The Reader Travels

I bought myself a new car this weekend, and I’m selling the old ‘93 Accord to my brother so his daughter can have her own ride as she turns sixteen next week. It’s kinda special because that car is as old as she is. It’s also as reliable and sensible as she is, and I know it’s a lot for a sixteen-year-old to live up to, but I have a lot of faith in her.

Of course, I wasn’t as sensible when I was her age, even if I was a smidge more sensible than most of my friends. For instance, the night we had a sleep-over at my girlfriend’s house, and the rest of the bunch got arrested for being out past curfew, I was asleep in bed so I could wake up early the next morning for driver’s ed class.

This was the summer of the cross-country road trip with UB.  Once I was finished with driver’s ed and being grounded for letting my younger sister get arrested, I was equipped with a learner’s permit and a need for speed. And I couldn’t turn down this perfect opportunity to put my new skills to work. My uncle needed someone to help him drive his monster Lincoln Continental from Orlando, Florida, to Dayton, Ohio, and back down to Texas. My brother, who already had his driver’s license, was busy with a summer job, so it was all me.

It was a hot summer that required a lot of beer. With a cooler full of Miller Lite 16oz cans, it was my job to pour, while UB warmed to the idea of putting me behind the wheel of his big yellow car. Since the cups only held 12oz, I was rewarded with the other 4oz from every can.

I learned a lot that summer. I learned not to keep a death grip on the steering wheel and not to blank out watching the dotted white line. I learned to change lanes to give a wide berth when cars were parked on the shoulder. I learned that I shouldn’t drive when I’m really sleepy for fear of putting my car under a tractor trailer. And I learned the proper way to flick cigarette ashes out the front window of a moving vehicle. Ah, memories.

So I’ve got wretched allergies, right? And I’m really bad about going to the doctor.  It’s more because I hate making phone calls than I hate going to the doctor, and I think more doctors should do online scheduling, but that’s another story.

My eyes were itching and watering for three months before I finally decided to go to an eye doctor. Anyway, the first thing they did when I went in was to take a quick eye test, and I could hardly read any of the lines on the chart, with my glasses on.  One week later, after 10 drops a day and a bizarre regiment involving baby shampoo and a Q-tip, my eyes were vastly improved, and I could read a whole lot more lines on the eye chart.

So I’m realizing that I’ve been driving around with seriously impaired vision for a while. I might even blame my vision for that ticket I got running a red light on Northwest Highway, costing me $75. Not only was my eyesight impaired, I drove around squinting all the time because the light hurt my eyes, driving east in the morning and west in the evening, always into the sun. It’s a wonder I didn’t have an accident.

So the moral to the story is… ach, no moral. It’s just better to be able to see if you’re going to be driving a motor vehicle. Duh.

I was all ready to talk about comparisons between migrant farm workers and the Jewish diaspora, but I just need a break, a nice clean rest stop along this extended highway. Life’s little dramas always come in waves, and we’ve been splashed.

OK, enough with the mixing of the metaphors. Yesterday, we said bon voyage to a friend who is returning home to care for her sick father. We don’t know how long he has left, and meanwhile, there are travel plans, child care and housing issues to juggle, work efforts to coordinate in her absence. Another friend left work to be with his ailing father, who died before the plane ever landed. Don’t ever leave things unsaid, he said. I keep thinking of Gene and songs sung at bedside.

Two miscarriages in one week, a mother with breast cancer, a grandmother with a heart attack, a girlfriend with a broken foot, another girlfriend in ICU clinging to life, an uncle who crushed his baby kitten under the leg of his rocking chair, a grandfather left home alone with no running water or air conditioner in the Texas heat, eyes wet and swollen with incessent allergies but hardly a tear cried for the rest.

Luckily there are happy things too. Two dear friends were married, another has a baby on the way and an exciting new job opportunity. A cousin has reached the second trimester successfully after three miscarriages before.  And here I am traveling, and I finally have a cell phone if anyone needs to reach me. Not that I’ll give you the phone number.

My man writes the Web trends site on About.com, so he thinks a lot about search engine optimization and how to write articles that will draw people in from Google and Yahoo!. But, me, I just write, passively posting, and waiting patiently for people to pass by. Perhaps a little alliteration today, a rhyme tomorrow. I even took the ads off my Web site, so when people do arrive, they feel more at home.

When people search to find me, it’s pure serendipity, and I feel the kindred spirits are out there, friends unknown, searching and connecting on things like…

Blanche Dubois drag queen
unibrow is beautiful
giant badger in mythical northern europe
“aldous huxley” and “carey grant” lsd
famous syphilitics
biblical violence
The Wanting Seed

Whoever, wherever you are, welcome home.

I like to see a man with a small dog. It says to me, he ain’t compensatin’ for nothin’. It also says, he’s sensitive, yet brave, brave and confident in himself because he doesn’t care what others think.

Of course, it could mean he’s got an overbearing wife at home, who forces him to walk her little pet, when all he wants is a German shepherd. Or, it could mean he’s trying to appear sensitive to pick up chicks, like my first boyfriend, who used to bring his little white Maltese to the beach.

Either way, I prefer that guy to the one who says, I’d be embarrassed to walk a little dog like that. That guy! He’s got issues.

I’m registered to vote, so I might as well. But honestly, any time I tune in and listen to what the politicians are saying, every sentence, every sound bite, just sounds dumb. I guess that’s why I haven’t voted in 15 years. Go ahead, be appalled, I don’t mind.

I think I’ll go and vote to allow convenience stores to sell beer and wine in my neighborhood. And I guess I’ll vote for President while I’m at it. It’s not that the wine store is extremely far, it’s just that I don’t like those big red NO signs in my neighbors’ yards and all over town. It’s just so negative.

Besides, today I started to cook my spaghetti sauce and I realized I didn’t have any red wine, and I didn’t feel like driving to the over-priced wine store at the edge of town, so I faked it by combining white wine with vermouth and dark rum. It tasted good, but it just wasn’t the same. And if I could have gone to the Texaco on the corner, I would have done it.

For the sake of my spaghetti sauce, I will make it to the polls this year. Cheers!

So, Halloween is coming up, and there are decisions to be made. My costume tradition is to pay tribute to someone famous who’s died in the last year, and I have a few interesting options this year. There’s:

• » Jeff Healey, blind guitar player extraordinaire
• » Bobby Fischer who kicked ass at chess and then became a freaky recluse
• » Heath Ledger, his last role presenting some cool possibilities
• » Charlton Heston, though I did the Planet of the Apes when Roddy McDowell died
• » George Carlin, perhaps the old school hippy dippy weather man
• » Isaac Hayes, maybe a little South Park, maybe a little Shaft, maybe some spaceship Scientology stuff, who knows?

I’ve been leaning heavily toward a tribute to Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax, who died in March of this year. He opens up a lot of possibilities for strange and wonderful creatures. I could be a sexy she-elf or a goddess, a warrior, bard or cleric, a sea nymph, fairy or succubus. I can take advantage of the opportunity to be a hot girl, since the last three years I’ve dressed up as nerdy dudes – Bob Denver in ‘05, Don Knotts in ‘06 and Kurt Vonnegut in ‘07.  So, I’m way past due for a costume that shows off my chest.

But I got thrown for a loop yesterday when I learned of Paul Newman’s death. Whenever I look at pictures of old blue eyes, I see my grandfather. I always thought my mom’s dad looked like Paul Newman, both in his younger pictures and later in life, when I knew him. So, to pay tribute to Paul Newman is to pay tribute to my Papa. Oh well, we’ll just wait and see.

Farewell, Mr. Newman. Farewell, all.

I don’t know why I find the subject of syphilis to be so fascinating. Maybe because you have these great minds through history that turn to madness with the aid of a tiny bacterium. Maybe because I’m also fascinated with Hansen’s Disease which has a similar but more nefarious stigma. 

People are always speculating about famous syphilitics.  But really, we don’t know for sure that Friedrich Nietzsche had syphilis. And we like to blame Van Gogh’s madness on any number of things, including the infamous spirochete. The syphilis entry on Wikipedia has a great list of “Notable known and suspected syphilis-infected people…” that shows who was known to have it, who was merely suspected to have it and who died of it.

Because of my morbid fascination, I think I will start a “diseased world” tour, starting with this book. Of course, you’ll have to wait for the blog to catch up with the research. In the meantime, there is still Shakespeare, who was genius but never mad. I’m not done with him yet.

When I was a pensive seventeen year old, I stared at the beautiful antique dresser inherited from my grandmother and interpreted the art of it. Through my powers of observation, I saw in the dresser a scene of the afterlife.  The top part is carved to represent heaven, and the bottom is hell. Hell is represented by snakes and bats and fire and a great big urn.

Each time I tell the story to someone new, they say, “Oooh, that’s pretty cool,” and I say, “I know, right?” They all stroke my ego and reassure me that I think interesting thoughts, and I walk away feeling good about myself. Until last night. 

I showed the dresser to my friend D, and she said, “It’s a beautiful piece of furniture.” Then I proceeded to tell her the story, but instead of praising me for my insights, she said, “Well, when I walked in here, it was a beautiful piece of furniture, but now it’s just depressing.”

What? You mean you’re not going to tell me how awesome and interesting I am? Oh my god, should I file my dresser interpretations under cringe therapy and just get over myself?

Okay, so my dresser tells the story of eternal damnation, and hell takes up a whole lot more real estate than heaven. But at least my panty drawer is in the top part of the dresser, which, to me, means that despite what the Pope says, there is still sex in heaven. Or maybe it means that sex IS heaven. Aw yeah, that’s it.

I’m only one season behind on Lost now.  When I started watching, I was three years behind, watching scenes that happened before, feeling as if I had slipped back in time to the year 2004, watching time progress again to 2005 and 2006.  So, I’m a little slow in jumping on a bandwagon, and I’d never make it in the fashion world.

I’m time tripping again now, going back a little further in time to see the mighty Buffy in action.  At the same time, I am making my way through the archives of Greg Howard, Buffy fan and blogger extraordinaire. It’s September 2003, and California is going through its governor recall election.  I don’t have the heart to tell him the Terminator is going to win and that TO will soon be moving to Philadelphia.

Greg jokes about himself and how he was slow in jumping on the blogger bandwagon, but I was a whole four years behind him. He talks of things as blogging cliches, things like making fun of the search terms people use to get to your blog, when I thought that was an original idea I came up with all on my own (don’t you worry, I’ll do it anyway).

Anyway, back in 2003, River Phoenix had already been dead for ten years but was still missed.  And before he died, River starred in one of the coolest versions of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I ever — My Own Private Idaho. If you’ve never seen it, don’t you worry about young Keanu — he was always good at playing young stoner types. Back in the day.