in case you hadn't picked up on this, I kinda like dogs.)

But back to the original thought: the heart has its own agenda. Why? Why are there people whose souls I cannot help but love, even if I’ve ever met them? And why is it that those people seem to be able to do anything without my affection for them changing one whit? My affections have a logic all their own, that my ego (such as it is, poor, small bruised thing) does not challenge.

But Cupcake, why do you say your ego is a small, bruised thing?

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because it is. Sometimes that’s a blessing and sometimes it’s a curse. Like, if you have only a tiny ego, any injury to it is, ipso facto, also tiny. Objectively, I know I am a good person. At least, I try to offer kindness and live within my own moral code. Yet sometimes I seem to be untouched by the ravages of self-interest. It's perplexing because I see it's unusual and I wonder sometimes if I'm like those people with no sense of pain, who put their hands on hot stoves and only notice when the smell of burning flesh fills the room.

We could look at psychological scripting and make up theories about how I was warped by certain things in my childhood. But actually, it was a very nice childhood, sans trauma or abuse, involving lots of weekends at the lake with the boat and noodle salad. But obviously something went amiss, for me to be like this. And I don’t want to theorize about where that may have happened. What's the point? (Besides, I don’t remember who has my blog address and who doesn’t. And my sister once posted some rather harsh paragraphs about me in her blog, the discovery of which caused me a few weepy hours. I don’t want to inflict that on anyone else.)

Anyway, it doesn’t matter why my ego has faulty wiring. What matters is what I do about that. I force myself to build it up. I try to take up space in my own life. (Hence this blog.) My New Year’s resolution for the past several years has been “Be Selfish.” I never manage to keep it. Although I had a breakthrough yesterday when, shopping at the 24/7 Ghetto Mart, I took the last TWO Purdue rotisserie chickens, which get marked down to $1.50 each after midnight. At first I took only one of them, thinking perhaps someone else would be happy for the other. But having made my rounds and seeing that chicken still there, I forced myself to wheel my cart back there and grab it. Trying to live a low-carb lifestyle can be expensive, and a girl needs all the $1.50 rotissrie chicken she can get.

Yet I was talking about inexplicable, undeniable, inherent love. That tenderness that I feel for certain folk. It's puzzling- I suppose in a good way, like Su Doku.

Here are some non-celebrity people I felt inexplicable tenderness for from the first moments: Two girls, Laurel and Charlene, I met on the train from Kyle of Localsh to Glasgow once. A 14 year old boy named Paul whose family was on a 2-week tour of the Alpine Countries when I was a tour guide in Europe. An old man named Otto, ditto. (Different tour group.) Someone whose blog I read but don’t correspond with at all. A guy named Nick Lynn who went to Oxford with a guy I briefly worked with. My high school friend Bryan’s Freshman year roommate, Simon. Someone I met on the internet who should have been a fling but keeps turning up like a bad penny, or a leit-motif. A lisping, eccentric waiter at a diner near Union Square.

Um…Cupcake, do you have a point here?

Yes, Reader. At least I think I do. I suppose it’s just the observation that love is like life, and sometimes there are odd twists and the road takes us strange places that we didn't know we were headed for. (“Hey! What the----! How did we get to Boston Common?”) And sometimes things happen in such a way it seems as if they were meant to be, with familiar characters making entrances as if we were waiting for them all along. Our relationship precedes the introduction.

And maybe that’s just the way it is. Maybe certain things are predestined, certain people are supposed to show up in our lives to teach a certain lesson or something.
Maybe there is some sort of plan for it all.

If Hendrix can open for the Monkees, anything is possible.

The Potsdam Guard

2005-12-02T01:44:00.000-05:00

King Friedrich Wilhelm I, father of Friedrich the Great (contemporary of Louis XV and why I started thinking about Friedrich Wilhelm, after my musings on Les Louis the other day--)

Anyway, Friedrich Wilhelm I was an odd little man who beat his children and suffered from deep depression. His greatest interest in life was his army, especially a special group of soldiers called The Potsdam Guard. These men were all giants. He had spies around Europe whose jobs were to keep the ear to the ground for stories of exceptionally tall men. These men would then be scouted to join the Potsdam Guard. If they refused, they'd be kidnapped and forced to be in the Guard anyway.

Many of the men were cretins who didn't really understand what was being asked of them. He brought them from as far away as Spain and Russia. He dressed them in designer uniforms of blue with dashing ribbons and sashes. And on his darkest days of depression, the only thing that could cheer him up was having them march single file through his bedroom.

When Freidrich Wilhelm died, the Prussian Guard was disbanded. And suddenly the streets of Europe were glutted with very tall morons, all trying to find their way home.

I've always thought that was an interesting story. I love those crazy Brandenburgs. I liked them ever since I learned that Friedrich the Great, a great lover of dogs, made sure that there were royal graves for his dogs, next to his own at the palace of San Souci.

And I like the thought of rosy-cheeked Friedrich Wilhelm, chasing away the blues by lounging on his bed in powdered wig, watching his soldiers and marveling at each of them.

That image struck a chord with me. It reminded me of something. But I couldn't figure out what. Then it came to me, one day. It reminded me of --myself.

There's been a slow single file parade of idiots marching through my bedroom for years.

The measure of love

2005-11-29T18:13:00.000-05:00

"There she goes,
There she goes again..."

I am standing in Home Depot, talking to a guy named Louie about shellac-based primer. It is $35.00 a gallon, but the only thing you can use if you are stupid enough to want to paint over asbestos shingles instead of residing your whole house.
Most people would just go ahead and put up vinyl siding, because painting the asbestos shingles will cost about the same. But people like me, who really hate vinyl siding but can't afford to reside with wood...those people would consider painting asbestos shingles. Louie, who is a painting contractor on the side, says it will turn out fine with the shellac-based primer.

We're still negotiating my purchase of the house I made an offer on. Nothing's been finalized. Still, I thought I'd get my ducks in a row by strolling through Home Depot, estimating the cost of work that needs doing.

I am scanning the rows and rows of color samples while Louie explains that asbestos shingles are made with tar, which will seep through color without the primer. I am rapt in thoughts of the future, the possible colors of my possible new house, the one sitting on the hill above the park.

Then that song comes on in the Home Depot background music. It kicks me in the gut.

Does Louie notice that my eyes well up with tears?

"There she goes,
There she goes again."

Yes, Reader-- I have seen the feminine hygiene product commercial using that song. But long before that advertisement, that was my song for Casey. My sweet dog Casey. I used to sing it to her in the car, or when she was running in the yard, or sitting with me in the living room, lying across the room looking up at me.

She wouldn't get on the furniture if I was in the room. Sometimes I'd catch her there when I came home, and she looked guilty but I'd say, "Of course you can sit on the sofa, Casey." I'd sit there and pat the space next to me, but she demurred. Whoever had her before I did, the fat fucks that took her to the pound without concern that a morbidly obese middle aged dog would likely be put to sleep-- they must have never let her get on the furniture. Probably they were too fat to share it.

The woman who ran the pound said the people who brought her in were very fat. They said she was a stray, but the lady was pretty sure they were lying because Casey, too, was super-sized. She was so fat that they didn't think anyone would adopt her at first. Also because she was older. Older dogs have a hard time getting adopted. She was actually taken into the room where the unadoptable dogs were taken to await their final shot.

But the woman who ran the pound said before she started giving the shots, she looked at Casey and knew she was special. So she saved her. She said that even though Casey was probably 8 years old and weighed nearly twice what she ought to have, she knew that someone would come along and want her. Because she was that smart, sweet,sassy amazing of a dog. The woman who ran the pound said she'd never been tempted to adopt one of them on her own. She had enough of them during the day. But Casey-- she almost adopted. And when I went back, to say hi, three years later, just because I was in the area, she still had a picture of Casey on her desk.

My dog Abby died and I was sitting on a sofa in Boston. And suddenly I thought, "There's an older border collie mix at the pound in Peabody. That's my dog."

It was interesting because that thought popped into my head, and I lived 90 minutes away from Peabody. I called that pound and said, "Um...do you have an older border collie mix available for adoption? They said, "Yes. And she's wonderful."

I got in my car. They kept the pound open for me. The lady who ran it brought Casey out for me to meet.

And I knew she was my dog. The dog. The one.

(And FYI-- it took about a year for her to lose all that extra weight. But she did.)

So there I am in Home Depot talking to Louie, and that song comes on. She died on August 14th, and it is November 28th. And I start crying. As soon as I walked away from Louie, heading to my car, I start crying.

I was even mad at Home Depot. Shouldn't they be playing Christmas Carols or something?

The thing is, I always miss her. And I always will. The measure of love is loss.

Sometimes it seems like losing Casey is such an enormous loss that I am pulling cargo wherever I go.

I know it's silly. I've lost things before. Men I loved, and other pets, and friends, dear friends whose voices I still hear in my head, whose names I can't erase from my cell phones even though the number has long been disconnected.

It's just that so rarely is something as perfect and uncomplicated as my sweet Casey. A dog with a sense of humor. I can't even explain.

I guess I just have to expect that it will sneak up on me sometimes. The sudden remembering that she's gone.

When I die, the first thing I'm looking for is that dog.

Sorry, Grandma.

I'm not worried about offending my grandfather with that priority. He, a man who could talk to animals, will understand. He used to look up at phone wires and invite the birds there to come sit on his shoulders. And they would. (We're from the Abruzzi, a region in Italy known for snake-charmers and witches.)

Here's what I want to say:

Sometimes we lose things that are in their own way perfect and we know we will never be able to find anything that good again. Sometimes, this perfection was genuine, simple, and innocent-- like Casey's was. It was always a gift to me. I marvelled, every day I knew her, that she was my dog.

But sometimes, when I've lost other things, remarkable and irreplacable things, I have discovered in the end that the remarkableness and irreplacablity were good things to lose. That maybe from a distance I could see that I had over-valued them. Sometimes, losing something I loved that much has been like being freed. And their real gift to me turned out to be their not being around anymore, to make other things, real things, seem pale in comparison.

Usually, it's taken me a while to get to that realization. I didn't always see that at the time. Pain will insist on its own time in the limelight. However we rationalize the process, sometimes all we can do is sit with the bad feelings.

I keep thinking of getting another Border Collie. Maybe someday I will. It won't be Casey. And Casey I know was irreplacable. I lived with her for 6 years. I was not projecting perfection upon, nor was she somehow faking it to beguile me. So many "perfect" things are shams. She was the real deal.

If only Home Depot would devote itself to the darn Christmas Carols, I wouldn't get all maudlin and stuff.

Peefer said recently (in a moving post I would link to if I knew how to) that in all the stories of the world, there's only one plot: fear of losing the thing we love.

I have sometimes found that loss to be, in its own way, a happy ending. This isn't one of those cases. But they're out there. Trust me.

And um...listen, if there's anyone out there who'd like to email me, I wish you would.

Views, houses, views from houses, etc

2005-11-28T08:59:00.000-05:00

My realtor took me in a condo building called "the Hague" after "Boss Hague", the notorious Jersey City mayor in the first half of the 1900s. For forty years, he had politics in his back pocket, not only for Jersey City but for the entire state of New Jersey and into some other states.

In the lavish foyer of the building (where he had the top two floors entirely for his mob machine), there was a photograph of a man in 1940's clothes, wearing a hat and overcoat and looking the camera directly in the eye. A small bronze plaque at the bottom said, "Boss Hague" and then beneath, "I am the law."

The foyer was all gleaming white marble and potted palms as far as the eye could see. It looked like a movie set's stylized view of heaven.

I don't know why I am telling you this. It's just that I have been consumed by real estate the last several weeks and so I was thinking, "My life is real estate." And then I started wondering about the derivation of the words "real estate" and the link between the work "estate" as property and "l'estat" in the sense of Louis XIV and "L'estat, c'est moi."

And then I realized that that was pretty much Boss Hague's mantra, and wondered if he even knew who Louis XIV was.

"Apres moi, le deluge."

I'll bet Boss Hague said that too. And he'd have been right.

My roommate moved from Arkansas to New Jersey to work in politics because she was fascinated that the Boss system still works here to a degree.

But that's neither here nor there. I wanted to talk about houses, because I made an offer on one yesterday.

L'estate de reale, c'est moi.

It's a two family house about a five minute walk from the old house, where for the moment, I am still living. It's overlooking one of those beautiful parks, the kind where people exercise their horses in Henry James movies. There's a pavillion of some sort up on the hill on the horizon. The view reminds me of the garden behind a castle in Vienna I went to once. Which is awfully special, for a house in Jersey City.

It just occured to me that from his penthouse, Boss Hague would have had the same view. Although it wouldn't have been the horizon for him. Newark would have been his horizon.

Anyway. I made an offer on a house and we should be negotiating today on price, and if all goes well I'll be moving at some point in December, probably in the days between Christmas and New Years. Hooray.

I briefly suffered some regrets last week, but I am really glad I sold this house. I never really liked it.

I hope I like the new house. I hope I get it, for one thing. And if I do, I hope I like it and that it wildly appreciates in value, which would make me like it even more. Then I can sell it in a couple of years and get a new house. Because that's what I do.

Readers, Cupcake has long been aware that her life is not a novel but rather a collection of short stories. This most recent story has been one that, given the option, she would probably skim over, skipping the last part and jumping right onto the first page of the next one, hoping it presented more interesting narrative.

Maybe moving to a new house will push things into the next installment of her life. Wouldn't that be nice?

Though Cupcake hastens to confirm that she had a very nice holiday with her cousin, though she spent the lion's share of the weekend with her realtor, a very patient man who is probably pretty ready to strangle Cupcake about now. She made him a whole lotta money on the sale of her home, but she's been a very demanding customer as a buyer, making him take her, over the holiday weekend, to the same house 4 times in 3 days. Then she made an offer on a different house.

The 4 times in 3 days house was a house Cupcake really, really liked. But it would have been a money pit. The apartment on the second and third floors was one giant apartment, too big to be an easy rent (5 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, in a transportationally challenged section of Jersey City). Cupcake would have had to deal with repeated vacancies (ergo, no rental income to assist with the mortgage, which would be irksome and worrying). And/or large families stomping around overhead (which would be irksome and annoying)-- Also, to make the house habitable would have cost at least $10,000 when she moved in, on top of the mortgage, as the seller was adamnant that she wasn't doing any more work. She was also inflexible in the price, which is why the beautiful old house, which had been enduring a half-assed renovation which mercifully sputtered out when the seller ran out of money, has been on the market for six months.

Cupcake loved that house. She would have been very happy there, despite the lack of a Viennese pavilion on the horizon. It was a graceful old Wedding Cake Victorian on a lovely, quiet street. There were trees in the backyard, and a sense of timelessness, and (Cupcake believes) a gentle ghostly presence in the basement. (Cupcake imagined the ghost hanging out with the rabbit, whose would have shared that domain.) Added up, it might have made up for legions of tenants stomping overhead.

But at the end of the day, Cupcake is a practical girl. And perhaps a lazy girl, because she likes other people to pay her mortgage for her. And the rental income of that house would have been erratic and insufficient. The house on the park has a better cash flow. So Cupcake's heart, softened by Victorian cornices and a kick-ass Kohler sink, took one for the team. She passed on the Wedding Cake house for the sake of her bottom line.

And at the end of the day, it was probably a good move. Now she will be Boss Hague's neighbor, and have a park outside her door, and maybe, just maybe, things will move to the next short story as assuredly as Louis XV took up right after Louis XIV.

Who knows what that story will be. Let's hope there's no Thirty Years War in it.(Though Cupcake would welcome M. de Pompedour, should he show up.) But whatever is ahead-- Cupcake's ready.

I'll let you know if they accept my offer. I think the realtor will be very happy if he doesn't have to keep driving me around.

"I am the law." I like the sound of that. Maybe the Viennese pavilion won't be the only view I end up sharing with Boss Hague.

Nah. Just kidding. Being that kind of estat would drive me nuts. Real estate is more than enough to amuse me.

Thanksgiving

2005-11-24T11:19:00.000-05:00

It's Thanksgiving.

Happily, I have something to do because my favorite cousin moved to Jersey City this week. He's cooking a fabulous low-carb Thanksgiving. And I am going to dine with him and his boyfriend at a small dinner party.

You have no idea what a relief it is to have real Thanksgiving plans. With family, no less. Usually, other than Christmas which I spend in Florida with my parents and sometimes my sister-- holidays are rather lonely times for me. Oh, sure-- there's always the friend willing to take in the "orphan" for the holiday meal. It's been interesting, through the years, to note those of my friends who invite me to share holidays with and those who doesn't. In Thanksgivings past, there have been good riends with nice families and nice children who I might have enjoyed dining with. I have sometimes hoped for an invitation but rarely received one, though I've known that if I hinted broadly enough, I would be welcome there. One does though hate to intrude. Annually, though, the offer is made by the friend whose child behaves so appallingly that I find it difficult to eat at her home. I spend the meal wishing someone would slap the enfant. I am usually to be found cutting turkey furiously, telling myself under no circumstances to put the utensils down because if my hand is empty leaving a free path between my palm and the child's face, the person who does the slapping might just be me. Somehow it seems like a less than courteous action for a guest to take even under the most justified of circumstances.

Once, for example, in the course of a grown-up's conversation, this child, then aged 5, interupted something I was saying, exclaiming, "No, No, Cupcake! I don't want you to talk!"

I was stunned into silence, and gratified when my friend, the parent, immediately responded to her offspring's declaration. "That is very rude, Bratface!" (Not the vile child's real name, FYI.) "You should say, 'Please, Cupcake, I would really prefer it if you do not speak."

I stared at her in horror, enraged. I shall let the reader guess if, during the remainder of my visit to their home, I used more than 20 words and if the mother, absorbed in her own matters and in worship of her Devil's Spawn, even noticed.

Several weeks later, when I had calmed down enough to speak rationally to the doting parent, I repeated the exchange to her. She seemed puzzled at my invocation of the incident.

"But, Cupcake" she explained, "I want her to grow up speaking English properly, not sounding ignorant. And you of all people must know the importance of phrasing things well."

"Um, yes, Person Who Was My Friend For 20 Years Before She Created This Monster" (not her real name, FYI)--"Yes, I do understand the important of diction. But you did in fact validate your 5-year old's telling me to shut up."

Even more confused at my lack of understanding of the arcane skills of parenting, she stammered, sincerely, slowly, as if explaining to a dim-wit, 'But Cupcake, I would never invalidate her opinions!"

Ah, yes, Readers. This is why Cupcake shudders when people tell her that the children are our future.

And this is also why Cupcake has, for many years, spent Thanksgiving alone. Usually she has spent it in the car driving to Vermont, happily scheduling the drive to take place when most Americans are seated at the bosom of their family, so not only is there no traffic but also so she can avoid the fact that she has nowhere to dine.

But this year, Cupcake has family to dine with. Other people too, guests at her cousin's house, which will be nice. But for a change, Cupcake will feel like she belongs somewhere, she belongs TO somebody. That where she should spend the holiday is obvious, possibly even obligatory.

That's a very nice change. A very nice change indeed.

And for that alone, along with many other reasons like that she made a decent amount of money on the sale of her house, and that she has good health and a fun working situation and all her teeth, Cupcake gives thanks.

Happy Turkey Day, everybody!

House-hunting

2005-11-17T15:44:00.000-05:00

I have been doing a lot of house-hunting. And maybe some soul-searching. Mostly the former, but the latter sneaks in as I'm driving around at night looking at neighborhoods and streets and jotting down "For Sale" sign information on the back of envelopes in my car.

Anybody want to buy drugs in Jersey City in the middle of the night? I can tell you the best corners for that.

Not to imply that Jersey City is rough. It's impressively gentrified since I moved here three years ago. In fact, I feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House books. I remember her describing one day when her father heard someone else chopping wood in the Big Woods, so he knew it was time to move further west because civilization was encrouching.

When I bought this house, it was the frontier. They'll be putting in Starbucks here soon.

My work here is done.

I don't have to move immediately, and I have ideas about places I'd like to go. I found a place I like, just a leetle tiny house for tiny money, which I was thinking of buying to live in for the moment and then rent out when I find another house I might like better. It's not just that as part of my committment-phobia a move a lot (though that is true)-- It's that to defer taxes, I have to spend as much money as I am selling this house for. So I may end up buying two properies in a bad part of town that looks like it wants to improve itself. And then I'll sit and wait for Starbucks to find me there.

Of course I still have my house in Vermont. And though I can't live up there full time without starting to type "All Work And No Play Makes Cupcake A Dull Girl" over and over again, it's nice to know I won't be, technically, homeless, even after I've sold my house in Jersey City.

So that's why I haven't been posting much. I've been preoccupied with real estate and strongly doubt any of my five readers are interested in my comparing the various benefits of Jersey City's diverse neighborhoods.

But I miss hearing from people, so feel free to drop me a line. Perhaps it will inspire me to write something nice.

The ravel'ed sleeve of care...

2005-11-15T05:30:00.000-05:00

Oh, Reader. Has Cupcake ever mentioned that she doesn't sleep very much?

Yes, yes-- she believes she has mentioned that once or twice.

Every roommate Cupcake has ever had has at one point or another said, "Do you EVER sleep?"

Yes, Cupcake does sleep. A couple hours a day seems to do the trick. Tonight it was- and with the help of Tylenol PM no less - 90 minutes. From 11:30 to 1:00. Wide awake after that. No problem with it. Just catapulted from the arms of slumber into a sudden consciousness with no purpose.

It's not a problem, exactly. Cupcake has friends who suffer from insomnia. Cupcake doesn't suffer from it at all; she rather enjoys it. The one pang she has about the situation is that it baffles her that, in the course of 21 or 22 waking hours, she doesn't get more accomplished.

But that's another matter. What Cupcake wanted you to know is that it's just strange, experiencing the world when most other people are sleeping.

There are things that occur because of this regular purposeless consciousness.

It means that Cupcake knows every 24-hour restaurant and store in Jersey City.

It means that Cupcake knows infomercials better than most people. Or she used to, anyway, before the TV started making a weird slanty-flickering that drives her crazy to the point that she can't even watch Law and Order. But it doesn't bother her enough that she ever remembers to go buy a new television, even when she does have enough cash to do that.

It means that Cupcake wishes she had more friends in other time zones.

It means that Cupcake can really super assiduously check out the nocturnal activity in the ghettos of Jersey City where she is considering purchasing a home, circling blocks for hours to determine that yes, there really does seem to be a lot of drug trafficing on that corner, and huh, it really does seem like that young lady in the garrishly blond wig and super tight hot pants has a lot of men friends in various cars.

It means that Cupcake is usually available for friends who are suddenly arrested, or themselves unable to sleep. (File that away, Reader, should you be prone to drunk driving or spousal abuse in the wee small hours of the morning and need someone to bail you out.)

It means that Cupcake gets to spend a long time admiring the sleeping visages of men who might want her to grace their beds. (If it's not an admirable visage in the first place, she's unlikely to grace it. But knowing that she's going to be lying there staring at that face does in fact change the prospect of such supine intimacy, creating a greater need for asthetic selectivity.)

It means that Cupcake has plenty of time to do laundry, poke around the house looking for stuff to throw away now that she's moving, go down in the basement and play with the delightful rabbit (also a nocturnal creature).

Cupcake just wishes it weren't so darn lonely all the time. The rabbit is indeed a pleasant companion, but not much of a conversationalist. As the clock moves towards midnight, Cupcake sometimes catches herself guiltily engaging her roommate (who is as delightful as the rabbit but not as nocturally animated) in late night conversations that are probably ungenerous if not downright greedy. Cupcake hoards every word of them, knowing she will be starved for companionship later in the night.

Yes, yes-- of course Cupcake could devote the time to her writing. And sometimes she does. Tonight, though, what with the house being sold and no clear plan as to where she is going, Cupcake has been pacing, stopping to lift weights, and pacing some more. Eventually she will go back to bed with a cup of tea and flip through a book, mostly to be out of the way of the aforementioned delightful roommate while she gets ready for work. And then around 9 or so Cupcake will propel herself out of the house and down to the artsy Jersey City coffee shop where she is wont to spend her days since she quit the Job From Hell.

Dunno. This is probably a very dull posting. Which is why I don't spend every sleepless night writing. Sometimes I might be awake but the Muse isn't.

Anyone else have -- not a problem with sleeplessness as much as an expanded waking time? How do you fill those hours?

Oh well. I'm going back down to play with the bunny.

Leaf people in late fall

2005-11-09T14:49:00.000-05:00

I'm in Vermont, hiding out at the cafe above the bookstore.

Earlier, I was at my house listening to the autumn rain on the metal roof, loading logs into the woodstove and staring at the orange intensity behind the glass. When I come up here and embed myself in the quiet, the wheels in my head turn differently. I don't know so much if it's wishing to live deliberately or just discovering that in the quiet, slow pace of this life, and in the solitude that wraps itself around me on the mountain, that deliberatation is inevitable. Shaking myself out of it and realizing that I'd accomplished nothing all morning because I stop and think about things rather than just doing them, I loaded the dogs into the car and came to town. I figured that if civilization didn't restore me to the innured state I usually experience, a triple shot latte would at leave revv my engines into a higher gear.

But, deliberate or not, today the drive down the mountain seemed to go in slow motion. Today is weighted with the aching descent of late fall into winter, and each tree, sad and wet as if its waiting for a bus without an umbrella, filled me with acknowledgement of our human condition of longing. Or at least, my human condition of longing.

Today is crisp with a new cold, and forlorn piles of shriveled leaves gather like the homeless outside a subway station asking for spare change. Grass appears uncertain. Should it persever in being green, in growing? There's a beauty to all this that cuts me. Change, decision-- things turning a corner.

Dunno. The church bells outside are ringing against the cafe's Gypsy King music. And at the end of the room, the window is open and the drumming of the rain patters through the top of maple tree pressed against the glass. A few orange leaves cling to the upper branches like guests who won't go home.

In this town (the big one, population 4,000, that's next to my town of 243)-- there's a tradition called "Leaf People."
In October, people bring the leaves they've raked and dump them in the town square, where the children, supervised by the 147 artists who live in this town (no joke)- stuff old clothes and create scarecrows which are hung around the town-- in front of shops, where you'd expect them, and at the edges of town, like one masquerading as a hitch-hiker which has year after year surprised me when my headlights hit it.
There's something very T.S. Eliot about it, very "We are the hollow men." But then, I've been accused of being rather dark sometimes.

It's just for the tourists, not a grim reminder of mortality.

And frankly, I don't find anything all that grim about mortality. As Patch Adams said (or at least as Robin Williams said in his role of Patch Adams)-- "What's wrong with death?"

At the moment, the only thing I can think of that's really objectionable about death is that it might take us away from all this beauty. This change, the heartbreaking quality of fall seceding into winter, of youth conceding to middle age, of life taking these turns so that every day is different from the one before in small, unimaginable ways. What an amazing process. Does death put all that to a screeching halt? Are there degrees of being dead? Because I'm not sure that the same thing over and over again would have the same impact.

But then again, life surprises me. Repeatedly, like the damn leaf hitchhiker. It always gets me, leaves me chuckling that I fell for it, again. Maybe death will be just as mystifying in the best of ways, like someone we love but have never really figured out.

Strangers on a train

2005-11-09T00:04:00.000-05:00

One day this summer, I was very sad about something.

I put on my favorite brown chiffon dress and went into Manhattan to have dinner with a friend. He was sweet and consoling and it distracted me for a few hours. But around midnight, I took the train back to Jersey City. And I sat on the train realizing that my sweet Casey was dead and that I hated my job and I’d messed something up with someone I cared about, and that there were several other disappointments swirling around me that I couldn’t fix. I sat there on the train, staring into space and trying really hard not to cry.

The next day, on Craigslist Missed Connections, I saw a posting that said, “To the sad girl on the PATH train.” Someone wrote, “You were a brunette in a beautiful brown dress. You got on at 14th Street around midnight and got off at Grove Street Station. You looked like you were fighting back tears the whole time. I just wanted to say that I hope everything works out.”

I don’t know who wrote that Missed Connections posting. I hadn’t even looked at any of the faces on that train that night. But it made me feel better about things, if only for a minute. It made me feel like maybe the universe is a caring place.

And even though Casey is still dead (that sweet, soft face against my knee, that expression of mischief and wisdom, that really horrible dog-breath)- truthfully, things are better now.

Pain is the place where our hearts are arguing with What Is So. (I was thinking last night about that little book, “Who Moved My Cheese?” which – I admit through embarrassment- taught me a lot when I read it years ago.)

If I were on a train of some sort, and I saw someone that I thought might be feeling very sad, I probably wouldn’t make the effort to post on Missed Connections. I don’t think I’d take the time to write anything unless I was reasonably sure my words would be read. Missed Connections seems like such a long shot.

I don’t know though. I think if I thought the person might read my words, maybe I would take the time to say something, even if I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Knowing even as I wrote something that the bad feelings WILL demand their due time. And what do I know, anyway, about the hearts of strangers? Some people are braver than I, keeping on the game face despite feeling rotten. Maybe it’s presumptuous for me to assume things.

It’s just that life sometimes feels very hard indeed. And although there are people it would be totally inappropriate to accost with words about feelings, change, pain, and moving cheeses-- sometimes a girl just wants to send a shout out. To say, I know I appear to be a stranger on a train, but I am with you. I send you good thoughts from the best part of my heart.

Maybe the connections that matter are never missed.

For what it’s worth, from a stranger on a train—I wish you well.

A Fabulous Weekend

2005-11-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

Every now and then, exciting things happen all at once. This weekend, for example, was one of the best weekends I've had in ages. A friend came down from Vermont and so it was great to hang out with her. An old friend was having a party, so we went to that and met some fun people. I also ran into an old friend who had some very amusing and interesting stories to tell. Then, leaving the party we ran into another friend who pulled us into a bar and kept us laughing our asses off til last call, when he put us in a taxi. We got home at dawn.

This was particularly gratifying because my friend who was visiting is a full-time working Mom and usually goes to bed before 10:00 PM. She said she hadn't been out on the town like that since her kids were born. It was great to see her doing shots at 3:45 AM. We had a blast.

Then, the next afternoon we got up and went driving around looking at houses. (Because that's what I do. The way some girls shop for shoes.) I recently stumbled on another great Jersey City neighborhood that's taking off like wildfire, and real estate pioneer that I am, I'm always looking for ghetto on the brink of gentrification. This is slightly more of the former than the other neighborhoods I've been looking at, but there are reasons why I really like it. So I'm going to go see a house there in a little bit.

For readers who are wondering about the Secret Garden House-- I just don't think I can swing it. The parking issue is truly an obstacle, as I keep strange hours and really hate having to circumnavigate the globe just to go home. (My friend who had the party on Saturday lives in a loft above a comedy club, and sometimes has to stand in line to go home. Which is pretty funny.)

But the best part of the weekend was last night, when we went to see Barach Obama speak. My friend and I were swooning like bobby-soxers before Elvis. I stood about 2 feet away from him, and got a great photo of his back that I'll put up here if I ever figure out how to email pictures from my phone.

So all in all-- it was a really great weekend. I'm still on the Barach Obama high.

And tonight I'm driving back up to Vermont-- with my friend in the car, thank heavens- and I get to see my dogs, who have been staying with a friend up there while I went to Florida and entertained my visitor this weekend. I'm pretty happy about that. Casey won't be there, of course. But dogs is dogs, and my ones that remain are pretty darn sweet too.

Look for Barach Obama later. He rocks.

The Devil.

2005-11-04T12:50:00.000-05:00

Readers, Cupcake sometimes feels that she watches most of the game from the bench. She was once told by a psychic that most of her past lives had been spent in religious seclusion, more than once as a cloistered monk.

For the record, Cupcake's thinks reincarnation is a sensible idea. What Cupcake thinks recycling of any sort is a peachy idea. And she knows that energy is neither created nor destroyed and all that. And she has also observed that the trees stay the same while the leaves change every year. So reincarnation makes sense to her, as a proposition. She not particularly invested in the idea-- although it has crossed her mind that it would be rather nice to come back as a cat and have better night vision--but she is content to wait and see.

However, when the psychic said that she'd spent most of her incarnate existances in quiet contemplation, Cupcake thought that sounded just about right. If reincarnation happens, that's likely the way she would spend her time. The psychic's theory was that this life, Cupcake was attempting to see what all the fuss was about, having observed other people living more participatory existances. This time around, Cupcake was going to try to jump in the game. Just as an experiment.

Whether the psychic was right or not, one way or another, Cupcake watches things with the surprised eye of someone who has spent a great deal of time in sequestered contemplation.

And one thing that she's come to realize is that the Devil walks among us.

The Devil is the thing that shows up in beauty but leaves you with ugliness. The thing that promises but never performs. The person who calls to invite you over, but doesn't answer the door when you get there, so that you stand there, uncertain if they're in there laughing at you or had to dash to the store for a minute to pick up some Camel Lights and will be right back.

It's hard when the Devil shows up because sometimes he is wearing the features of someone we know is not essentially evil. Where is the real person's good self when the Devil is pulling the strings? Cupcake does not know. And maybe that's what Free Will is all about-- the ability to say, "Get thee behind me, Satan!", which translates in modern terms to "Kiss my backside, dickwad." Maybe the point is that when the devil shows up and tells people that it's okay to mess around with other people's heads, God wants us to tell him to take a flying eff at a rolling donut.

But people don't always tell him that. Even good people.

I watch for this. I watch it happen to my friends, and I watch it happen to me. In others, I usually observe a healthy intuition of when to back off, when someone is acting like the Devil's Howdy-Doody.

For myself, this isn't always the case. This life is an experiment, remember? This is where things get interesting for me. I sort of poke at the Devil's embers, wondering what will happen. I want to know the next part of the story. I stand there on the metaphorical doorstep, ringing the damn buzzer and scanning the street expecting to see my friend skipping up the sidewalk with a 7-11 bag.

Objectively, I can see that this probably isn't such a good idea. And sometimes I am able to resist it. Other times though-- I feel like THAT's my work, THAT"s why I'm here-- to follow these things, to see where the Devil will go. Maybe it's a test of what I can take on without getting upset. Or maybe I just really want the end of the story. Or maybe I trust too much that people who let the Devil drive them for a little while are actually still good people.

I don't know. I'm only halfway though the experiment. I can't say it's going swimmingly. But there are moments of beauty, and kindness, and confirmation that whether we only go around once in this life or we go around a lot more-- Life is worth living.

I feel sorry for the Devil. If he were around, I'd buy him a cup o' Joe. Oh, sure-- he'd order the most expensive drink at Starbucks and then ditch me. But I'd shrug it off and go work a crossword puzzle or something.

The game's just not all that important from the bench. Or at least not the one I am sitting on.

"...And know they love you."

2005-11-03T10:08:00.000-05:00

I'm in Florida, visiting my parents.

Dad has this thing about fruit stands. He loves them. When we used to take family vacations, we stopped at virtually every fruitstand we passed along the road. My sister and I would groan, "But we just stopped at one!"

Dad would say, "Let's see what this guy has." I sort of associate long car trips with the smell of peaches and nectarines.

My sister and I believe it's the legacy of this passion for fruitstands that's the basis for a contemporary ritual we call "the food interrogation." This ritual traditionally takes place in the car, when they've picked one of us up at the airport and we're driving to their house.

Shortly after the customary "How was your flight?" questions are taken care of, at a lull in conversation, Dad will begin to carefully inquire about our fruit and vegetable preferences.

This drive from the airport was no exception. This time, he began with vegetables.

“Do you like vegetables?” Dad asked.

“He’s joking, right?” I asked Mom. It is always comic when he begins. He doesn't realize that we expect this interrogation, that he has asked us these same questions dozens of times.

“No, I don’t think he is.”

”Joking about what? I only wondered if you like vegetables.” He looks slightly injured.

“Yes, Dad. I like vegetables, “ I say as patiently as I can.

”What about fruit? Do you like fruit?”

“No, Dad. Not so much. It’s a carb thing.”

”Oh.” A pause while he considers this grave omission from my diet.

“What kind of vegetables do you like, then?”

I list my favorite vegetables. Tomatoes, zucchini, mushrooms.

Onions.

Yeah, onions.

Spinach, broccoli, green and red peppers.

I'm not a big fan of string beans.

Asparagus is good.

When he was driving-- (and he only stopped recently, after a car accident--) He frequently came home laden with small plastic bags containing zucchini, bananas, and for my sister -who has an intrepid palate-- the hottest hot peppers he could find. He took real delight in bringing things to us.

"Cupcake, look-- you said you like zucchini! I brought you some!"

His enjoyment in bringing us that stuff is so sweet. Yet the ritual of the food interrogation never fails to annoy me. I list the vegetables begrudgingly. I think, "Why doesn't he remember, ever, that I don't like fruit that much?" And I wish that weren't so.

Sometimes when I am with my parents, I feel like I am two people. The adult in me looks at them with an indulgent, loving appreciation-- so aware that I am lucky to still have them, so grateful for who they are. But the lurking teenager in me still sulks, wishing that Mom would puh-lease stop asking me if I want some Soy Milk, as I gave up my Non-Dairy phase in 1997. That even though I think her hair looks great, I don't want her hairdresser at JC Penney's to do my hair.

Yesterday, driving my father somewhere, I snapped at him when he said, "Look out!" as I was about to turn into a busy street. A truck had pulled out about 300 yards away. It was no threat to us. So I said, rather snottily, "Yes, Dad, I see it!" In a tone I wish I hadn't used.

Immediately, I put my hand on his soon to be 83-year-old arm and said, "I'm sorry I snapped at you." But the words couldn't be unsaid.

I no longer have the luxury of acting out my inner teenager. Every moment with them is precious. Every word they say, every experience shared, I try to etch indelibly in my memory.

They're wonderful people. They have been bewilderingly supportive parents, loving kind parents whose bounty of wisdom and unconditional love has baffled me. It's almost God-like. Having no children of my own, I don't know if I could ever find that wealth of forgiveness, of unquestioning respect and affection.

I'm trying, now, to find it. They deserve it.

So, yes, Pops-- I like vegetables. I like them fine. (And I love you and Mom.) Anything else you want to know? Just ask.

A good deed in a weary world...

2005-10-31T20:49:00.000-05:00

“ Ssshhhhhhht.”

That’s the sound of you, striking a match.

A flash of yellow. It grows larger and brighter. You light a candle in the dark.

“There. Is that better?” you say.

There is just enough light available for you to see me when I nod.

“So. What do you want to talk about?”

The candle is between us. It is a tall white taper that we stole from church on Easter Eve. After the candlelight vigil, the other people drop them carelessly onto the little shelves that hold the hymnals. We eye them greedily until the sermon ends. Then, as the other worshippers file out of the pews and cram themselves into the aisle, inching towards the door, you and I furtively dash through the pews, stuffing the tapers into our coat pockets.

If we don’t, they will only be thrown away.

You remember doing this with me, don’t you, Reader? How we carry away as many as will fit in pockets and purse, and still more stuck up sleeves, held in my hands cupped over cuffs as we exit, hoping that the priest won’t see as we slip out into the night? But of course he never does, though he is standing at the door and we walk right past him. He is receiving congratulations on his beautifully delivered sermon, his words describing hope and transfiguration.

You ask, “Where are we, Cupcake?”

You just asked it now; I heard you think it. Not in the story where we are leaving the church, Reader. (In that story, we have managed to keep straight faces and are now scurrying down the sidewalk towards your car, gleeful and triumphant, pulling the candles from our sleeves and holding them before us like bouquets.)

Where are we, when we are sitting with the candle, afterwards. I think that’s what you meant.

I can’t tell you where we are though. Because I don’t know. The candle doesn’t throw its beam that far (so shines a good deed in a weary world). We might be in a cave, like Tom Sawyer and Becky. Or we might be camping, like a group of old friends. Or possibly we are on a picnic in a graveyard, or sitting on the steps in front of one of our houses. It's just you and me and as far as the glow surrounds us. That's as far as I can see.

For just a quick second, I have a feeling that we are on the ground in the middle of a baseball stadium. But why would that be? It must be your thought. I’m not much of a sports fan. (Although I do like the symbolism of baseball, like in Field of Dreams.)

It doesn’t matter. Where we are, or whose thinking put us there.

What matters is that it isn’t dark right now. And that we have each other to talk to in the dark. And that the candles from Easter Eve remind us that we are pilgrims, and poets, and partners in crime, and people who see opportunities where other people see trash.

See, that’s part of what I like about you.

“What did you want to talk about?” you ask again.

“Oh, nothing,” I say. “Everything.”

”I know,” you say. We just sit there for a while. And for that moment-- with the shadows on your features dancing a little as the flame bends and shimmies—a dance that obscures your visage even as it reveals it- For that moment, sitting there together, I know that although we have never met, Reader -that we are truly friends.

Thank you for that.

Easter next year is on April 16th. I guess I'll see you in church.

2005-10-27T17:00:00.000-04:00

Once, driving home under a full moon, I passed a cemetery full of cows. They’d broken down the fence keeping them in their pasture across the street and were happily grazing on the fresh grass between the graves. Moonlit cows bending heads to the ground, silhouetted against tombstones. A sense of celebration, somehow, as if they were performing some sort of annual bovine full-moon ritual. One curious cow, chewing its cud in front of the wrought iron churchyard gate, raising her head to look at my car as I passed.

I parked the car and left it running. I remember how bright the headlights seemed compared to the gentle glow of the full moon over the fields. I banged on the front door of the farmhouse until a light went on. A few seconds later, the door was opened by farmwife in a nightgown. Her hair was dyed a cheap black and although it was flattened on one side, it had the stiffness of a coif thick with hairspray. She stood squinting at me with a mixture of defensiveness and confusion.

“Are your cows supposed to be in the cemetery?” I asked. I didn’t think they were, but Vermont has strange customs that even now I stumble upon with surprise.

She stepped out onto the porch where I was standing and squinted even more, aiming her gaze at the cemetery across the street. “Oh dear Lord!” she said, when she saw the herd enjoying their liberty above the sleeping generations of the parish.

”Mort!” she shouted into the house, in the general direction of the stairway behind her. “Mort, the cow’s are out!” Hastily, she thanked me as she ran back inside.

I got in my car and drove on, my headlights weaving against the shadows.

Somewhere, in a Robert Frost poem I can’t find, he wrote about the New England custom of pre-digging graves in late Fall. This is more practical than morbid. The ground here freezes to about 5 feet down in the winter. In the old days, and even now, it’s not always possible to dig six feet under. So they guess how many people will die over the next months, dig the graves and then cover them with tarps, waiting. Anybody who dies too late in the season, once all the graves are filled, just gets put on ice.

At least that’s how they used to do it. But Frost (who lived a few miles from here) makes the point that the unspecified graves make everyone a little nervous, a little cautious. Whose graves will they be?

What I wondered, as I drove away, was what would have happened if one of the cows had walked across the tarp, falling into one of the pre-dug graves. If she’d broken her leg, would that have had to shoot her? And having shot her, would they have simply buried her there, amongst the good Christian folk? Or would they have hoisted her, dead and limp, or alive and indignant, out onto the grass? If she was fine, would she have walked away with an angry swish and forgotten the whole thing? Or would she have been scarred for life, yielding sour milk, fussing at the milking hose?

Maybe Frost wrote about that, somewhere, in another poem that I can't find.

Gods and Guests

2005-10-26T16:05:00.000-04:00

There's still no power or heat at my house. Now there's no phone, either.

Here's a picture I took today of the path to my garden shed.

As you can see, the trees are straining with the weight of their burden. There were lots of downed branches on the road.

Fortunately, the snowplow guys had moved them to the side of the road. Otherwise, I'd still be home rather than sitting in a Vermonty cafe above a very Vermonty bookstore. There's wireless internet here, and cappucino, and I'm hanging out, wondering if the power/heat/phone situation at my house will magically fix itself or if it requires effort on my part. My entire town is without power, so I know they're working on it.

Somewhere, a reader is thinking, "But Cupcake, how can you get milky coffee drinks if there's no power in town?"

Clever reader, you caught me on that technicality. The answer is simple: I'm in the next town. My town is so small that all it is a town hall and a church. And they only open the church on Christmas Eve for a candlelight service. My town has no post office, and the only commerce used to be a guy who sold eggs out of his back porch, but he retired a few years ago.

This town, the big one, shown in this picture:
is a huge metropolis compared to that. For the record, though--they don't really have the Christmas tree lit yet. I used a stock photo from the internet. And in fact the town square doesn't look very festive at the moment, as it is glutted with broken branches from the maple trees in front of the spruce. But that is the town, and in fact the church in the picture just rang its bells as though to say, "Cupcake, tell your readers we say hi!"

I am in a shop you can see lit up to the right of the spruce. If the photo were a webcam, I could leap from my seat, run down the stairs and out into the street to wave at you.

Vermont is wonderful. Oh, it's quirky and weird, too. (If you've ever seen the Chevy Chase movie "Funny Farm", you'll have a pretty good idea of what it's like.) For example, here in this cafe, where it's all pretty artsy --the password for the wireless internet is "Ilovekermit"-- there are a bunch of flannel-shirt wearing old guys, the kind you'd expect to see at a diner, not a place that sells chai. They talk with farmer twang and say "Y-yep" using two syllables.

I'll wax poetic about Vermont another time. I just wanted to take advantage of the wireless connection and the electricity (which is recharging my laptop battery so I can work on my novel tonight, by light of candles, if necessary)-- and to tell you all that as of this moment, anyway, I have not been nabbed by Big Foot or anything resembling "Deliverence."

And it wasn't even really that cold last night. It was in the high 20s, but that's nothing around here. One year, it was negative 40 for three weeks in a row.

Please, everyone-- send good power line vibes towards me. Although I will be a little disappointed when the lights and heat come back on. It's interesting to imagine what it would be like if it was always like this. It's not so bad. (Although ask me again when it's negative 40 and I may have a different attitude.)

Well, I'd better get back to my citadel in the forest. Please leave me comments because without phone or internet, I'll be starved for human interaction when I next emerge from the woods, or received the mixed gift of modern technology as a guest at my door again.

Remember how the Greeks thought all guests could be gods in disguise? I wonder if they would have had a god for technology. Maybe they did. (Mass? That's your kind of thing, isn't it?) Certainly, up here in the mountains, we remember that such luxuries are always transients.

Til whenever-- I remain your Green Mountain Cupcake.

Falling, Snow, and Silence

2005-10-25T21:08:00.000-04:00

The lights have gone out. And it's snowing.

There's a specific silence that falls with snow. I often think I should look it up, or ask someone who reads science books why that is. But I don't think I really want to know. It's enough, to look out the window, or to stand on the porch and hear the almost crystaline silence accompanying the descending flakes.

It has the air of a gentleman in hat and overcoat offering his arm to a veiled lady stepping out of a carriage. A veiled lady who might be young or old, fair or dark. That sort of decorum, respect, tradition, mystery. Something unshakable, timeless, and holy in the most humble, human way.

Before the lights went out, I was making a half-hearted chili. I forced myself to do it, having read what I'd written in the previous entry, where I announced to the blog world at large that sometimes I survive entirely on bacon and eggs. I read that, imagining a reader thinking, "How sad that she doesn't cook for herself!" Picturing the kind of reader who comes home after work and fixes herself a little plate of nice things, grapes and brie and stoned wheat thins, just a tiny plate to snack on with a glass of Pinot Noir, while she grills herself a salmon filet and stir-fries snow peas.

I thought, "You know, Cupcake, you might exert a little effort on your own behalf. You can cook. Why don't you make yourself something nice?"

This chili would not have counted as anything nice. This chili knew it was being forced, practically expressed like a boil, from the ingredients in the fridge and pantry. It refused to cooperate. Everyone-- cook, chili, and reading audience alike-- was done a great service when the electricity went out and the stove relinquished heat like a narcoleptic releasing consciousness. (Truth be told, what I really wanted was the bacon and eggs.)

Having been given a stay of execution-- or stay of dinner, anyway -I went outside on the porch to smoke a cigarette and stare at the falling flakes, white like stars shooting across a sky of unforgiving indigo.

Because the electricity is off, the heat is off. I reawakened the fire in the woodstove, which I'd let nap through the afternoon. And I lit candles around the living room, where, once I post this (from my battery charged laptop), I will curl up with a stack of books, reading by what light I have mustered. It should be enough. I have a wonderful chair, huge, that seems to hug the person sitting in it. And the dogs will come and find me, nestling into knees and edges of things until it will be cozy and peaceful and the quiet night will drift past like clouds.

Okay, maybe not quite like that. It's --well, it's a tad scary sitting here in the dark, miles from anyone else. I keep thinking about that tagline from Alien: "In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream." It's so quiet that every noise sounds momentous. There was just a big cracking sound in the yard, probably (surely, yes, surely) a branch breaking under the weight of snow and ice. And that thumping sound that keeps happening on the roof is probably the just metal shifting as the house lets off the heat. Right? God only knows. All I can say is if, dear readers, you never hear from Cupcake again, you can at least know with satisfaction that, at the grisley end, she was thinking of you.

Maybe I will break out the bottle of wine. After all, a bottle of Pinot Noir really makes a girl feel like she's doing something nice for herself. And the heat's evaporating from the room around me. I'll need to stoke up the fire and wine will help to keep me warm.

Tomorrow, when the sun comes up, I'm pouring the chili out into the woods. And I'm making bacon and eggs. On the woodstove if the power's not back on.

Life's too short to eat things you don't really want. At any moment, the cataclysm might occur that will change everything.

Maybe that's why the silence comes with the snow. To let us think about that, in the quiet. To let us hear ourselves think about our own gentle descent into the end. We will all, one day, fall with just that much resolution and inevitability. Let us hope we have as much grace. And that our last meal is the thing we really wanted.

Night driving.

2005-10-24T01:38:00.000-04:00

I drove to Vermont tonight, finally. It takes five hours.

Time in the car always sets the wheels in my head a-turning. It's worse after dark of course. I'm lost. I start thinking about the things I always wanted and never got. I start thinking about the men I might have ended up with, if I hadn't frozen them out for ridiculous reasons, and the men I longed for, dreamed of, even when I knew it was impossible, or in one case, never even really wanted to be with, just wanted to watch him the way other people watch sports.

I thought of all the letters I've never answered, and the letters I've never written, and the letters I've never sent. And the letters I have written that received no response.

I thought about my sweet dog Casey, who really really is gone, not lost, not downstairs in the basement looking for a frog like that one time I couldn't find her for hours, or the time she ran away in Queens. For a minute, I felt her, like she was there in the car. And I had to steel myself to not look in the rear view mirror to see if she was there in the back seat, her chin resting on the the back of the seat while she looked out the rear window. The way she used to sit. But I didn't look in the rear view mirror because I knew she wasn't there. And I hated that she wasn't, and that she never will be again.

And it made me think of the piece of her fur I found today when I was sweeping out under the dresser.

I thought of all the loss, and of the day I turned 20 in Rome, when I wore a white dress and walked on the white benches lining Via Delle Conciliazione singing Oh to live on Sugar Mountain--and how I wish I could go back to that day, like that episode of "Lost In Space" where the girl finds her younger self and tells her what to do, and what not to do.

And then finally I got here, to my house on the mountain. There's nobody for miles. I built a fire in my woodstove, and I wished for -- for -- for something. To have the kind of life where I don't drive five hours in the dark by myself to come to an empty house by myself. Where I don't carry in the groceries and to know that for the next several days I will be eating bacon and eggs because I won't see any reason to cook anything else for myself. I imagined a life where, when I opened the fridge to put away the bacon and eggs, I'd see the bottle of Chardonnay that a guest left for me and I'd actually have someone to turn to saying, "Hey, shall we open a bottle of wine?"

This is what's so, though. The solitude. And if I didn't want solitude, why did I buy a house on a mountain so far from anyone else? And why did I put a six foot fence around it? And why do I work mostly by myself, and not return phone calls, and freeze out men who like me?

I really should just start driving up during the day. That would make all the difference. I really should just make sure I get home before dark.

Cupcake's Winged Secrets

2005-10-20T18:41:00.000-04:00

Readers, your Cupcake has always believed that there are hidden laws to the universe. Because she sits very quietly under the tree of wisdom, some of the winged secrets that nest there have learned to trust her and have come, cautiously, to take breadcrumbs from her hand. At which point she snares them in a net and brings them home to share with you.

They are Winged Secrets because unless you really want to keep them, they will probably fly away. But perhaps, next time you see them from afar, you will recognize them and say to yourself, "Ah, that Cupcake. What a clever lass she is!"

Or possibly, "I must write Cupcake and ask for her address so that I can send her money." Or even, "I wonder what we're having for supper?"

A short list, then, of some Winged Secrets:

---The better the book, the greater the likelihood that your enjoyment of reading the last pages will be interrupted by a phone call, a knock at the door, or an unexpected leak from the ceiling above your head.

---Even the most elusive waiter will come immediately to the table when everyone at that table has a full mouth. This is common knowledge. The Winged Secret is that this rule can be used to your advantage. When unable to flag the server down, savvy diners will conspire for the entire party to cram as many ice cubes as possible into their mouths. The server will be drawn tableside through the force of the universal law. Be forwarned that the waiter will look appalled when a designated person then spits the ice cubes into a glass in order to make the group's request.

---Traffic lights will always remain red for slightly less time than it takes to dig a lipstick from the bottom of a purse. Also, holding an open tube of lipstick while you drive will guarantee that any traffic light you encounter will be green.

---For some reason, it almost always rains at 5:00 on Fridays. Noone knows why. Also, it almost always snows on baseball's opening day. A few flakes. But snow. (This Winged Secret applies only in MA, VT, and NJ. No guarantee is made for universal application.)

Have you trapped any Winged Secrets of your own? Cupcake invites you to share them if you have.

Missing Casey

2005-10-19T16:42:00.000-04:00

Every time I go home and put the key in the lock, for just a second I think that when I open the door, I'll see Casey standing there.

Casey, for those of you who don't know me-- oh, wait, that's pretty much all 5 of my readers-- Casey is my dog. I still can't write "was" even though she died two months ago, on August 14th.

I spent most of that rainy Sunday on the floor beside her, petting her and talking to her. If I walked away for a minute, she whimpered a little. Other than that, she didn't seem in pain.

It was a relapse of an illness called Canine Vestibular Syndrome. I knew there was nothing that the vet could do. Either she'd recover or she wouldn't. She'd recovered from it before. This time--- well, you can't win them all.

So I spent that day lying on the floor next to her, telling her that she was beautiful and that she'd always be my doggie, and having periodic bouts of crying.

It felt surreal. As the light began truly fading not only from the late afternoon sky but also from her eyes, the rain intensified into a fierce storm. The electricity went out. And almost exactly then, my friend Kathleen, an astrologer, returned a call I'd left her the week before. The message had been something like, "Look, so I know I haven't talked to you in two years but my life has become very strange and -- dude, I need to know what the hell's going on and more importantly WHEN WILL IT END?"

I have always found astrologers -- good astrologers-- at least as useful as therapists, and certainly more cost efficient. An astrologer can, in an hour, tell me why what I'm experiencing is happening, what the next thing will be and when the change will take place. It's a decent bang for the buck and requires less caterwauling on my part. Sure, you might not buy into astrology. But trust me: a good astrologer can trump a bad shrink any day of the week. I like, for my money, being given AN ANSWER. I was happy to hear from Kathleen that the series of very bad months I was enduring would change for the better, right about now. That's part of the astrologists job-- to predict when things will be better. A therapist will never offer you that kind of certainty. And to my way of thinking, that's a shame.

Anyway-- Kathleen, who is amazing, told me things that were uncannily accurate considering that she'd not been updated on my life for quite a while. We talked about karmic ties and destiny v. free will. And she stayed with me on the phone while I was sitting on the candle-lit floor (because the lights stayed out for hours), while my sweet girl Casey chased the swift black rabbit out of this world and into the next.

Every day this week, I've meant to drive to Vermont. And yet I don't pack the car and go. It's because when I get there, I'll be looking for Casey. Some irrational part of me believes that she isn't really gone. That somehow she teleported from Jersey City to the forest, where she's there running through the woods, or lying on the front porch of my house keeping watch. Part of me believes that when the car crunches up the gravel road and turns into the driveway, when I get out of the car to open the iron gate, my girl will stand up from her corner of the porch and welcome me with her Bea-Arthur sounding bark.

I know that won't happen. She won't be there. And the sadness of that knowing weighs me down so that I can't seem to pick up my purse and car keys and other dogs (who seem unimportant and faceless now) and travel north to the place I love most in the world.

My girl is gone.

I feel like I don't belong anywhere now. Because wherever she was, was home.

To tell you the truth, I think that's why I've put my house up for sale.

And the Secret Garden house I like-- I haven't made an offer. There's no parking, and that seems impractical. As an insomniac, I often come home very late. If I buy that house, I'll circle and circle, ending up parking blocks away and having to cross through a rather rough bit of 'hood...So I'm still weighing pros and cons. Besides, my house hasn't even been seen yet, let alone sold.

And whatever house I come home to, there will be that moment where the key's in the lock. And my girl is not at the door.

Someday, I'm sure, I'll see that the experiences of this August have made me a stronger and wiser person. Right now, though, I just feel lonely and misunderstood. August was a bad month in a series of very bad months which, mercifully, seems to have ended. (As, perhaps coincidentally, Kathleen said it would.)Casey died. But before that, I did something stupid that got out of hand. There are lingering bad feelings about that, too. Someone I cared about and meant no harm to now hates me. And people who heard that person's version of the story think I am nuts. Which I am not. (Quirky, yes. Deranged, no. And many think the quirkiness is rather charming.) The story made my friends laughed their asses off. Yeah, they were laughing AT me, but they laughed with affection. Knowing me, having a background of how it all came about, they knew the whole absurd situation was closer to a Seinfeld episode (me as Elaine) than some psycho-drama thriller.

In other circles, I'm a pariah. Which hurts. There's nothing I can do about it but shrug and go about my life as I would otherwise, but it's hard to not care about it. I am conscious of being judged unfairly, and sad that a few people I respect have a skewed impression of me. It's a constant pebble in the shoe, and there's nothing I can do to cast it out.

If Casey were here, all that would matter less. If Casey were here, I'd bury my face in her neck and it would be better.

It's said that we miss things in proportion to how much we love them.

I miss that dog with all my heart.

On Writing

2005-10-17T12:05:00.000-04:00

I've been working on my novel again.

Wait-- do I hear a reader somewhere begin to groan?

"Oh, God- no, Cupcake!" Please don't say you're going to be giving us snippets of your cheesy Chick-lit book. Haven't you learned, by now, that blogs and fiction do not mix?"

Fear not, gentle reader. I am not going to inflict the whimsical stylings of my story-telling pen upon you. At least not here. Maybe in another blog? I'm tempted.

I hadn't worked on the novel in some time, having been plying my craft in playwrighting, which is a horse of a different color. A novelist has it easy. If the character does something uncharacteristic, you can give the reader the inner thought to justify it. But in theatre, of course-- the character's motivation has to be externally obvious enough to make sense. Otherwise, the audience just gets annoyed.

In my play, one character is giving me trouble. I'm creating him, so I ought to know what he's thinking. But this guy seems to have a will of his own. He gets away from me, dancing in scenes where he ought to be mourning. Snapping at a woman who is kind to him. I don't know what to do with him, as though he's a misbehaving two year old I impulsively agreed to babysit.

And in the story, his thoughts must evolve convincingly. Since I am not sure what he's doing in the first place, I don't know how to poke him with my pencil to get him where I want him to go. I have to mull it over. I'll take a break.

It's like when pie crust won't roll itself out right, and you have to stick it in the freezer to re-think its stubborness. And for the butter to recongeal. And then you start over.

So-- play stuck in the figurative freezer-- I'm back to working on the novel. Fiction suddenly seems very easy compared to the Rubik's cube of drama. Marsha Norman wrote that you have to write plays twice-- once in your head and once on paper. Fiction lets you back-pedel more.

But that's not what I meant to write about. I meant to write about the actual process of writing, the way you stick your neck out the window into another world, shouting back over your shoulder, explaining what you see to your typewriter (which for the sake of this metaphor, takes dictation). Of how the best things I have written seem to have written themselves, because when I re-read them I am surprised to discover them laid out like that. As though I wrapped a package which, when unwrapped, is not the gift I remembered.

That's all, though, for the moment. The cardinal rule of successful writing is to write what you yourself would enjoy reading. And since I begin to wonder where I am going with this, I suspect you, dear reader, are wondering the same thing.

Just this: if I put up another blog with chapters of Dog Walker's Diary as I write them, would anyone read it?

On Houses

2005-10-16T14:53:00.000-04:00

I've listed my house with a realtor, but I don't think it knows that it's for sale. And I'm not telling it yet.

I keep re-examining the situation. It reminds me of times I've decided I was going to break up with someone but we hadn't had The Conversation. I watch the house, waiting for something to happen to make me to decide not to sell it.

I don't know what that something would be. Perhaps the house, sensing that I've never truly been in love with it, will make a last-ditch frantic effort to win my affections, by -- I don't know, miraculously self-painting rooms I never got around to. Perhaps if I walked in my bedroom and discovered that the walls were the delicate robin's egg blue of the paint sample sheet that's been sitting on my jewelry box for nearly a year-- perhaps then I would say, "Yes! I shall call the contractor and have him knock down this wall, expanding the room as I have often thought of doing! I will put in the french doors in the living room! I shall stay here! Together, we will make it work! And to think I nearly gave you up!"

And my house and I would fall madly in love with each other and whisper endearments in the dark, as I would fall asleep in its embrace, glad to be there rather than wishing I was somewhere else.

I keep waiting for something like that to happen.

There's no good time to break up. I'll wait til the first potential buyers come for a look-see. No point in playing the "It's over" card til it's necessary, til you're sure, ready to move out. It just makes for tense days, and those awkward nights where lying in the same bed, you jolt awake with horror if your foot accidentally brushes against the other's foot. (In this case, I guess that would be the wall my bed is pushed against.)

There I go, anthropomorphizing again.

Gibran wrote:
Then a mason came forth and said, "Speak to us of Houses."

And he answered and said:...Your house is your larger body. It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream? and dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?

I have another house, in Vermont. My house there is indeed both grove and hilltop-- or more precisely, in forest and on mountain. I think of that house constantly. It's my favorite place on the planet. But I don't get there very often.

I've tried living in Vermont full time. It doesn't work. At first, the quiet calms me. I feel at peace. I sink into the quiet, decompressing. But then the sinking into it begins to feel like free-falling through space. In a matter of weeks, the quiet roars in soul's ears, a deafening stillness. But then the howling erupts to break that stillness-- It is the fierce dogs in the cellar of my dark side, who begin with whining, then snarl and bark and emit such howling that even the Baskervilles would quake with terror.

And the next thing I know, I'm pacing through the night, chain-smoking, listening to Sarah McLaughlin, writing really bad poetry and self-absorbed entries in my journal, and weeping while I read Sylvia Plath aloud to myself.

I can deal with depression. But I do so hate indulging in cliches.

So I only go to Vermont for small pieces of time. Like this coming week, I think I am going. But I think about Vermont, and my house there almost hourly, wishing I were there.

It's like the chocolate pudding, which I never eat though it's my favorite dessert.

Just the Knowing that it's there, somewhere in the world--- often, that is enough.

Not always. But often. And often is pretty darn good.

Cupcake Answers Readers' Questions

2005-10-10T23:40:00.000-04:00

First of all, I’d like to thank the multitudes of you who have been emailing me privately with comments and questions. I certainly understand the hesitation in commenting publicly on a blog. The knowledge that one’s position might someday be used as in evidence in a court case, or read by one’s mother (however charming the mother in question may be, as mine is---Hi, Mom!)-- Well, those possibilities are undeniably problematic. But as readers continue to write me to pose questions, and as many of the questions are similar, I have decided to devote a posting of Cupcake Central to the most popular themes of inquiry.

Cupcake, what would you do if you won a million dollars in the lottery?

Funny you should ask, dear reader, as only today I was wondering about that myself. The first thing I’d do is put a back porch on my house in Vermont because there’s a spot that’s just screaming for a back porch to be put on. I’d donate to animal rescue groups and the DNP, and then I’d put the rest into a trust and start a theatre and comedy club to develop new plays, mostly funny new plays because audiences are so often made to suffer. (How is it that what is considered "Art" is so rarely funny? Comedy had it's own Muse, one reflects...) Oh, and at some point I’d buy something that certifiably and unarguably belonged to Napoleon, ideally something that he’d held in his hand a lot, like a watch. Once, on eBay, I bid on some buttons from his coat. I stopped at $800, which seemed a lot, and though I lost them to a higher bidder, I wish I’d gone further. To be able to touch something that he held, something that he’d absently fingered while reviewing documents, looking over maps, pressing his hand inside his jacket in his idiosyncratic gesture that Davide made famous—That would be worth a lot to me. More than $800, unarguably.

What about Napoleon appeals to you so much? Wasn’t he a war-monger and the George W. Bush of his day?

Reader, for shame! I will not grace that irreverent question with an answer. But you can look for an upcoming post on The Little General on October 21, which will be the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Perhaps then, when you hear my take on him, you will take back your inelegant and inaccurate (to a point) dispersions.

What is your favorite dessert food?

While the title of this blog would imply otherwise, my favorite dessert food is chocolate pudding. But I don’t eat it because I sugar makes me crazy (wired, then narcoleptic and depressed) and artificial sweeteners just don’t do pudding right. It’s a consistency thing.

And perhaps this says something about me. Like many other things I value tremendously, I enjoy it without the need to consume it. To think about something wonderful can be every bit as intense as having it. Sometimes, sadly, more so. I have often reflected that nothing is more satisfying than the first drag of a cigarette. And nothing so disappointing as the second.

You’re so pretty, funny, sweet and wise. How is it that you are single?

Thank you, generous reader, for your kind words. I am especially flattered that you have guessed my pulchritude through my words, since shy as I am, I have not posted photographs of myself. I keep daring myself to, but haven’t yet worked up the necessary gumption. Perhaps this goes with the hesitation in commenting on other people’s blogs, as mentioned above—and why I neglected my own blog for a couple of months. And other stupid choices I have made along the way, the examples of which might be legion, should I parade them in formation. I dare not begin to count.
This fear of declaring myself, of daring to take a solid and public stand, I think—--that’s what’s held me back from many things, including marriage. (I was engaged once. Suddenly, I felt an irresistable need to bolt to Australia for a few months. Somehow I forgot to keep in touch with my fiancé while I was gone. Oddly, he took umbrage at this omission and…that was that. As I recall, I experienced only jet lag and relief.)

I sometimes puzzle over my solitary status, usually on nights when all my friends are nestled in domestic situations leaving me, the cheese, to stand alone. ("To sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander the boulevards restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing…")

My Singledom is very much of my own making. And yet it is a mystery even to me. Should you turn upside down the Eight-Ball of my solitude, I’m guessing some of the enigmatic answers that would float to top would be: “Too Many Canines”; “Inappropriate, (sometimes bizarre) Choices in Men”; “Gathering No Moss”; “Commitmentphobia”; “Groucho Marx Syndrome” (as in I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member)—and inevitably, “Ask Again.”

What gives you faith in mankind?

I often think that I don’t have faith in mankind. And then I remember September 11, standing on 6th Avenue watching the buildings burn. I remember the river of dust-covered people moving uptown that afternoon—the acrid smell in the air, the shell-shocked sense of doom. And that those of us who were not covered with dust, those of us who watched helplessly from a quarter mile away – kept offering help -- water, the use of a phone, a place to sit, a pair of better shoes for walking than the super-high heeled pumps the barefoot, crying woman was carrying—When I think of that, of how the instinctive response to that horror was the impulse to help--- then I think maybe the world isn’t as messed up as I sometimes believe.

Niven, Connory, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, or Brosnin?

Dalton.

I fell for him when he played Heathcliff in a weird 70’s version of Wuthering Heights. When I saw it on TV, I was enthralled. For the rest of that summer, when a thunderstorm erupted, I’d force my reluctant cousin John to play a game called “Heathcliff” in which I'd wrap an army blanket around myself in what I hoped looked like a cloak, chasing him through the rain while calling after him, with great longing and desperation, “Heathcliff! Come back!!!” John hated this game and complains about it to this day. He is soon to move to Jersey City and will be surprised to discover that I plan to resurrect it. (Just kidding, JR.) We were, I think, 11 at the time. Looking back, I impressed that I could pretend with sufficient diligence to turn our suburban cul-de-sac into the Yorkshire Moors.
So, yes, Dalton. Absolutely.

Why are we here? Is man the measure of all things? What is our relationship with God?

Oh, for Heaven’s sake. I’m a playwright, not a philosopher. If you really wish me to answer those questions, it will take me a year to compose the drama, and 90 minutes of your time in a darkened theatre to watch, followed by two more hours arguing with your friends over dinner about what the hell I meant.

So that's it for now...sorry if I didn't get to your question. And keep those emails and comments coming. I love hearing from you.

A world rich with good things

2005-10-09T00:42:00.000-04:00

I've been very happy lately. Here are some of the reasons why:

My rabbit, Clover.

Clover used to live in a hutch like an ordinary rabbit. Then an old roommate built her a house and a play area in the basement. The way he set it up, she can come out any time she wants. When I go downstairs to do laundry, she dances around my ankles. It's the best way to do laundry, ever.

Sister Wendy.
I was looking at her book, 1000 Masterpieces. There's something very endearing about her. And I truly admire her. It must have been terrifying to emerge from the cloister to become an internationally recognized celebrity. But her passion for art and her faith in God kept her going. I find that inspiring.

A story I heard.

At my favorite artsy Jersey City cafe, the owner told me about a scientist who was probing an octopus with an electric shock thing. The octopus let him do it twice. But the third time the octopus grabbed the probe, hurling it back at the scientist like a spear.

For some reason, this delighted me. I couldn't stop smiling for hours.

These things speak to me. Nay, they sing with the voices of angels.

Oh, and also-- Monday is the last day of my soul-killing job.

The Secret Garden House

2005-10-06T23:47:00.000-04:00

I looked at the Lemony Snicket's house. Florescent lighting glared upon the hospital-white walls so that the whole place felt like that scene--not from Lemony Snicket's but from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Gene Wilder version) where Mick TeeVee gets broadcast across the room.

Even with better lighting and nicer colors-- that house had a bad vibe. Also, Mr. Trump is building a 55 story building that will block much of the view.

But I found something cool. It's on a gorgeous street, in what was the 'hood two years ago and is now a 'hood half filled with yuppies. It's a brick attached Edwardian home. It feels right. And the backyard has a secret garden. Really, it does.

Imagine a square. Each side is the wall of an enclosed backyard. So the middle square, between those four yards, is like a yard itself. It's about 25 by 25 feet. Except nobody owns it. The realtor looked it up on the town map. It's not deeded to anyone. Nobody's taxed on it. It's not town land, either. It's forgotten.

It probably hasn't been touched in decades. It's filled with tall trees, a little forest in the middle of the 'hood. And only one of those houses has a gate into that forest. The one I looked at, Number Sixty-One.

I stood in this room that, if I bought the house, I would make look like a castle tower. It's kind of round, the windows leaning out into the trees. I looked out at the secret garden and I thought, "This is my house."

The only problem is that it's just a shell right now. Needs a total gut rehab because it's uninhabitable as is. No plumbing, no lights, no heat, no nothing. In fact, no windows, just the spaces where they should be. But it called to me. It said, "Cupcake, we belong to each other. Welcome home."

Am I crazy?

I really want it. But I also know that if I get it, the stress and inevitable cashflow problems will torture me until the work is finished.

There's every likelihood that I could make a great deal of money, buying this place, fixing it up, living there for a year or two and then selling. (Although I'm already thinking, "No! I can't sell the secret garden house! I'll live there forever!")

It's not just because of the secret garden that I really liked the house. It had a feel -- a good feel. It felt welcoming. I could imagine living there and being my best self-- working on my stuff. Hanging out with my dogs. Cooking. Having friends over. The bus to Manhattan is on the corner.

It's worth it, though, isn't it? If at the end you get a home? If I can rebuild the way I want-- with a woodstove as backup in case we have some sort of catclysm? With a claw foot tub under a window that's part stained glass and part view of the secret garden? (I have the claw foot already, in the basement of my house in Vermont, just waiting to be put to use.)

Imagine having a house a stone's throw from Manhattan, with exposed brick walls, high ceilings, and a secret garden full of trees? A little forest all to oneself?

Dang.

I'm going to make an offer.

Remind me, later, when I'm posting about the ordeals of working with contractors, that I knew it would be like that, okay?

A secret garden would be worth it. A bedroom like a medieval tower.

Yes.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

2005-10-04T23:55:00.000-04:00

This post is about my dad.

The picture above is not my dad. It's Ed Asner (aka Lou Grant from the old Mary Tyler Moore Show). Dad looks a lot like Ed Asner. And he's also that sort of blustery, good-natured-but-can-come-off-as-gruff-til-he-smiles kind of guy.

A cousin once described Dad as a cross between Shrek and the Dalai Lama. I've seen pictures of both of them that resembled him. But as he and Ed Asner have aged, they've started to look like twins.

Aged. They've aged.

Dad's almost 83. (For those of you counting on your fingers, let me leap right in emphasizing that my parents had children late in life. So although your Cupcake is admittedly d'une age certaine, she's still younger than Madonna. And at least that hot.)

Almost every day, I talk to my parents in Florida. (I know, I know-- a planet to choose from and they go from Dayton to Port Richey. What were they thinking?) But they're very cool people.

I work with Senior Citizens, and I know age is relative. Some at 74 are much much older than others at 104. My parents are still active people, taking trips, following current events, making plans. They're still in the game.

But then...yesterday, when I called home, Dad told me he'd had a car accident. He's fine. The other guy's fine. (The vehicles are not so fine. But who cares.)

"Honey, I coulda really clobbered the guy," Dad said. "I didn't even see him."

He's decided he's not driving any more.

When he told me that, in the car myself, I practically slammed on the brakes.

Did he mean it? If it's really at that point, I credit him for having enough self-awareness to make that huge concession. But if he does stop driving, if he steps down from that activity voluntarily, nobly, because it's time-- then what does that mean?

It's shaken me.

I mean, he's always driven. Ever since I've known him. He gets around.

Like, at 82, this past year, my father started dealing in vintage jewelry. He's never had interest in jewelry or shopping. But he's developed one, going several times a week to flea markets and estate sales, reading books on 20th century costume design, carrying magnifying glasses to look at tiny imprints in metal that he's learned to decode and classify. Why? Because he's smart, and he knows that at his age, he needs to keep learning new things, keep his mind active. And he's been having a blast, learning this stuff, making new friends, finding treasures.

And now he's going to give that up, because he's not going to drive. He's conceding to age with a shrug and a non-plussed "Oh, well." He'll just read more, he says. Play on the internet. Watch the news, regretting daily the choice he made at the polls. (Not that it matters, especially in Florida.)

Oh, Mom'll drive him around. His golfing buddies will pick him up for their weekly game, or to go hit balls at the driving range. The neighbor friend Dick will shuttle him sometimes. But to give up driving---! That's a huge chunk of independence. And he's not making a big deal about it because-- well, he's never been into drama.

I, on the other hand, am truly shaken. Are they really old now? Have I been in denial? THIS IS MY DAD, guys. Not some old man. But-- my dad's 83 in two months. I guess he is an old man. How did this happen?

Now it's my turn to count on my fingers and realize that I've been procrastinating about visiting them. Haven't been there since April. Meant to go August. And September. And October. But still have made no plans.

Now I'll go. Soon. Drive him to the flea markets, myself. Talk to him about rhinestones. Spend some quality time.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one of the best TV shows in the history of television. But one day it was canceled. One day, it just wasn't there any more.

I'm making a reservation to Florida tomorrow. I gotta go see my dad.

The Lemony Snicket's House

2005-10-02T21:58:00.000-04:00

When I want to change my life, I shop. Except I don't look at shoes or clothes. Oh, no. I buy houses. I move.

It is time.

My sister says it's because, growing up in the suburbs of Dayton, we wished we lived anywhere else. Somehow the white-breaded Brady-world we lived in inked a "get me outta here" tattoo on our psyches. She moves a lot too. She calls it "geographic bulimia." Says she can't stomach one place for too long. She doesn't buy and sell houses, though. She changes countries. This weekend, she bought the plane ticket to Thailand. She's moving there on New Year's Day. Until then, she's leaving Barcelona, where she's lived for the past year, for a small town in France where she'll work on her novel.

Me? I'm just looking at a different part of Jersey City. Because I can't think of anywhere else to go. I've started doing my middle of the night "well, I can't sleep so I guess I'll drive around looking at houses" manuevers again. That's how I found this house I am sitting in, two and a half years ago. I drove past it and said, "That's the one."

It's a fine house. But I've never been in love with it. It's an investment, and I think the market's peaked. Time to sell. Buy something cheaper, smaller.

Yesterday, I drove past the house I want now. The Lemony Snicket's house.

That's not what the realtor calls it, but that's what it is.

It's perched on a cliff, facing Manhattan. It's the weirdest street, somehow, in an urban area but practically deserted. What buildings are there are derelict. A few vacant lots filled with broken furniture. It's not pretty.

But there's this ramshackle house, all by itself, sitting on a hill just above the cliff. It's a side-by-side two-family. Half of it is boarded up. The other half is for sale. Cheap. (Well, it would have to be, wouldn't it?)

When I saw it, I pulled the car over to the side of the road, at the edge of the cliff overlooking Manhattan. I sat there, like at Wimbledon, looking from side to side-- rickety, sloping Lemony Snicket's house to the left. Manhattan skyline to the right. I sighed. It's perfect. And who would live there but me?

I can't wait to see the inside. I hope the stairs wheeze when you walk on them. I hope you can roll a marble across the kitchen floor. I hope that when the light backs in over the afternoon, it casts long shadows and eerie beams to catch dustmotes that will dance for me as I look out over the Chryler building.

And I hope the boarded up half is drowning in back taxes so I can buy it too, get it zoned commercial and open an artsy cafe with outdoor tables in the summer in what is now the trash-filled vacant lot.

It will need mega-work. But it's so gothic (and so cheap) that I can't imagine not at least bidding on it.

And with that view. Amazing.

So I am house hunting again. And autumn tugs at my sleeve. "Find your way, Cupcake," it whispers. "Find your way home." I keep looking. Like the Baudelaire children, I keep looking.

Maybe this is the one.

("Who has no house now never will have one.
Who is alone will stay alone.
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening.
And wander the boulevards, hither and yon, restlessly
while the dry leaves are blowing.")

Dumb dialing

2005-09-27T13:50:00.000-04:00

You know what sucks? When you hit the wrong name on your phone and call the wrong person. Especially if it's someone you don't want to call for a lot of reasons, and you're telephoning somebody else and you're in a good mood and the world's a great place. And then you look down and see that your phone (the traitor), the new phone just got last week that you still haven't figured out entirely, is actually calling the wrong person, someone you don't want to talk to, whose phone number you thought you'd deleted but apparently it was still on the sim card because there it is in the new phone, which you begin to suspect is demonic because you keep hitting the red button that should disconnect the call but it takes what seems to be minutes before it does actually disconnect.

So now this person thinks I've called and I haven't. Which of course makes me wish I could text and say, "Yo, that was a mistake."

But I can't. Obviously.

I can't figure out how to delete the number from the sim card, either. I changed it, though, so if it does get pressed accidentally again, it will be a wrong number.

Which I guess is what it always was.

girl to girl

2005-08-14T19:13:00.000-04:00

Here's something I've learned over time:

If a man tells you that once a crazy woman chased him with her car and tried to run him over, the day may come when you understand completely and wish that she'd succeeded.

the tightrope

2005-08-13T14:52:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog, it was going to be a novel. I had only just started reading blogs. A friend has one, and it's a big part of her life. And then another friend gave me the address to his blog. Once I started flitting around in blogdom, I became engrossed. I was intrigued by the way a one line comment can reveal the personality of the person who left it. In my lurking weeks, reading blogs felt like reading a novel. So I started thinking of writing a novel that read like a blog. I was thinking that the comments could be included if they added to the readability of the book. (It would be easy enough to change the identities of people who didn't want to sign releases.)

I thought out a story line about a girl called Aurora Trelawny who starts writing a blog called cupcake central. She doesn't like her job very much. She has a flaky best friend named Holly, and a roommate, and she is longing for something-- but she doesn't know what.

I'd just started the book. Read the first three entries I posted here. That's as far as I got in the book. Then something happened that made me unable to continue with the novel.

If I'm telling a story and somebody doesn't know that it's a story, is that a lie? In some stories, deception pushes forward the plot. I wasn't sure if I was living my life or writing a story about someone else's. I had to think. Sometimes I thought one way; sometimes the other. But the dilemma, both ethical and literary, left me at a creative impasse. To describe more of cupcake (aka Aurora)and her life seemed murky, at best. So I stopped, wanting to mull it all over.

Someone who wanted to more about cupcake asked for another posting. I sat at my computer and thought about how much we don't know about other people, even people we think we know or the people we want to know most of all. The posting about the crayons was inspired by that. And by realizing how many colors were beyond what I could see, both in this world and in someone else's heart. A spectrum treasured for its beauty even though it is undiscovered, like El Dorado.

After that, I posted only when I was bored. The next posts are based on random thoughts I wasn't really invested in. I still hadn't solved my dilemma about fiction and lying. I stayed on the safe side, writing stories nobody would really care about, even me. The thing about Buzzy was a tribute to a crazy guy I knew in high school, someone another friend runs into from time to time. The crazy guy now rides an ergonomically correct bike. Which if you knew him, is a perfect expression of who he is: pedaling low to the ground, arrogant and righteous, and expecting not to be hit because a little orange flag waves high above his head. And because he's RIGHT, dammit.

I laugh at that, but the truth is, I was doing the same thing. I knew I was lying. But it wasn't out of a dishonest intention. So how can that be wrong? I looked for a logical loophole. When is fiction fiction, and when is it a lie? There had to be an escape clause for my situation. I wanted to ergonomically back-pedal my way out of it. But I couldn't.

I have a lot of time on my hands. I'm the first to admit it. I live in Jersey City, New Jersey, where I moved only because it was close to Manhattan. It's a different world, though. My friends are in Manhattan. My life was in Manhattan. Then I moved here because I bought a house (though it officially belongs to my parents, for mortgage rate reasons) - and I spend about 2.5 hours a day in the car, traveling between home and work.

I can't quit my job because I am doing a really good job at it. I am hoping that the company will promote and transfer me. It's a realistic hope, but I'm not there yet. I've got a mental deadline for that. Now, I'm biding my time.

One of the nicest parts of my day occurs as I am coming home from work in the evening. The traffic inches painfully through an ugly stretch of gas stations and trucker-world restaurants. At a standstill in front of a particularly complicated rotary, on the right side of the car, just over a bridge, there's an ancient wrought iron gate. Through the rails, there is an old graveyard. After the gate there are a few yards of wrought iron fence. Usually, when I'm passing it,(slooooooooooooowly, because the traffic sucks)- the sun is dipping in the sky. From the road, the view faces west, over the graveyard which is on a gentle downward slope. The sun hits the grass like a golden backlight, illuminating the space between the blades. And in this peaceful scene, there are rabbits. One day I counted six of them, sitting there in the grass, peacefully eating.

The nicest part of my day.

And then the traffic pushes me beyond that view and I am back in urban ugliness, and I come home to my house. Usually I calculate if I have money and energy enough to justify the trip into Manhattan to do something fun. Usually, the answer is no.

Most of the year, I belong to a couple of writers' workshops. They've stopped for summer. My friends are married. From what I've observed, that uniformly indicates that they now go to bed at 9:30 pm. (If you're friends are just starting to marry off on you--- just wait. You'll see.) After 10:00 PM, I spend a fair bit of time doodling on bar napkins in front of ball games I'm not paying attention to.

From that point of view, friends, I started this blog. There's more of a backstory than that. But you get the idea, and discretion applauds forebearance.

I'll write more about this. All I wanted to do write now was make a declaration of what's true. The line between what I was writing and what I was living became blurry, and for a while I think I wanted to be cupcake enough to pretend that I was her. But I am not. Though obviously, as she is drafted from my thoughts, she is a projection of me.

As I said, backstories have not all been told. If anyone's all that interested, feel free to ask. I doubt anyone is. I'm sick of cowering behind my own shadow, though. From now on, cupcake central is about me, Leslie. That scares me, a little. I like dark places, rooms with doors, anonymity. But I don't see any choice. And my sincere apologies if things took on a fun-house mirror effect while I was walking the tight-rope between fiction and lies.

buzzy

2005-08-02T21:43:00.000-04:00

the last time i saw buzzy was in the sub shop. they were closing up and had already shut the lights off, so we sat in the dark, dipping fries in ketchup and sipping diet coke.

he asked to see my keychain, and when i showed it to him he pulled off my cvs discount card, replacing it with his own. he liked to throw the consumer-computer off track. said he'd traded cards with five people already that month. keep the man guessing, he told me. he reminded me to always pay in cash, and warned me about microchip implants they're selling consumers as convenient sources of id or medical records, information injected in the back of your arm in case a cell phone signal isn't enough to let the satellite know where we are.

he told me to cut the labels off new clothes, because there are hidden coding devices that can track where items brought home from the store are traveling, where they end up, who's wearing the kathy lee gifford and who's wearing donna karan. (i looked it up later. he was telling the truth.)

we spoke of love and life and fireflies, and wilde's observation that "it is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. the absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable."

i considered kissing him, just for something to do. you don't see a lot of men in tie-dyed bandanas anymore. (and more's the pity, i say.)

on the street he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before he told me to keep the faith. and then he got on his ergonomically correct bike and rode off against the traffic: no helmet, no light, no horn.

and that was it. the last time i saw him.

but you can still see the crater where the state house used to be.

the gentle art of handshaking

2005-07-29T18:14:00.000-04:00

last night i went to a dinner party. i arrived with two bottles of wine as a hostess gift, but they were really as much for me as for her. i’d never met the other guests before, and i figured either i’d like them, in which case the wine would create a merry atmosphere, or i wouldn’t, in which case the wine would console me until i made my excuses and departed.

it was okay. i liked them fine.

as the hostess made the introductions, we all shook hands. and i realized again what a powerful first impression a handshake makes. i found myself judging these people based on their handshakes. and i know i always do.

how hard is it to get a handshake right? i ask you. yet so many people have bad ones.

there’s the “handing you a dead fish” handshake.

there’s the “I’m just going to c-clamp your fingers” handshake.

there’s the “i read a book that said a man should have a firm handshake so i’m going to squeeze your fingers until your rings bend” handshake.

here are some handshake tips:

stand up, unless you are a female over the age of 60. for anyone else to remain seated during a handshake (whether as means of introduction, greeting, or goodbye) smacks of unconcern.

the palms of the two people shaking should touch. they do not need to writhe together in a manual lambada. but they should press against each other. the fingers also lie parallel. no curling of fingers, grasping with fingers, or squeezing of fingers is necessary.

if you have sweaty palms, wipe your hand discreetly on your pant leg first. if you have sticky hands, say, “my hands are sticky, so please forgive me if I don’t shake yours.” and then go wash them. if you shake my hand and there’s a tackiness on your skin, i shall wonder what was on your hands and it will repulse me. this will make me associate you, forever, with unpleasant things.

there are probably other pointers to handshaking. but i was thinking about it as i met 6 people last night. by their handshakes i knew who i wanted to sit with at dinner, and who would be interesting to talk to. i was right.

although perhaps it’s like kissing and there are several schools of thought. i’m sure there’s someone somewhere in this crazy old world actually enjoys what i consider to be bad kissing. someone may be hoping to encounter the tiny pointed tongue that a recent date darted around in my mouth for the 15 seconds it took me to extricate myself from his (unexpected) ardor. i’d had no intention of letting him kiss me, but my attention went momentarily elsewhere and he sneaked on in.

i knew when i met him that i didn't want to kiss him. i knew he'd be a bad kisser. why? because when we’d met, he’d handed me a dead fish.

kansas

2005-07-24T14:56:00.002-04:00

when you open the door, the bright day pushes past you, cajoled by a surprising wind. acknowledging your appearance on the porch, the wheat field bows repeatedly, like a chorus line at curtain call, or reception of japanese diplomats. but it's neither of those things. it's a wheat field on a windy day.

you are standing outside your house in kansas, a dishtowel in hand, looking down your driveway at the country lane that leads from town. you are waiting for the mailman. he might bring something, something that might interest you for half an hour. a letter from a far-off friend. the electric bill. or an entry to a contest which might involve some minutes of occupation, peeling gold seals from one card to reapply to another, pulling apart perforations and scratching off markers to reveal secret numbers beneath. a bulk-mailed invitation to subscribe to a magazine, "songwriter", or "tennis today". you have never written a song or stepped onto a tennis court. perhaps you should. Perhaps you would, if the mailman would come, if he would bring you an invitation from the world, a ticket out of stillness, of loneliness, out of here, where a golden field of wheat gives terse approval, nodding as you step back inside and close the door.

it's been days since the cat's come around. this is not the first time. he's stalking mice in the fields, or down at the neighbor's farm, yowling at a barncat in heat. he'll show up again. probably. he'll show up, scraped and cut from brawling, hungry and ungrateful. he has his own agenda. it's a business relationship; that's all.

is it time for the book of the month? is it a day to drive to town, to wheel the squeaking cart through the over-airconditioned supermarket aisles? is it time to buy more stamps at the postoffice? to visit the library where you will surf the internet looking at the airfare on flights you dream of taking?

at your house in the wheatfield, there is noone home, not even you. and yet you stand there just inside the door, devoid of cat and company, waiting for a golden ticket out.

maybe today?

and then you blink and rediscover the table of friends before you.

"let's split the tiramisu" says the girl next to you. "it's really good here. i've had it before."

a discussion of dessert occurs, hinting at guilt and laciviousness that no one will indulge. a cart appears, laden with pastry and gustatory treasures, each an invitation to delight. strawberry shortcake languishing in whipped creme so decadent you can imagine it spread on marilyn monroe's decolletege. chocolate gateaux, intricate layers spread with rasberry. mocha mousse. tiramisu, lady fingers giving the thumbs-up at its periphery. wistful compromises are struck amongst the girls, who waver between what they want and what they ought to do.

"i will have one of each," you tell the waiter, to the suprise and amusement of your friends. the thinnest girl laughs, somewhat uncomfortably.

"i will have one of each, and apple pie a la mode, and pecan pie, and a scoop of every ice cream flavor that you have, two scoops, in fact. and lots of spoons, enough for all my friends, and if they care to join us, the people at the next table, because they look nice."

the waiter pauses, determines that you are serious. he nods (a hint of a bow?) and disappears into the kitchen.

your best friend, across from you, says, "what's the deal?"

you smile. "it looks good," you say. "don't worry- I'm paying." (you mentally calculate the money in your debit card account. yes, it should be fine.)

later, a table of happy spoons cut through indulgances ordinarily forbidden, and somewhere in kansas, a mailman with his hand in a cavernous mailbox feels a cat brush against his leg.

the big box of crayons

2005-07-21T17:44:00.000-04:00

when i was little, my favorite aunt had a special box of crayons she kept for me and my sister. when we went to her house, she would go into the attic (a place of great mystery, because the stairs to it were in the back of a clothes closet that i remember being behind the television set--though surely that can't be right). she'd come down the attic steps and emerge through the clothes with the box, a flat box like the box "candyland" came in. the box smelled of sanctity-- dust and wax. the sacred smell of crayons. (remember that?) when she opened the box, the colors were laid out like silverware on a banquet table. it created quite an appetite to draw. the box held 100 crayons, each one resonating a pure note of color.

in kindergarten we had a box of 5 colors. i rememeber because i was the only kid who brought mine home, the last day of school, without a single crayon broken. to me a broken crayon was tragedy, like baby birds fallen from a nest. no prayer or effort could bring them back. (my first taste of disappointment, i imagine.)

our aunt's legion of crayons offered infinite possibility: draw within the lines, or rebelliously outside them. scribble, scrawl, deface, create. what paper or surface could fail to be beautiful with such a spectrum afforded to it? there i learned the metals: not only gold and silver (how pedestrian they seemed!), but copper but bronze, pewter. perhaps this isn't a real memory, but i can see a platinum crayon. can that have happened? platinum? crayola, stand aside. in the crayon parade, you must bow to this box from my aunt's attic.

it broke my heart when i learned she let cousins share this treasure when they visited. oh, fickle aunt. after learning that, when the box was opened i'd jealously inventory the colors- see which shades had been lost or broken by the yahoos from the other side of the family. but in truth they did pretty well. i think like my sister and i, they were awed by the colors.

the norm, of course, was the crayola 64 set. it was pretty good. no complaints, under usual circumstances. i remember clearly the difference between yellow-orange and orange-yellow, like two brothers similar looking and yet distinct.

"get to the point, cupcake!" i hear an impatient reader sigh.

yes, friend, i shall. i wonder what crayon you would be. your impatience speaks of red, brick red,i think. and assessing that has brought me to my point.

meeting people is like coloring. they provide the shape. we try to match our understanding with what we know of them. we color sponge bob yellow because we know he is yellow; marge simpson's hair is blue because we know it is blue. our acquaintances we adorn with the 5-color kindergarten box. the 64 box we keep for our closest friends. in between, the 12, the 24, stages of intimacy that offer more dimensions to knowing people.

but sometimes i wonder about the colors we do not see. a co-worker lies about something to make me look bad. who would have guessed she carried that shade in her? a neighbor glows unexpectedly with an exotic hue i never guessed. people i meet in life or cyberspace show up sometimes like a technicolor movie seen on a black and white tv. i want the hundred crayons back, for some of them. i want to know the possibilities, the range, the nuance of refraction. i want to hold out the box and match the colors to the person's soul, discovering in each aspect a richness that defies the mundane, the 64-ishness of the daily world.

in heaven there are colors we can only imagine. i see them sometimes, flashes of the divine, in people i know or want to know. and it's like my aunt presenting the unopened box of colors. i want to inhale, to grab a stick and find the picture that i know is there.

how to build a barricade

2005-07-20T12:58:00.000-04:00

first, take all the chairs in your office and place them in the main corridor where the elevators open. for stability reasons, if time permits, it's best to remove the wheels from the bottom. ergonomically correct chairs may have removable neck rests or back supports which should be also removed and woven into the mix.

the object of the chairs is to create a small puzzle which upper management may feel is solvable. that is before they get to the great wall of cubicles which will form your second level of fortification. cubicles are heavy and when pushed together, it may take the entire team of upper management and middle management yes-men to move them. with planning, you can devise a cubicle layout that will create a structural gridlock.

meanwhile, it is to be assumed that you and the few coworkers you don't despise are celebrating your stolen moments of liberty over microwavable toaster strudel in the employee kitchen. perhaps someone was visionary enough to bring starbucks or d/d coffee to work. otherwise, the last libation you will enjoy is folgers made in the decades old mr coffee with permanent coffee stains etched into the glass. add enough hazelnut powdered coffee mate and it's almost drinkable. turn on the radio attached to the clock in the corner whose red numbers have woefully scolded you to get back to your desk so many times. listen to the static-filled tunes on whatever station might come in. await breaking news about the swat team landing on the roof. you may have to turn up the radio to hear it over the helicopters and the moans of the other co-workers tied with scotch tape in the supply closet. those large post-its make great blindfolds when placed over eyes.

or, you could call in sick. or, you could find another job, start a new life, move to another city, create a new identity. though it's true that, should you build the barricade, most of these things will be settled for you.

you can use the wheels from the chairs, those spherical wheels, to lob at the swat team when they kick through the window. it won't hold them back, but it might provoke them to shoot.

you'll never take me alive, copper.

sigh.

it didn't work in les miz, either.

postcard of venice

2005-07-18T21:29:00.000-04:00

last night, coming home from john-o's barbeque, i found a postcard. it was lying on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. it was just getting dark but i saw it on the sidewalk, so i picked it up. a postcard of venice, one of those long postcards with a wide angle view. this was looking over the venetian lagoon, black gondolas gloomy in the foreground and in the background, the purple sky swathing itself around the white dome of a church. it was folded, as though it had been mailed in an envelope. or maybe not mailed at all. there was no stamp. the crease of the card was frayed. someone had unfolded it many times.

in the square set aside for the address was written only "to my love" it a wide clear handwriting. the person had used a nice pen, a fountain pen, not a cheap pic. (i noticed this because i only ever write with cheap bics, and this ink looked nothing like that.)

my sister taught me ages ago that you should always look down. she finds money that way. more often (and more money)than you'd think possible. walking to school as kids, we'd find other kids homework dropped along the way. later, as adults, sometimes she'd pull from her purse a letter or a document that she'd found blowing down the street or stuck to the side of a trashcan. once she showed me a letter she'd found that was hysterically funny, a break-up letter written by a woman detailing all the reasons she was dumping her boyfriend, reasons that made it perfectly clear he wouldn't care at all. (he hadn't called in two weeks. he'd neglected her birthday. he'd dropped her off first after the dinner party, taking her friend sue home second even though she lived further away.)

this postcard was sort of the opposite of that. this postcard breathed such romance that i could practically smell the heavy scent of venice. i think it was written by a guy to a woman, but it might easily have been a woman to a man. or hell, two gay people. i don't know about the trivialities of gender.

there was so much love resonating off this postcard love that my eyes filled with tears upon reading it. i don't know how to explain. i was perfectly fine, talking on my cell to my roommate about where i'd left the keys for her because she'd locked herself out again. i saw the postcard, folded, and bent down to pick it up. i didn't read it until i'd hung up from her and dropped my cell into my bag. reading it, i was so moved that the whole world looked different. and exactly then the streetlights came on which i took as a sign of something. i don't know what.

i can't quote it here because i put it back on the sidewalk. i wanted to take it because it was so beautiful but it was heartbreaking (for me, missing t.) and reading a stranger's words to his (her?) beloved seemed somehow wrong, like looking over someone's shoulder as they punch in their pin at the atm.

it was all the stuff you'd expect: longing, praise of the beloved's soul and beauty and beautiful soul, a description of a walk crossing bridges and through piazzas and a search, in the heart, to connect to the missed dear one.

why was it on the sidewalk? did the recipientlose it? or leave it behind like we do so many things we love?

perhaps it had never been sent, only carried by the writer who hoped to someday meet the lover of his dreams. then dropped when the burden of carry that hope became too heavy.

i keft it there, in case the person who dropped it came back to find it. i thought i'd memorized it, but what i remembered got messed up in my own thoughts. he spoke of finding a pidgeon feather as soft as her hair. or something like that. it sounded better in the card.

i came home pensive, was cranky to my roommate who had left the keys (the spare keys)in the lock for anyone to steal. i went in my room to ponder life and love. eventually fell asleep in my clothes and woke up wondering why i still had my sandals on.

i want to go to venice. at sunset. i want to write with ink so rich and dark that i can fall into the crevices of words. i want to live in that postcard world of sunsets and feathers drifting over st marks while the gondaliers sing, where someone i love speaks to me in soft tones that opens doors without needing a key.

why i am home on saturday night

2005-07-16T21:16:00.000-04:00

holly, my best friend, was going to have a party. all week it's been "remember that saturday night is my party, you're coming, right?" i bought an extra cute dress because this guy she works with was invited. (steamy, he is. so hot he's steamy.) my cousin invited me to the beachhouse. my brother-in-law offered me $200 to babysit the brats so he could take my sister somewhere for the weekend. "can't!" I said to those offers. hols is having a party and i promised i'd come."

this afternoon, holly calls me and rasps through the phone, "i'm too fucking hung over to clean my house."

huh?

i offer to help her. no, she can't be bothered. the cat litter is overflowing, she says. i'll lose all respect for her, she says. she's going to spend the day lying in bed and would i please get the word out that the party is a no go?

so i make some calls. then i take a bath. i lie in the tub and shave my legs while the water grows cold. (too bad, steamy. i'd have been all sleek had you seen me in that cute dress.) i get out of the bath and, wrapped in a towel, try to take a nap on my back patio. yeah so the wife-beater wearing neighbor keeps peeking out his window. i guess that huge peach colored towel i took from my parents house is a turn-on. it came almost to my knees, you know? but must be thrilling to look at if you're 60.

anyway i lay there on the porch -which isn't sunny, by the way, even when the sun is shining-and i thought about better jobs and that steamy guy and what i would have done with the $200 babysitting money. then suddenly it was 8 o'clock and i didn't have any plans. hols has her phone turned off and nobody else is answering. maybe this is a good way to spend a saturday night, it's cheap and i won't be hung over tomorrow.

then again, i could start dialling again.

nah.

(sorry hols for telling the world about your cat litter but to be honest juniper kitty deserves a clean box and you really ought to not drink so much unless you're drinking with me, beeyatch.)

goin' postal

2005-07-15T20:58:00.000-04:00

lord, but i hate my job. it's not that i hate the work, per se, but the environment. how is it that no one has to knock at a cubicle? i'm in there, doing my thing. it's my space. there should be a door. or failing that, some sort of line across which people will not go without my say so.

oh to have a door.

but cupcake, you will be thinking. why do you not simply quit?

now there's an interesting story, and one i dare not tell.

okay, that's a lie. i haven't quit because i need the money. every day i half-heartedly look on careerbuilder and cl and monster. but i end up drifting into blogworld and blocking out the mindnumbing boredom by reading about social lives beyond my own and then someone comes bounding into my cubicle so i have to click on a spreadsheet and act like i am doing work. as soon as I get out of there every night, i race down to the local, order a cosmo and wait for my posse to join me. they hate their jobs too.

can i blame bush for this?

one of my friends quoted drew carey as saying something like, "so you hate your job? there's a support group for that. it's called everybody and we meet at the bar." true. so true.

something's gotta give. on the way home i stop at blockbuster and rent movies like office space and nine to five where the oppressed workers have the last laugh. next: a christmas carol, part 2-- in which bob cratchett beats scrooge senseless with tiny tim's crutch.

is there a checklist for warning signs that you're about to go postal?