I'm taking you with me.

Toukey’s Big Deluge: The Reckoning Prelude: Paradise Lost Propers

Sundown.  Expressway.  The sky is a murky post-pink peach.  Indigo clouds smear up from the western horizon, appearing very much like the monsters that awaited us at the edge of a world we once considered flat,  bringing nighttime in the hems of their gowns.  In the darkness below, snaking chains of alternating red and white lights coil around the I-94/134 cloverleaf .  They slither  this way and that across an unseen landscape.  From the lower deck of a preposterous aquatic amusement contraption, a bottom-heavy Eve regards this rush hour serpent and the darkness outside the cathedral-sized water park windows through her water-speckled Buddy Holly glasses.  She sighs and returns to her so-called “chair of delight” to weigh her options.

She has been informed that a step toward knowledge equates two of the same toward death.  She’s not jazzed on that math, but isn’t a life of ignorance a death in itself?  To walk through a life overgrown with the inescapable shadows of the unknown, the unexplained, to always fear—what kind of life is that?  She rounds the edge of the armrest of her Adirondack with her big plastic beer cup and thinks of letting it all go. She reminds herself that the earth was flat until someone decided to let go of the fear to sail headlong to the perceived precipice, and then the monsters vaporized into clouds.

A shriek tears through the chlorinated humidity; the sound claws her gaze from the window and directs it to a day-glo green waterslide.  It vomits out a doughy, pre-pubescent boy who careens on his behind through a waiting exit flume at the bottom.

She notices that this boy’s breasts are bigger than her own.  Something in his womanly scream rings out like a call to arms. She downs the last of her beer and takes her first fateful two-step toward the kiddie slides.

A Word About Fear

Fear serves a purpose: it’s the alarm that bell that assures the continued survival of the creature harboring said fear.  Fear keeps us from, say, doing the Macarena in the path of oncoming trains or dangling our legs over the edge of the pirhana tank at our local aquarium.  This is obvious.  But the point I’m trying to make that is all fear exists to keep us alive.  Even the fear of kiddie slides.  Especially the fear of kiddie slides. These stupid fears—the weird ones, the obscure ones– serve a more nuanced purpose.  In this modern age, we are hardly ever in actual danger.  Yet the creature container we inhabit still has an instinctual compunction to defend itself against its own demise.  In ordinary everyday suburban life, the only thing we have left to fight off is the awareness of our own mortality.   If you were to untangle the anxieties balled up inside you, you would find yourself holding your end of a rope that connects you to the idea of your own death.  These gnarled-up knots of modern fear are designed to distance you from your adversary, which in this case isn’t actual death, but just the idea of it.  My fear allows me to steer clear of that which reminds me I’m going to die, hence the fear of Toukey’s Big Deluge.  Why anyone would want to kill their fear of death, since it helps you stay alive in your head and in your heart is a really difficult proposition to defend, but here we are at Key Lime Cove with a twelve dollar beer in our narrative hand, invoking Christopher Columbus, John Milton, Satan, and the Tree of Knowledge in a quasi-heroic attempt to do just that.

Adam and Eve, not quite suited up for their trip down Toukey's Big Deluge

Chicken Ascendant

Given the fear of death/death of fear conundrum I’ve expressed, it’s hard not to describe the climb to the top of Toukey’s Deluge in the terms of capital punishment. It’s sadly unavoidable.

The rickety-shambles of  TBD’s pole-based architecture is just a Technicolor makeover applied to the basic concepts of your classic scaffold.  The stairs lead to corridors, the corridors lead to rope bridges, the bridges lead to more stairs–  all of which combine to usher the human body upwards toward ever greater gradations of elevation, to the summit, the end of the line.

Along the way, the condemned walks the gauntlet of parting shots:   curtains of warm, heavy liquid jets  piss down, squadron-style, creating an obligatory checkpoint of humiliation ,  chlorinated broadsides blast at  flank-level, and buckets dump unceremoniously on her head like so many chamber pots.  All the while, a roulette wheel of vessels keeps a steady tattoo of water pounding on the platform.  It sounds a lot like the drum beat accompanying a military execution, only faster and cracked-out on kids’ cereal.  It also keeps perfect time with the heartbeat of an irrationally fearful person ascending to the zenith of her terror.

Letting Go (Special Guest Star: The Voice)

I’m not afraid of kiddie slides per se; I’m afraid of hurtling. Even though I knew this waterslide would not kill me, I knew that it riding it would feel like death, or what I’ve come to believe death to feel like, and that being launched into nothingness.

The earth in its place, the sky in its place, and me, doing my voluntary- neural-systemic locomotion thing in between—I associate these things with being a living creature.  Hurtling runs completely counter to this: the sensation of the loss of control, loss of gravitational context.  So I’m not afraid of kiddie slides; I’m afraid of hurtling. Yet, kiddie slides are the world capital of hurtling, so there you go. The Voice delighted in this absurdity.

As I made my way up to the top of the same day-glo yellow slide that had expelled the chesty lady-lad, The Voice jeered me on.  It crowded the off-beats of the aforementioned exo-internal thunder-pulse of eminent doom and degradation with the alternating refrains of “DO! IT!”  and “CHICK! EN!”

My fear of hurtling has been lifelong. It began when I was six with a dream.  In it, I piloted my sled down a blank hillside wall of blinding white snow.  I saw myself from the outside: I gripped the handles of the planks-and-rails contraption—a Midwest Radio Flyer—my stocking hat flying cartoonishly behind me.  The tableau had all the weird visual signifiers of a Sesame Street alphabet interlude: the enormity of the hill, the liberal interpretation of the laws of physics.   It was all good times except instead of scripting an elegant S on the face of the snow, the little redhead on the sled careened into a depression concealed beneath the tundra, leaving her vehicle gravity-bound behind as she hurtled helplessly though infinite space, nothing.

I can still feel the pit of my stomach fall out when I think back on this dream.  I can still hear the winded grunt hanging in the air in the damp darkness of my bedroom in the basement of my parents’ house back in Ohio. So what began as a jerk-awake dream of a sledding accident at the age of six blossomed like a Citizen Kane rosebud into an empire of avoidance:

a pre-empted driver’s license at twenty-one, a first solo trip on a plane at the age of forty-two, and a lifelong abstention from amusement rides exceeding 10 mph.  Yet all the detours taken have led me to the top of Toukey’s Big Deluge.  The Voice is my copilot: “WE’RE HERE!” she announced through crackling, phlegmatic static.  Nuances of triumph italicized her words, for this is by far the stupidest thing she has ever put me up to.

As I stood at the apex, under the sunny yellow canvas tent-top, I savored the non-slip pebbling of the platform under my feet.  The reassurance that some part of me was grounded to a level surface of some kind steadied me, even while the rest of my body and mind was differently situated— airy and barely-there and wavering like a mirage of myself– some twenty feet above Paradise Lost, and preoccupied with the pulse-pounding business of hurtling.

Did it occur to me to feel foolish when a scrawny little ferret of a five year old cut in front of me, just 3 steps away from the mouth of that first slide?  Nope.  I was too busy trying to catch my breath in tiny panicky pants.  One moment, she was sitting in the gaping cradle of its horrible, toothless maw and the next, she was gone.  Horribly and utterly gone.

Did it occur to me to appear shame-faced and shruggy when the lifeguard  gave me a snappy, aviator-style “all clear” that positively oozed with sarcasm?  Nope.  I was too busy getting my head around the fact that soon, I, too, would be horribly and utterly gone.

The Voice was probably in her glory, but I couldn’t hear her anymore.  Nor could I hear “Some Guys Have All The Luck”, the inescapable anthem of Paradise Lost, (not by the original artist).  By this time,  I had an annoying, rubbed-raw, Kleenex-to-snotty-nose kind of relationship with this song.  It had been playing when I had initiated my climb, but it, too, was gone.

Gripping an overhead bar, I took my seat in the mouth of that greenish-yellow day-glo tube of destiny.  Water gushed frothily around my legs—my pale, white, substantial middle-aged legs.  My thoughts were too many and too frantic for me to even understand at that moment, let alone detangle and articulate in alphabet synthesis.  My brain was a buzzing beehive, and the queen was in danger.

My final, pre-hurtle breath was more chlorinated than all the others somehow, warmer, and heavier with humidity. I held onto it.  It was rich, because it contained the last of the gravity, the last of my physical autonomy, the last of my fear. I let it go.  All of it.

Geronimo!

The plan was to pretend that the water slide was a good, old-fashioned playground slide like the ones I grew up with: I would take my ride in a seated position.  This was not an option, for you see, when you ride a water slide, you are Gravity’s bitch.  You do not ride her like a parade route convertible; you capitulate to the velocity of her agenda.    She will sculpt your body to her specifications, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

First, she clotheslines you with momentum and lays you flat on your back.  Your hands and their inexpedient, foam-rustling fingers are frankly in the way.  The resistance they put up is quaint, but nonetheless an inconvenience.  Gravity folds them kindly across your chest.

A fellow pilgrim, assuming the position at Disney's Summit Plummet.

These modifications are done with the utmost elegance of the inevitable.  Fighting is out of the question.  There is no question, actually.  You are given over to a force of nature; it is enormous beyond your concept of enormity, timeless beyond your concept of time. Your internal organs, no longer dog-piled within your ribcage, flutter apart like freed birds.  Feet together, hands over your heart, you assume the position preordained within the marrow of your very bones.  You are an arrow slicing through your allotted time and space.  You are a shooting star flickering within the unblinking eye of the cosmos.  You are as you should be.

Your individual anxieties and defenses and the very consciousness that houses them?  Blown away like a teepee in a tornado.  But this is not a bad thing.  This is not a good thing.  This is a thing that is, was, and always will be, regardless of how we, as tiny flecks of living warmth, conceptualize ourselves within its incomprehensible framework.  The skull is silent, serene.

In short: you succumb.

I had embarked on this day-glo snot-colored water slide looking to confront my idea of death and I was certainly not disappointed.  Trussed up like a mummy by a mortician called momentum, I was a creature shot into the infinite from whence I came.  Careening crazily up the side of one curve after another, luge-style, I must have issued almost a dozen grunts from top to bottom.

Amazingly, the entire trip from life to death and back again probably clocked in at barely over 3 seconds, max.  I was dismissed from the beyond as soon as I glimpsed its merest molecule, expelled from the tube like a time-traveling turd. Blasting on my ass through the long aqua-trough at the foot of the slide, I received a water wedgie as a reminder of my place in the universe.

The ride was over, but then again, it was ongoing.  The fact is, I had been hurtling before I ever went down that stupid slide, and I would continue hurtling, along with everything else in existence.  Even with my equilibrium restored, and everything returned to its place, all of it careened through its temporal trajectory.  All of it–the box of tubes known as Key Lime Cove and its slippery inhabitants, the teeming expressway, even the closing glow of twilight–hurtled though the unknown in an ever-expanding universe.

My feet pushed down on the floor, the floor pushed back, but that was only another one of Gravity’s creature comforts, an impersonal courtesy that is our birthright on a planet she had set spinning long ago.  I returned to my life as a visitor, just passing through, letting it all pass through me.  All that was familiar unfolded like a new frontier, all of it, each breath a once-in-an-infinity opportunity.

Trip #∞

Hunting for "MONNNNN-sters"

RipTide Reef Arcade“With 8,000 square feet of fun, crafted in age-appropriate zones, there’s interactive fun for everyone.”– KLC Glossy Propaganda

After a towel-down, a wardrobe change, and a dinner of contraband homemade pizza, we took Mabel to the RipTide Reef Arcade.  All of the elements connoting the Vegas zeitgeist (minus the alcohol, hookers, and Cirque Du Make It Stop) are evident at The Rip: the onslaught of flashing lights, pulsating “ooncha ooncha” club beats, the fabulous prizes.  The mission statement of The Rip is simple: play games, win tickets, trade the tickets for unbelievably cheap, eminently breakable prizes.

Mabel’s game of choice was “Monster Hunt”:  a roulette wheel of monsters which is set in motion with a clunky, mad scientist style lever, and stopped with a pull of another just like it.  The wheel spins in a blur, blending all the monsters on the wheel into a pizza of complete obscurity.  The game talked like Bobby “Boris” Pickett, he of the ghoulish “Monster Mash” soliloquy, and it talked NON-STOP.  “Ooooh!  You’ve captured another MONNNN-ster!”  It’s an obnoxious and stupid game, yet I approved.  The monsters are of the super-cool Big Daddy Roth bloodshot-bug-eye/trip-over-their-own-tongues species, and “Monster Mash”?  Well, “Monster Mash” is FTW bomb.

Mabel two-fisted her levers with the unsettling, unhinged focus of a Dr. Frankenstein going for broke at the MGM Grand dollar slots.  Her irises glowed with spinning monsters and complete mania.  The compulsiveness that had propelled her down the Purple Little Limers Water Slide had clearly found its purpose at last.

Kate and I just tried to keep out of the way. Our tiny fiend had just netted her forth monster when she was accosted by Santa himself.  Doing the rounds at KLC with an elf named Sugarplum in tow, this Santa had no idea what he had just walked into.

[A word about Santas: In my four years as a parent, I’ve become something of a student of Santatry.  I’ve determined there are three kinds of Santas in the world: 1. The Community Theatre Santa—an aged actor who may or may not bear a passing resemblance to Santa, but who is thrilled to be cast in the role of such a universally beloved character.  They can be counted upon to ham it up at high volume.  2. The Santa Santa— The Santa Santa may look nothing like Santa Claus, but an avid love of children and the holiday compels the Santa Santa to gladly sweat beneath a stuffed coat and a fake beard from Thanksgiving until New Year.  3. The “I Look Just Like Santa” Santas grow their own white beards and sport an impressively jolly layer of fat.  Other than their uncanny "Santa is REAL!" mien, these guys tend to be pretty worthless.  Lacking a verve for the role or any affection for the holiday or children, the “ILJLSS” coasts on his looks, and expects brand recognition to do the work for him.  The best of them seem arrogant, and the worst of them, resentful of their genetic lot in life.]

The Key Lime Cove Santa was a “I Look Just Like Santa” Santa.  Not that it mattered; Mabel happens to hate all Santas.  The KLC Santa’s oddly understated, ho-ho-ho-less interruption was tantamount to a cock-block of Mabel’s winning streak.  It did worse than nothing to foster goodwill.  It was practically grounds for justifiable homicide, really.

"Have you been a good little high roller?"

Having failed to deliver the ho-ho-hos AND the jingling bells, Santa could have easily recouped public relations points by offering to take Mabel’s Christmas gift order, but instead, in a jaw-dropping act of self-destructive cluelessness, the KLC Santa decided to lead with the question “Have you been a good little girl?”

Mabel only stared at him in response, letting Santa know in no uncertain terms that he and his moralistic claptrap were not welcome here, in the RipTide Reef children’s casino.

The “ooncha-ooncha” beats hung heavy in the air.  The KLC Santa attempted to solicit a high five from Mabel, and then a fist bump. Both were rebuffed without a word. The choice was clear.  Who needs Santa, and his be-good-strings attached when you can score all the toys you want, high-roller style?  My kid may have a gambling problem, but she’s no dummy.

Sugarplum,  a dyed-in-the-felt Community Theatre Elf, shimmering with flop sweat, attempted to smooth over the tension with some skittish pleasantries dished out with an odd approximation of a Cockney accent, but it was no good.  I pocketed the tiny candy cane that Mabel refused to accept and waved the duo away. She went on to win five hundred tickets which she redeemed for a an armload of toys (street value: approximately seven bucks).

Christmas at The Rip

Paradise Lost: Slight Return

• Dog Paddle  Mabel practices her swimming in the Sport Pool, and I help her along, guiding her by the strap of her KLC-issued life jacket.  She does the dog paddle, barking like a puppy while I do my best to avoid our getting hit/splashed by the red, white, and blue novelty-sized basketballs hurling off the back boards lining the pool’s edge.  We are more or less under siege.  I can’t decide where to attribute the symbolic subtext this situation: to the brutality of patriotism or the savagery of sports. Nonetheless, this is certainly no place for anyone with glasses.  Mabel is oblivious to our peril and continues to pump her skinny little arms and legs, chin above water,  happily barking.
• Everywhere There are long spine boards everywhere: strapped to the wall by the Sport Pool, tucked in amid the fake tropical vegetation, within spitting distance of the exit orifices of the 4 indoor/outdoor/indoor tube slides.  These six-foot-plus wooden planks with padded head frames are frankly a buzz kill.  They loom around the KLC pool party like the awkward safety-first cousins of the surfboard, invited out of necessity and nothing else.  They stand straight up, like people, like life-size advertisements for “this could happen to you.”  I notice my first one standing watch in the emerald foliage on the perimeter of Toukey’s Big Deluge.  And then I see them everywhere.
• Hotcha Gotcha Hot Tub  The KLC hot tub is designed to accommodate 36 people, aged 18 or older… 36 very sleazy people.  I don’t say this to judge.  I say this as a matter of fact, for if you set foot into a Hot Tub, you instantly become Very Sleazy, whether you like it or not.  The hot tub is the sexual watering hole of American Skank Culture, and by now, everyone knows it.  When you so much as dip your toe into a hot tub, you enter into a hotcha-gotcha social contract that mandates the surrender of your perceived virtue in exchange for the luxury of lounging in gloriously warm water.  Hell, even I know it and I don’t even watch any of the hot-tub hook-up reality shows that have made it so.  So for about 20 minutes of my militantly married, top-button-firmly-affixed life, I, too, was every bit as sleazy as any cast member of The Jersey Shore, all thanks to the KLC hot tub.  I didn’t dip into that hot tub with any intention but to warm my fragile granny bones and just unwind, but to my fellow Skanko-Americans– the swinging couples, the tramp-stamped girls gone wild, the stag dudes with agenda-vision– I was a librarian cougar on the prowl who liked “to party.”  Either that or an overcooked carrot cowering on the simmering perimeter of a monstrous soup intent on eating itself, which is how I felt.
• The Voice The Voice was delighted to see me sitting by myself, avoiding all eye contact behind my steamed-up glasses in the KLC hot tub.  But the feng shui of Paradise Lost conspired against me and any chance of her forgetting about Toukey’s Big Deluge.  Resting my head on the edge of the hot tub, it seemed that TBD practically curved above me to look back at me.  Even when I sat with my back to it, the screams and the periodic roar of the eponymous deluge somehow became louder.   To The Voice, the KLC hot tub was just a cheap house in a nice neighborhood.   “DO IT.  CHICKEN.  DO IT.”
  

  Fake palm tree, real dust.

At Crossroads Of The Crossroad's Crossroads

We are lost under layers of winter wear. We scurry headlong into oncoming squalls churned up in a dark, frigid place so lonely and terrifying that the wind itself had to flee it, screaming. We look directly at a counterfeit sun, coin-sized, washed-out, and utterly worthless.  It is summarily dragged down like the token at the end of a cosmic window shade. We make our way home into a premature darkness and we know we’re on our own. We exhale clouds of warm, damp life—so quickly dissipated in this climate of unrelenting mortality. In the outlying fields, where the suburbs and the jolly Christmas lights end, the furrowed rows of plowed-over cornfields are braided with wisps of snow and sinister black soil. Even the barren trees seem given over to dark thoughts:   the grasping neuron-like branches wave helplessly in the wind, clutching shreds of  dappled winter sky. It is winter in the Midwest, and make no mistake: it is a bitch.

Because I’m especially sensitive to the whole bundled-up, sun-forsaken death trip that is winter in the Midwest, measures must be taken. Almost every light in my house must be on, for example. Every sweater in my family’s wardrobe belongs to me by ad hoc right of eminent domain. (Even my daughter’s, whose tiny cardigans make righteous ski caps in a pinch.) Funk music– which pulses, grunts, and somehow even reeks like a living creature– must be played, and clumsy, rigor-mortisy dancing must ensue.

Anything connoting warmth, sun, and life will do: even a weekend trip to a cheesy-ass indoor water park. To my four-year-old daughter Mabel, our visit to Key Lime Cove in Gurnee, Illinois is a surprise Christmas present. To me, it was a chance to run around in my swimsuit and pretend December never happened: a delusional indulgence made possible by my partner Kate, who brilliantly scored a deal online, thus killing two proverbial birds with one budget-conscious stone.

Our Hotel Room

“Our ultimate tropics-inspired décor features bright colors, fun lamp fixtures, distressed whitewashed Chinese birch furniture, and exotic accent pieces so that you feel as if you are staying in the Florida Keyswithout ever having to leave the Midwest!”—KLC Glossy Propaganda

Unintentionally Erotic KLC Glossy Propaganda with Unsolicited Reader Response

A Hemingway bungalow aesthetic loosely guided the interior design of our room.  And by this I mean Papa, tanked on rum and disgust, wandered away from the drawing board at some point between the occurrence of the window-shutter-replicant bathroom door and the installation of the big screen tv.  The table lamps are modeled after pineapples.  A framed print on the wall depicts a boldly colored shore side shack accompanied by a solitary palm tree, which seems to be the suggestion of what our room might look like from the outside, except there seems to be no corresponding visual image that would account for the cry of “Which one of you kids shit yourself?” on the other side of our door.

Mabel extracts the Gideon’s Bible from the nightstand and pronounces it “The Book of This Apartment.”  She pretends to read aloud from its pages.  It’s some pretty grim stuff.

The Lost Paradise aka Paradise Lost Water Park

 “The fun-shine starts here — at our 65,000 square foot indoor Lost Paradise Waterpark.”—KLC Glossy Propaganda

Aside from the wince-worthy wordsmithery of “funshine”, the real stand out element of this sentence, cribbed directly from KLC’s “Passport to Paradise” brochure, is the figure sixty-five thousand square feet.  Just for the hell of it, I Googled that figure, and came up with a list of results that included a website for a Bellagio spa in Vegas, a press release touting a “footprint increase” for a M Massachusetts marketing firm , a list of “Superstores” , and a web page devoted to a Canadian “Megamansion” .  It just so happens I find all of these enormous, carnivorously commercial megalithic things loathsome to the max.

The KLC Lost Paradise Waterpark is every bit as loathsome as its titanic brothers, only worse somehow because within its gigantic confines is encrypted the very matrix of my daughter’s fondest dreams.  We took her here last year as a part of a Rainbow Families outing, (ostensibly to expose her to other families like ours) and we’ve heard of nothing but waterslides and swimming pools and “apartments” with “tiny refrigerators” ever since.  On December 17, 2011, we returned to the scene of our well-intentioned crime against the basic foundations of child psychology, hat in hand, and penitent.

The Gastric Technicolor Spew of Dishonor

Presented in patented Gaytheist bullet point format: my observations of said Lost Paradise—which I’ve nicknamed Paradise Lost because Milton would have wanted it that way.

• Fencing In The Fantasy The walls of Paradise Lost are painted to evoke the vacation dreamscape of our collective working class consciousness: the blue sky hosting a gentle white cumulous stampede, the placid Pacific upon which awaits a distant island—the geological contours of which are etched with cool indigo shadows.  A rickety picket fence stands between us and this duo-dimensional Escape Horizon: an honest-to-fudge barrier that has been hammered into the wall and white-washed and festooned with corny signs designed to aid and abet the psychological scam we’ve all decided pull on ourselves.  “NO DIVING cannonballs always welcome” and the inevitable “Surf’s up!”  The fence separating fantasy from reality is located within spitting distance of the Tiki Bar, just in case anyone gets carried away.

• Nice Guy Sky God  A teenaged lifeguard attempts to clean a trail of vomit off the floor by the cabana tables.  He gingerly lifts each of the towels covering this gastric disaster, and sprays the area before sweeping it up.  Settled into my “Chair of Delight” (glossy propagandaspeak), I sip my plastic cup of Blue Moon and watch.  His rubber gloves are a dreamy, mile-high shade of blue; they look like they were cast from the atmosphere just a few feet away from the 30 foot tall “HMS Parrot-dise” cruise ship, painted on the north wall.  He flails his empyreal hands at passersby, waving them away from potential pedestrian catastrophe.  After a few more sips, I feel a physical and emotional warmth bubble up from my stomach, and I see him as something more than a scrawny kid with a shitty job.   He’s a nice guy sky god come down to the Isle of Good Times to eradicate all evidence of unpleasant reality.  Upon his protruding scapulas rests a massive responsibility.  Under those towels festers a poison that would taint and destroy the illusion that sustains KLC and all its jolly castaways.  To stumble on this Slip and Slide of sick would invariably mean to land on our asses on the fact that we are not glamorous good-timers in paradise, but rather aging suburbanites wearing the physical evidence of a lifetime of bad dietary decisions gussied up in unflattering swimsuits.   If it were not for this kid, this is beautiful tropical vacation getaway would revert to a massive and cheaply-built box of tubes on a windswept Midwestern tundra.  The lifeguard’s heavenly hands sweep the dangerously slippery  Cheezits of our corporeal limitations
  

  Trip # 10

  and fragile dreams into a garbage bag and I want to weep with beery gratitude.  I see him shaking open yet another garbage bag and casting a weary glance to the teal rafters, and appealing in an “I shall be released” kind of way.  Who is the God of the Nice Guy Sky Gods at KLC, I wonder.

• Number of Trips Made By Mabel On The Little Limers’ Purple Slide In The First Hour: 17.
• Toukie*’s Big Deluge From my “Chair of Delight”, I marvel at the engineering achievement that is the massive contraption known as Toukie*’s Big Deluge.  A Rube Goldberg journey into the outer limits of arcane cause and effect grown gargantuan on Cap’n Crunch and countless viewings of The Goonies, Toukie’s Big Deluge is a house of hydro-horrors.  It bullies its willing victims with water: water flung centrifugally from spinning discs big enough to seat a family of four for a cozy pizza dinner, water dumped unceremoniously from rope-tugged buckets, water showering down in abruptly drawn curtains, water riotously hosing out of mini cannons.  Presiding over this nautical naughtiness is a 250 gallon bucket gussied up to resemble a pineapple-cupped tropical mixed drink, paper umbrella and all. The pineapple cup teeters with the tremors created by the concentration of such unhinged mischief and tips over, drenching its each and every denizen with foaming white chlorinated judgment from on high.  After its scrambling denizens are sufficiently punished, Toukie’s Big Deluge dispatches them, screaming like torpedoes, out of its three curling colorful colons, I mean waterslides.   It is a horrifying thing, like something Hieronymus Bosch would dream up, if he were reincarnated as a dull-eyed suburban twelve year old.
•  Enter The Voice A dark, phlegmy voice inside me suggests I take a closer look at this insane tower of showers.  “Do it!” The Voice bubbles with the soft suggestiveness of a delicious bong hit.  It’s not a proposition as much as it is a dare.  Because The Voice, being a denizen of the subterranean regions of my psyche, knows damn good and well I’m scared of Toukie’s Big Deluge.  The Voice specializes in putting me up to doing things that are dangerous/destructive/just plain dumb.  The Voice has cheered me on to former victories such as my first cigarette, and that time I hugged Vanilla Ice in the nineties.  To its credit, The Voice has never urged me to do needle drugs or take up with a stripper; it’s not as interested in destroying its host as much as humiliating it with its own ridiculous flaws, fears, and predilections.  Most recently, it told me to douse an entire Healthy Choice meal– cherry “crisp” and all– with Frank’s Hot Sauce.  And now, to climb Toukie’s Big Deluge.  The Voice knows I’ve never ridden a waterslide before, because it is well aware that to do so would mean confronting a litany of fears I would prefer not to go into at this time.  “Chicken!” roars The Voice.   My attempts to ignore it are met with a disconcerting chunky rumble of arrogant, nicotine-stained laughter.  “This isn’t over, Four Eyes!” it taunts.  Incidentally, The Voice sounds exactly like that belonging to the late actress Suzanne Pleschette.

*A hateful toucan tribute to the shades-and-Hawaiian-shirt oevre of the wretched Jimmy Buffet: The Official Mascot of Key Lime Cove

"Purple Gays, all in my brain! Lately, things, they don't seem the same!" -- Jimi Hendrix

On September 30, I entered into a civil union with Kate, my partner of nine years and mother of our four year-old daughter Mabel. We were able to do this not because we love eachother or because we have a demonstrated commitment to one another, but because we were lucky: lucky to live in one of a handful of states that allows some vestige of equality in marriage rights. Not everyone is as lucky as we are. It is my hope that one day, everyone will have the option to do as we did, and celebrate their respective partnerships in a Right-On Civil Union. The following is a list of suggestions compiled from our own Right-On Civil Union (plus money-saving Hard Times Bonus Tips!).  I humbly present the following list to those of you who may wish to follow in our footsteps and/or learn from our mistakes.

 Pick the right partner. The search for Mrs. Hellraisin made David O. Selznik’s search for Scarlett O’Hara look as effortless as ordering from the McDonald’s Value Menu. Not just any woman has the capacity to endure my super-caffeinated marathon tirades, or the unassailable personal dignity to be seen in public with me on Marvin Gaye Crochet Hat Tribute Day, or the iron-clad sense of restraint to resist the urge to force-feed me my own cell phone after I’ve left it in the refrigerator for the third time. It took me two decades and almost a dozen candidates to find my beloved Katherine. Thanks to her, I’ve done things I’ve never considered myself capable of– great things: things like the parenting our daughter, the writing this blog, and the wearing of khaki for profit. She’s saved my life, every day, in ways both large and small, and has made it worth living for nine years. I still cannot believe my luck.

 If you think your partner of nine years and mother of your child is going to let you show up at your civil union, wearing a tux/purple granny glasses/inverted crucifix a la Axl Rose in the “November Rain” video, think again.

"$#@%!"--Axl Rose

 Hard Times Bonus Tip #1: There ain’t no shame in wedding shoe shopping at the Payless Shoe Source. There ain’t no sexy there, either. Just so’s ya know.

 Don’t forget to bring your ID to the courthouse. The legal system suffers from trust issues of pandemic proportions. Why anyone in their right minds would want to fake an identity funk on me and Kate on the occasion of our civil union is beyond me, but it is rather flattering to think someone would be insane enough to want to trade places with us.

 Make sure your mom’s ringer is turned up good and loud so she doesn’t miss the call when you need her to break into your house to get your ID while you’re en route to the courthouse.

 That’s right, I said “courthouse.” We got civil unionized in the same place that people get sentenced to jail. Outlandas De Amor no more! Love justice is served! What a courthouse ceremony lacks in romance, it more than makes up in police presence. So butch! If I had my druthers, our ceremony would have been attended by a contingent of lady cops, yelling “This is a love bust!” and issuing spread-eagle pat-downs to the entire wedding party, but nobody wants that. Because nobody’s awesome like me.

 Having the same first name as your fiancé is a great idea. That way your idiot judge won’t mess up your names THREE TIMES like he did when he performed our ceremony. Had I known this was going to happen, I would have made us matching “Hello, My Name Is Shaniqua!” nametags. Shaniqua loves Shaniqua. True Love Forever.

 An adorable child, dressed to the nines, is a classic element of any commitment ceremony. Carrying baskets of flowers, bearing rings, or (as was the case with own adorable child) simply glaring a thousand flaming thumbtacks at the idiot judge, a child’s contributions are often the most cherished memories of any Big Day.

It would probably be a good idea to remember to trim your nails, though.

 If you’re looking to have a civil union, you are a non-traditional couple. Why would you settle for traditional rings? I say keep the subversive good times a-rolling with a handmade beauty from an independent artisan! Stick it to the diamond industry! I’m not talking about “blood diamonds” or third-world government corruption. I’m talking about the unmitigated evil/BS consumer culture in which love is supposedly measured by the size of an outrageously-priced shiny rock. And who says which shiny rock is the best expression of love, anyway? Diamonds are not the only shiny rock, you know! Diamonds are not forever, if you ask me. Diamonds are for fuck you. The joke of the diamond industry is only slightly less hilarious than the price of gold. So get your gay ass to Etsy, and be free. (Hard Times Bonus Tip #2)

 Have a food photographer take your wedding pictures. You will look yummy!

 Hard Times Bonus Tip #3: Make your own cake toppers! My beloved Kate is not only beautiful, intelligent, and a consummate badass, she is also crafty as hell. She made this adorable duo

...so I guess you could say they look just like us!

with Sculpy and her own innate brilliance. What’s especially nice about our tiny effigies is how they make us look tall, thin, and elegant in comparison. Nobody has ever accused us of being any of those things before, so that was a treat.

 Last, but not least, the key to having a Right-On Civil Union is to live in a state in which you CAN have a Right-On Civil Union, or better yet, an actual marriage. How do you do that? Moving to a state that recognizes civil unions or gay marriage is one answer, but it’s not the solution. I would suggest you look up your local gay rights organization and get involved. Pound that pavement, stuff those envelopes, ride that bus, knock on those doors. Or email your congressman; call his office. Or speak out, Gaytheist style, with a smartass blog of your own. Anything worth having is worth fighting for, or shooting your mouth off for, at the very least. Your life, your love, and your family is worth it to me, let it be worth it to you. Let us burn the mother down, shall we?

Hard Times Tip #4: If someone else is buying, select the biggest beer possible. Cheers!

Meister and Meister: Labor Day Weekend 2011

I wasn’t always middle-aged. I wasn’t always a mom. I wasn’t always trapped in the suburbs, fighting for air in a cubicle 5 days a week. I used to be free, dangerous, and utterly idiotic. I did amazing things. I once set up camp in my car, just a few blocks away from the French Quarter during a full-blown Mardi Gras hellraiser riot. I drove to the top of the highest mountain I could find, just to cry at the distant, cloud-shadowed beauty of the world I left behind. I shut down bars. I broke hearts. I smoked a pack a day. I was indestructible. In short: I was young.

Meister was not only there with me, but many of those amazing things were her idea. She, too, was free, dangerous, and utterly idiotic. For a short, yet memorable span of time during the Clinton era, we embarked on what could best be described as a bromance with boobs. The only girly thing about our friendship was our penchant for non-stop talk about everything, (except that time we cried on the mountain). Otherwise, it was Dude City. We busted each other’s chops. We pushed each other’s buttons. We put each other up to a lot of stuff we’ll never live down. We had each other’s backs during a time when hardly anyone else knew what the hell to make of either of us.

We went our separate ways a long time ago, but somehow the planets align in such a way as to occasionally reunite us in both space and time. The parking lot at the Denver Phish concert on Labor Day weekend was one such collision; we joined forces to make grilled cheese sandwiches and give them away to concert-goers.

“You gotta put a lot more butter on, Meister! Pick up the pace, dammit!”

“I AM, Meister!” I protested, “Watch me now!”

Meister is Meister to me, I am Meister to her. We were given these doppelganger nicknames by a client who lived in the group home where we used to work. Meister worked the evening shift; I worked the nights. In the morning, this client would be the first one up for his meds, singing Meister’s praises to me. “She’s a hot babe, that Meister,” he’d say to me as he sprinkled his Lotrimin over his poor old turtle-head-looking toes, “You two make a good pair, Meister.” That we deliberately called one another by the same nickname is probably a good starting point in explaining why hardly anyone knew what the hell to make of us. But we didn’t care.

Meisters at the Great Divide: 1996

It was Meister’s idea to tailgate at the Phish show this weekend, and invite everyone in the parking lot to join us for free grilled cheese sandwiches. I offered to support her in this endeavor, which meant flying out to Denver and steeling myself for the inevitable sting of her lash. Meister is a Taurus: a dust-pawing force of brute physical will. I’m an aquarium of dreams and make believe, otherwise known as a Pisces. Whether or not you buy the astrological alchemy, we do tend to piss one another off at times.

“Dammit, Meister! Keep ‘em coming!”

I gouged my butter knife at the tub of Country Crock sitting on the open tailgate of Meister’s Honda Element and I smiled. I couldn’t really be mad; it was just like old times. Once, I was so furious at Meister I tried to kick her ass right in the middle of the street somewhere in New Orleans. To this day, neither of us can remember the precise flashpoint of this completely uncharacteristic outburst of mine. I’m assuming that she probably said something unflattering and truthful about me, very likely at a particularly inopportune moment. She had a talent for this.

Just a few minutes before, a cloudburst had rolled in like a buffalo stampede across the Colorado sky, so we packed up the “Phish Kitchen” and waited out the storm in the car. We talked about everything while the blues on the radio vied for our attention. Just like always. I remember Meister’s smokey green glasses, glinting off the naked lightbulb in the living room of her old place. I remember her ranting, shaking her fists and knitting her brow. “THE BASTARDS,” she howled. She had gone and waved her torch of unflattering truth up the wrong tree, at the wrong time, and had barely escaped from the conflagration that consumed our boss’ tree house of lies.  Meister had a lot of anger back then, and she was beautiful with her lanky, unwashed hair and hilarious “Beef Satisfies” t shirt.

The rainy grey daylight came in through the windshield and threw shadows on our faces.  I noticed a crease between her eyebrows, and I knew without her telling me, she’s still torching tree houses. Time and growth has had its way with her, as it has with me. She’s a married mom, too, and has also cleaned up her act.  But she’s still my Meister.

The rain was short-lived, and I returned to our posts: me, hastily coupling obscenely over-buttered bread with cheese and she, frying them up for the masses.

Munchies For Your Love: the Phish kitchen as captured by a reluctant Blackberry

The autumnal breeze rendered my shorts and tank top an ill-advised folly, but I soldiered on. Meister used to “feed the unwashed and unworthy” on a regular basis. She was there for the last hurrah of the Grateful Dead in the early 90’s, and the emergence of Phish. From what she tells me, these days were essentially the comet’s tail of the 60’s. As such, subversion of the status quo was de rigor: naturally, sharing and giving comprised the tacit currency of this “dirty hippy” remnant community. It was completely not unusual or uncommon for people to set up a camp stove on a card table and give away grilled cheeses from the backs of their cars.

We soon realized that we were the only people giving away food in the parking lot of the Phish show.

In exchange for our troubles, we garnered quite a few baffled “Whoa—‘s“, some incredulous “Awesome!’s”, and a couple of offers of illegal substances, which we laughingly turned down. It seemed that what people wanted more than free food, was an explanation. I can’t pretend to be in Meister’s skull to know what it felt like to come home to a place of personal significance, only to find that no one knew what the hell to make of her, yet again, but I decided it would be unwise to slow down production to attempt to console her.

“We’re giving these sandwiches away to offer you the mindfuck experience of receiving something good, absolutely free, which you don’t deserve. There is no obligation, nor the acceptance of a return favor. You get the pure experience of receiving ,” Meister would answer. I sensed the edge in her voice, and I was pretty sure what she meant was, “We’re giving away these sandwiches as a souvenir of a long lost subculture, destroyed by apathetic assholes not unlike you, Mr. Frat Boy Party Person.”

The clouds had cleared, and in the distance, I could see the Rocky Mountains heroically standing up to the sky, a perfectly-cast allegorical landscape for the moment. I nudged Meister, and pointed it out to her. “Look at that,” I said, “You’re lucky you live here. You get to see these every day.” And draw the strength to keep fighting for the things you believe in and never let THE BASTARDS win, I wanted to add, but we had a customer.

“What do you have against butter, Meister? More butter next time!”

“Screw you, Meister!”

She laughed and swatted me with her spatula.

We weren’t always middle-aged suburban moms. Once, a long time ago, we were just ourselves. The thing about getting older is, you never stop being the person you once were. Cut down the oldest oak you can find*, and you will always be able to count on its stump each layer of time and growth to the sapling that had lived within. This is true about people, too. Under the layers of maturity and responsibility—the grey hair, creased brows, the mortgages, the marriages and sensible clothing, our younger selves peer out and wonder how we got here, and why nobody recognizes us anymore.

But I see Meister in there, and she sees me.

Meisters in New Orleans: 1996

*Please don’t literally cut down an actual oak tree.  You’ll just have to take my word on this one.

Click to magnify the majestic mightiness that is this self aggrandizing landscape photo.

The Summer of 2011 has been a most majestic and mighty season, rife with victory, spiced with bravado.  It is a rump roast sliced from the hind quarters of a noble beast (perhaps a liger), turning on a spit over the fires of glory.  As we savor it, our hearts swell with secondhand triumph made bittersweet by the piquance of sorrow, for despite its lush and verdant beauty, its free-floating firefly constellations at night, the dancing gold of its lakes, ponds, and oceans by day, each succulent bite consumed brings us ever closer to the simultaneous bitch slap/nut punch/horrifying full nelson of winter.

For me, the Summer of 2011 was a barely-averted altercation with a stranger at a camp store.  It was hiking the rocky bluffs at Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin.  It was almost getting my ass kicked at the Am Vet’s Lodge in Higgin’s Lake Michigan. Yet it was so much more. This summer brought the Resurrection of Santa’s Village kiddie amusement park, a jaunt to the Circus World Museum, an encounter with John Muir‘s clock, as well as the Ghost of Peter Falk.

Without a doubt, my particular cut of this delicious creature was rich and rewarding.   I pay tribute to it today in the only way a middle-aged midwestern woman such as myself knows how: in scrapbook format.

I was almost as terrified as I pretended to be.

Dream Bucket

Dream Buckets Prohibited

The AmVets Lodge in Higgins Lake, Michigan is a compound of sorts comprised of a city-block- sized patch of 4 bedroom “cottages”, identical in their barracks aesthetic and brown siding.  Presiding over this micro-community is The Lodge, suitably big and white and elderly.  The nagging question “Is this ersatz urban design a tribute to the institutional racism of the military or a product of it?” dogged my stay at the AmVets.  To avoid opening this pandora’s box of paranoia, I spent a lot of time drinking beer on the shore at the communal firepit. 

 I was surrounded by Kevins—five of them in total: male Kevins, female Kevins, all of varying shades of middle age and states of undress.  Their faces danced in the firelight, illuminating and disappearing like jack-o-lanterns.  Every word they exchanged was stripped of language by the heavy humidity and smoke.  From what I could tell, what I was hearing was a bizarre throw-back translation of the primal roots of human utterance: grunts of derision and murmurs of supplication.

Just a few minutes before, they were ordinary people—working class people, sunburnt by a day spent swimming, tubing, and fishing, too hot to change out of their swimsuits, drinking too much by the fire.  A lot like me, but flabbier and crabbier.  They had names, too—Steve and Tuesdee, Tami and Larry, Mike and Deb, the silent Chuck—but something happened somewhere within the context of my fifth beer to transform them all into living variations of my terrifying redneck neighbor Kevin.

I sipped my beer and feigned mild impassivity.  But inside, I was freaking the hell out.

Kevin had emerged from the house behind ours last May with the apparent intent to become the bane of my existence.  He set up his hateful, misogynistic, homophobic hillbilly empire, complete with plastic furniture, blasting classic rock, and pig smoker, right in his back yard.   And there he would sit for hours on end in his dingy wifebeater, drinking beer, and glaring in the middle distance.  He loomed in the background of my every suburban backyard memory like an uninvited carnie vulture .  No interaction with Kevin was complete without abrupt references to child molesters and untimely death.  Kate says he has no filter between his mouth and his brain, but I contend that there is no brain, that his thoughts come from some subterranean vortex of darkness and fire (a hell if you will); his jaw is manipulated by some unseen claw.  He’s a demonic ventriloquist dummy, blank-eyed and barking “Death! Death! Death!”

And then, without so much of a “Hey!  HEY!” (his customary greeting, waving his arms at us as if we were fleeing taxicabs in a bad neighborhood, which in a sense we were), Kevin was everywhere I looked.  None of the people assembled around the AM Vets fire pit looked remotely like Kevin, who himself looked like a Grizzly Adams with a sour apple bowling split dental snarl.  But  somehow, they manifested the darkness and danger that is Kevin, or at least his hatefulness and ignorance, which I consider his lighter side.

Thankfully, I was not alone.  One of my partner Kate’s relatives sat next to me. Tall and gregarious and male, Clark possesses three attributes which pretty much write interpersonal meal tickets of all kinds, from marriage to public office.  As a short, standoffish female, I really value my associations with guys like Clark, especially when I’m surrounded by Kevins. Clark gamely attempted to build social bridges made of NASCAR references, blond jokes, and Toby Keith quotes.  This is what’s called “putting your best foot forward.”  But he was trying too hard, spreading it on too thick. The Tribe Called Kevin was not impressed.  They responded to Clark’s good ol’ beer-positive patriot persona with grunts of contempt and suspicion.  The Kevin consensus: Clark is no Kevin.

I think Clark realized this, too.  Resorting to a belt of Jaeger, he nudged the flask in my direction.  I forgot that I hate the taste of licorice in the desperation of the moment.

“I like your shirt,” I find myself blurting to Alpha Kevin, “It’s just like Belushi’s in ‘Animal House’.”

It was a gutsy move, trying to make nice with the mighty silverback.   I had noticed that no statement issued by any of the Lesser Kevins lacked an approval-seeking side glance to Alpha Kevin.  If the game were to be changed, it had to be achieved by affecting some sort of change of heart within Alpha Kevin, provided he had a heart to change.

This proved not to be the case.  At all.  Probably taken aback by the fact that I had spoke without having been spoken to, Alpha Kevin blinked, and looked down at his T shirt, as if I had pointed out it had a quiche stain on it.  The word “College” boasted across his chest with a resounding, very nearly hilarious emptiness.

“I don’t know what the fuck yer talkin about.  My wife got this at a yard sale for 3 bucks,” growled Alpha Kevin.  The She-Kevins tittered in appreciation of the put-down.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,”Clark chuckled, “She’s crazy.”

Summoned to the firepit like a genie of “crazy”, Joe suddenly appeared.  Joe is my future brother-in-law.  He can always be counted upon to introduce the element of surreality into almost any situation.  He once invented “The Standanball”, a cannonball dive executed from a standing position in waist deep water.  A few years ago, Joe serenaded my infant daughter with a soothing, yet bewildering Gregorian lullaby of totally bogus Latin.   He tucks in all of his shirts, belts many of his pants, and has a penchant for sunglass cross dressing.  And, like me, (apparently) he may very well be crazy.  For these reasons, and a few more too sentimental to mention within this context, Joe is one of my favorite people.

Oblivious to the roiling undercurrent of class resentment, simmering like an unseen cauldron over the fire, Joe plopped down next to Kevin the Quiet and somehow salvaged the various grunts that passed for conversation and fashioned a segue into a whimsical monologue about something called a “Dream Bucket.”  From what I could gather, the Dream Bucket was a depository into which the fondest wishes of those not in a position to fulfill them, would be left.  It was unclear to me what would happen to the Dream Bucket once it was filled with the Kevins’ unspeakable Jedgar Allen Poe dreams, but nevertheless, for a minute there, it struck me as a pretty fun concept.

But it was also a profoundly weird concept.  The frozen grin on Clark’s face seemed to indicate that it was also a dangerously weird concept.  As it turned out, the Kevins had no appreciation for fun OR concepts—weird or otherwise.  There was also a pronounced hatred of dreams, if my translation of the derisive snorts and provincial swears can be relied upon.

Ominously, silence overtook the members of The Tribe Called Kevin.  They began to leave the circle of firelight individually and in pairs without saying a word to anyone, heading into the darkness perhaps in search of blunt objects with which to kill us.

“Come on,”Clark said almost under his breath, depositing his flask into his cooler and carefully closing it, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

How the three of us managed to walk away from The Kevin Incident with our lives will remain a mystery lost in the smoke of the AM Vets fire pit.

Summer fun in the sun with Joe!

This contraption is a multi-purpose clock, invented by my personal hero naturalist John Muir. Madison, WI.

Temptation

The Camp Store Check Out Dude pauses as he checks out my purchases to check out the tattoo on my chest.  His glance hovers over the neckline of my tank top.  “Temptation,” he reads aloud, haltingly.

“Younger days, different times,” I shrug and smile.  It’s my stock response: a short story that writes itself with a tidy “live to tell” ending.  Most people are satisfied with it, find something in it with which they can relate, and then let it go with an “ain’t that the truth” chuckle.  They nearly always do.

But Camp Store Check Out Dude does not chuckle.  He does not smile.  He holds my gaze, expectantly. He is clearly not one of those people.

“I’ve cleaned up my act considerably,” I offer, hoping to speed things along to the part where he takes my money, hands me my receipt, and tells me to stay out of trouble.

“You’ve got to stay strong every single day,” he admonishes me.  On his face is a look so earnest, I’d swear that he would have grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me off the ledge I occupied in his imagination if I hadn’t taken a defensive microstep backwards.

Realizing that I’d been cast as a fallen woman of some kind (a stripper or a drunk or a junkie or some horrifying amalgamation thereof), I nod my head. “You got that right,” I say.  In all actuality, I’m more of a stumbled woman: a doobies and Doritos dabbler with a penchant for dirty jokes, but it’s a nuance that lacked the time, place, or audience.

“That tattoo is there to remind you to fight that temptation,” Camp Store Check Out Dude says, exuding no small sense of pride for making what was quite possibly the most original observation ever made within the confines of a Wisconsin camp store.

Paying homage to the Tattooed Lady. Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI

“Then I guess I must have known what I was doing when I got it,” I said.  And to tell the truth of it, I only thought I knew what I was doing.  At the time, I thought that getting a big, scary, Bic-and-a-dart-all-night-long jailhouse masterpiece on my chest would serve the same purpose as saying “leave me the hell alone” without the annoyance of having to continually repeat myself.

He smiles.  He is satisfied at last.

As I push my money across the counter, I have to admit to myself that perhaps “Temptation” was not the best choice of words.  Camp Store Dude was right about one thing: the tattoo was a reminder of something, and that is no matter what word one carves into one’s chest, be it a single three syllable word, a Bible verse, or a battle ship, it will always say “Cautionary Tale In Progress” or at the very least “Ask Me How Much It Hurt!”

He’s right.  I do need to fight the temptation.  But it’s not the temptation to backslide into my she-Dude past.   Instead, it’s the temptation be unkind to those who misjudge me based on my own very obvious evidence of poor judgment.  Camp Store Dude means well.  He’s probably the best sponsor an AA refugee could ask for.  I’d be willing to bet he’s a Big Brother in a spare time, or at least an epic tipper at the gentleman’s club.  But just the same, I still feel the words “It’s just a fucking tattoo, you idiot!” rising like bile in the back of my throat.

“Stay strong,” he says, handing me my receipt and ticket out of the conversation.

He smiles at me kindly.

I have no choice but to give him the thumbs up on the way out the door.

Blending in at the circus wagon exhibit, Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI

The Hard Way

“Raging Waves,Chicago’s largest water park—Raging Waves packs a day FULL of exhilarating family fun in this 45-Acre waterpark!”

 “Family Fun Festival—Millennium Park is the place for kids to just be kids, all summer long!  Enjoy free family performances and hands-on activities daily from 10 AM- 3 PM in the Family Fun Tent”

 “Balanced Rock—A difficult, steep, climbing trail with stone steps on the south face of the East Bluff.  Spectacular views of Devil’s Lake with the Balanced Rock Formation off to the south of the trail.  (.3 mile, approximate hiking time 1 hour)”

The options spread before us, endless goat trails paved with promotional hyperbole and glossy pamphlets, all of which leading to the happiness horizon known as The Family Vacation.  We have one week together, to do what we want.  It is clear that what we want is fun, family fun, to be exact, but what to do?  What kind of fun is right for this family?  What kind of family is this, anyway?  The kind of family that shriekingly succumbs to the forces of gravity and lolls meaninglessly in an aquatic pleasure park or any other setting, for that matter?  The kind of family that would even be caught dead in something called a “Family Fun Tent?”  No, this is a family that sees through the pre-fab consumer establishment and adheres to the path of The Hard Way.

The Hard Way doesn’t  just appeal to our self-image as rugged rebels or provides a sense of accomplishment and personal fulfillment, it’s also a hell of a lot cheaper than the path of least resistance. We are a family that shops at the Goodwill.  A family that goes to the library for fun.  A family that grows and cans its own produce.  A family that not only owns power tools, but knows how to use them.  A family that pretends to karate-chop sequoias into toothpicks and slays dragons named Sarah Palin for playtime.  We are two Amazons and our cub.   We will go to the park with the scary name and climb the forbidding rocks and we will have fun—family fun.

Amazons and Cub, Devil's Lake, Baraboo, WI.

*                                        *                                        *

The plan was to start off on the Balanced Rock trail, meet up with the East Bluff Trail, and then rendezvous with the Devils Doorway.  Kate and I sat, sipping coffee from our butch-looking cups, with the map spread before us, and with it, a quiet sense of satisfaction.  The red dotted lines of the trails looked like bloody sutures across the rugged green topography.  This hike was certain to suck horrifying existential balls of fire for any lesser family.  It was perfect.

The Cub (I will be referring to Mabel as The Cub throughout this piece in the interest of bad ass tone maintenance) regarded us over her bowl of unrecognizable slop.   That the slop was once Life cereal a half hour before is a testament to her own unwavering commitment to The Hard Way.  Would it have not been easier to accept the breakfast given, and in so doing, satisfy her hunger while enjoying the cereal in its peak condition?  Yes.  But would doing so appease the Powers That Be, thus rendering The Cub a mere cog in the machine? Never a slave to the agenda, The Cub manifests her mettle with sullenness and slop, making it clear that she is going to be A Problem.

This is nothing new for Kate and me.  One of our first Family Fun vacation memories consists of our taking turns carrying the then-eighteen month old Cub in third-worldly sling-like contraption while her cries of outrage and defiance rang mightily throughout Yosemite valley.  The subversion within our ranks only adds a tangy high note of irony to savory buffet we call The Hard Way.

*                                    *                                        *

The bluffs flanking Devil’s Lake aren’t bluffs as much as they are rock piles.  And they aren’t rock piles as much as they are fucking rock piles.  It’s difficult to describe these fucking rock piles without alluding to the Warner Bros. cartoons featuring the likes of Yosemite Sam or Sylvester, clad in convict drag, hammering senselessly at the sky-high fucking rock piles of impossible redemption.  Perhaps inspired by the travails of Sam and Sylvester, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dispatched a small army of young men to Devil’s Lake, on a mission to carve a stairway through the rocky bluff, and, offer up as sacrifice to the eponymous Devil of the Lake any and all vestiges of their youth and innocence in the process.

Mabel, Kate, Fucking Rock Pile.

It should probably be mentioned that we hiked this trail on a 90 degree day.  Sheathed in a cool silky sweat on my back and stomach, panting at the soggy oxygen languishing in the heavy humidity, my sandals (yes, I said sandals—not candy-ass hiking boots or even wussy tennis shoes—sandals) occasionally slipping against the more insidious purple quartzite surfaces, I feel the fulfillment of my badass destiny.  Until of course, I realize Kate is not only several yards ahead of me, doing everything I’m doing only more robustly, more efficiently, but also with The Cub swinging from her left hand like a priest’s censer, dispensing fragrant whines to the craggy congregation.  She is, in this and many other regards, truly my better half.

I’m not sure exactly at what point above sea level that The Cub began her assault against the agenda.  The progression from inarticulate whines to general complaints of physical discomfort was a de rigor element of Family Fun.  Kate had long ago learned to pack plenty of snacks and water to curb the onslaught.  Perhaps sensing a challenge proportionate to the dimensions of the monstrous fucking rock pile, The Cub stepped up her game.  “I gotta go potty!  I have to poop!”

Family Fun!

The bomb had been dropped.  We had left the nearest bathroom hundreds of sweaty, rocky steps below, and had no hope of one in the immediate vicinity.  As it happened, Kate had also packed toilet paper, but the barren setting afforded no purchase for The Cub’s dirty deposit.  Kate disguised her exasperation with potty promises for “big hiker girls who make it to the top”.  And try as I might to bring levity to the situation, it was hard to shake the feeling that the very bluffs themselves had conspired with the Cub in this particular poop d’etat attempt.

The Hard Way beckoned.  We marched on, spurred by a sense of urgency, hostages of our daughter’s ass that we were.  Balanced Rock and The Devil’s Doorway awaited us.

*                                        *                                      *

In everyday life, a person does not get many opportunities to demonstrate strength, endurance, and fearlessness.  Pushing the body and the mind to work together to achieve an heroic physical triumph of some kind seems to me like an essential function of the human animal.  Lacking any real physical challenges to daily existence like, say, having to walk a mile to a water source and back, while balancing pottery on one’s head or being forced to contend with the threat of natural predators, we languish.  We pollute our bodies with the food we eat, and our minds with passive, empty entertainment.  Modern existence mostly consists of navigating the flat line of endless tedium.  Jesus, it makes me want to run naked and screaming around and around the nearest cul-de-sac just thinking about it, so allow me to wrap up my sermon by saying that escaping the flat line is why hiking to a great height appeals to me.  It may also explain why triathlons and marathons are becoming the cultural craze of the day, too, but that’s a tirade for a different writer.

Seeing Balanced Rock, doing its impossible headstand, was a reward also lacking in everyday life.  Wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, it calls to mind a primitive sculptural tribute to a tornado.  That it stood for countless years, in perfect equilibrium and in utter defiance of  gravity’s pull, somehow struck me as a geological endorsement of The Hard Way.  “Right on, you bad-ass Amazons!” Balanced Rock seemed to say, “Keep on keepin’ on!”

Devil's Doorway

When we reached the top, The Cub celebrated our accomplishment with a triumphant dump right on the summit.  (Take that, you fucking rock pile!)

At Devil’s Doorway we met up with a small gang of hipsters, one of whom scaled the scary climb up into to the eponymous doorway itself.  Young, tattooed, dreadlocked, and sinewy, she struck a Righteous Babe pose as the girl she was clearly showing off for, snapped her picture.  Witnessing such blossoming Amazonian badassery, I couldn’t help but smile like a grandma at a graduation ceremony.

We had come to a place of serenity and stillness.  Freed from the world below and somehow from myself at the same time, I couldn’t stop smiling.  The sparkling, azure lake below was small enough to be framed by my hands, like a visual aid to a fish story nobody back on the flat line would ever believe.

Presenting the MVP of the Summer of 2011

An eerie encounter with the Ghost of Peter Falk. Circus World, Baraboo, WI.

Señor Wences is somewhere, screaming his hands off right about now.

They were hobgoblins dispatched from the darkest dungeon of The Patriarchy.  They invented and  played upon women’s insecurities, and then dared to demand payment for protection against them.   They were thugs in that regard; the Muffia, as it were.  Their tactics achieved a level of wretchedness that surprised even long-time observers.  They sparked an outrage so intense and massive, they had to retreat back to the hateful hole from which they came.

I’m talking, of course, about the Summer’s Eve ad campaign known as “Hail To The V.”   Caving  to cries of racism (which a company spokesperson passive-aggressively terms a “subjective” matter), Summer’s Eve recently pulled a couple of its most heinous clips from YouTube and its own website.  They were indeed offensive.  Rife with “girl, please” jive talking, rapid-fire Spanglish, incendiary allusions to hair weaves and leopard-skin thongs and featuring a raging undercurrent of hoochie mamatude and chicken headery—these commercials came across as the perfect companion pieces to the Frito Bandito and Uncle Ben.  “Companion pieces” being a euphemism, of course.

Keeping true to the ethos as established by its brother in misogyny, the horror movie industry, Summer’s Eve killed off its minority characters, leaving the white version of the ad to see another day.  She can still be found at the SE website, talking smack about how ignorant and filthy women are, in the warmest girl talk tones.  By the way, the star of this ad (and her now-retired sisters) is a hand…a hand pretending to be a talking vagina.

She needs to go, too, because now it’s time for Summer’s Eve to respond to the grievances of still another minority: those of us who are freaked the fuck out by the concept of hands as vaginas.

I can barely look at my own hands anymore, thanks to Summer’s Eve.  I dwell within a Kafkaesque porno paradigm in which the simple act of utilizing my hands for any purpose whatsoever is infused with unspeakable scandal.  My brand new set of vaginas simply cannot keep their hands to themselves, those whores.  The right one is especially troublesome—she’ll pick up anything.  I’m a horrified bystander to their shenanigans: witnessing them gobbling up mile after mile of steering wheel during my commute, pretending not to notice them lovin’, touchin’, squeezing, and generally goin’ groupie on my guitar while I’m trying to play it, riding my every beverage as it were an electric bull.  At this point, holding a hot dog is simply out of the question.

That my randy handies have not yet uttered a word is a sign that perhaps there is still hope for me.   I suppose that’s because they at least have some miniscule level of lady within them that mandates that it’s rude to talk with a full mouth.  Nonetheless, I worry about what they might say if they ever found an idle moment.  One thing’s for certain: those bitches have no call to criticize my feminine hygiene.  And neither does Summer’s Eve, for that matter.

Perhaps I am a minority of one in this admittedly surreal regard.  (Story of my life.)  But stopping to re-shift that paradigm a bit: the concept of a nationwide stank intervention as conducted by vaginal hand puppets is, well, the height of insulting condescension.  The videos may have been retracted, but the poontang puppet hands have spoken.  Their message is loud and clear:  what truly stinks here is Summer’s Eve unadorned contempt towards its intended clientele.

Hillbilly Lanai, Halloween 2008

I’m happy about getting a new porch, don’t get me wrong, but I’m really going to miss the collective of splinters and paint chips that came together for the cause we called The Hillbilly Lanai.  The Hillbilly Lanai was more than a porch.  It was, in the vernacular of sentimental gag-provocation, “a member of the family”, albeit a weather beaten family member who squatted by the side of the street and hoarded windblown litter and wildlife bones in its nether regions–an insane homeless great uncle, if you will.   To its credit, The Hillbilly Lanai didn’t give up its ghastly chipbag and chipmunk cemetery secret until it was dismantled, a gesture I’ve taken as a sign that it did its level best to live up to love that it was given by living down its more unfortunate attributes.  Bless its heart.

It was a sight.  Comprised of rickety grey planks and held together with spikes of tetanus threats and patches of lead poisoning, I dare say my front porch was, from an architectural standpoint, the closest thing to a Snuffy Smith-type outhouse that Charlemagne Oaks has seen in the last century and a half.  As the steady encroachment of track houses continues to consume the town’s historical character from its outer reaches, in, The Hillbilly Lanai was an embarrassing vestige of a simpler, more modest time.  It grinned in the face of progress and prosperity with a mouthful of summerteeth sunshine, and for that I loved it.

The Hillbilly Lanai was the stage upon which key moments of our lives were played.  It was where we set out Mabel’s jack-o-lanterns, and where Kate and I once set out our differences, the terms of our negotiations drifting up with the Marlboro smoke through the amber, street-light diffused rain.   There was no place on earth more suitable for the shucking of corn and the drinking of beer right out of the bottle on a July afternoon.  It also served as a checkpoint through which the paramedics escorted our neighbor away from her home upstairs to a waiting ambulance, and treatment for whatever it was that made her cuss, cry, and carry on all through Valentine’s Day Eve 2007.  It was where our postman stepped out of his professional role to come out to Kate and to shake her hand for raising a family with me.

On the other hand, it did leave a few splinters on my ass, and the handrail didn’t cut it from even an ornamental standpoint, but nonetheless, I relate to that porch.    When I refuse to let others make me feel out of place just because they have more money or privilege than I do, I’ll think of that porch.  And when I fret over the right shirt with which to conceal my tattoos from my mom, yes, I will think of that porch and its hidden stash of refuse, and I’ll laugh. When my joints creak and as my hair turns grey, I’ll think of that porch.

The men who took apart The Hillbilly Lanai tell me that it was “a danger.”  I acknowledge that its time has come, but it shouldn’t be dispatched without a word of gratitude for the fact that despite its age and debasement, it held up.  It was a grand thing voiced in humble terms, like Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” chorale played on a banjo.

Goodbye, Hillbilly Lanai.  You meant a lot to me, you rickety-ass thing, you.

Hillbilly Lanai, Mabel's first recital, June 2011

Corporate Druid

I received a cry for help in my Gmail the other day from one of my readers. From what I can tell, this person is a cubicle worker under siege and that he or she had surmised from my bio that I would be somehow qualified to help. Feeling duty-bound to the believers of my mythology, I present both sides of the correspondence, in hopes that in helping this reader, I may also help all my readers (love you both!).

Dear Gaytheist—

Some strange things have been happening at my place of work and your perspective is direly needed. This all started about 8 months ago. Sounds, random, loud, unbridled began emanating from behind soft, fuzzy, fabric walls of my cubicle. One could be described as uncomfortable laughter - like in a Krusty the Clown sort of way.  It’s up then down then up then down.  It’s a laugh that says “Yes I’m a little crazy and I’ll laugh at anything”.  The laughing eventually graduated into fist pumping. Who, what, why…I thought fist pumping only manifested itself at the Jersey Shore? Really, there’s no techno music and our manger certainly isn’t the type to foot the bill for a rave. Finally goodies, treats began to disappear. It seems the fist pumping clown like personality that lurks on the other side of our protective fabric walls has lurked out and over only to help themselves to special treats brought in by me and others. Please help.

Desperately Seeking Sanity,

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous—

First of all, I’d like to thank you for putting me in the awkward position of being accountable for your personal wellbeing.  Do you not have a real person with whom you can share your concerns and/or seek consolation?  I’m touched by your confidence in my ability to provide you with that consolation, but I can assure you I am not a real person.  Like the blurb says, I am an alter-ego. But I happen to be the alter-ego of someone who works in a cubicle, just like you, so I understand your emotional torment.  I came up from the cubicle like a rap artist comes up from the streets and a mushroom comes up from a compost pile.   As the wretched products of despair, desire, and the debris of this modern age, we like to pretend that we’re big stars or that consuming us with peanut butter and a side of Phish will somehow make us palatable.  “Going back” is something we’d prefer not to do.  But for you, Anonymous, go back I will.

As you know, here in Cubicle America, we work shoulder-to-shoulder, elbows to assholes with our comrades (okay, okay–let’s just stop pretending I’m not a pinko commie), within work spaces brought to you by a secret corporate partnership with Nabisco Wheat Thins.  The gussied-up plywood that separates us from one another affords us all the sham privacy of a lattice within a Catholic confessional with none of the sham redemption.

Talking Shit in The God Box

Make no mistake, Anonymous: you and I inhabit one of the most unnatural work settings since the advent of the Mir Space Station.  I know you’re probably wondering, “Wait a minute– what about pole-dancing establishments?  Those seem pretty unnatural.  Not to mention nasty as all get out.  What about them?”  Well, what about them?  Do you want to talk dirty or do you want to get better?

Returning to topic, you pervert: eight hours a day, five days a week, you and I work within a vast and rickety labyrinth teeming with squirming humanity.    The blueprint for this unnatural work environment was in fact, perversely cribbed from nature: the beehive.   The tiny, fragile work stations, the noise, the crowded conditions…all a beehive needs to complete the comparison is a casual Friday and a filthy break room with a bitchy sign about keeping it clean.

The O.C. (Original Cubicles)

The beehive works for honeybees, but does it work for us?  Sure, worker bees are famously short-lived, but at least they are allowed to get out and smell the flowers.  Here in our Corporate Moneycomb, we worker bees only get to smell the new guy’s Axe cologne and occasionally burnt popcorn wafting from the filthy break room.  And this pisses us the fuck off.  In fact, nothing ratchets up the rage in Cubicle America like a distracting odor.  We’re expected to pretend we’re wingless worker bees, sure, and we accept that,  but do not expect us to not lose our shit if some bitch burns some motherfuckin’ popcorn.

Why are we so touchy?  Let’s break it down, shall we?

I don’t know about the actual work you do, Anonymous, but the actual work I do is talking.  I don’t crunch numbers or create code; I make sounds out of my mouth for a living.  But the thing is, the thing is, (and this is crucial, Anonymous), THE THING IS:  I’m not just expected to talk; I’m expected to LISTEN, too.  Yes.  That headset I yoke myself into every morning has a mouth piece AND an earpiece.  My particular earpiece is one of those black plastic jobbies framed with a black foam donut, reminiscent of a Walkman headset from the 80’s.  Unlike a Walkman headset from the 80’s, however, it does not issue forth New Order’s greatest hits or Love And Rockets’ classic Earth Sun Moon but rather the sometimes unhappy, sometimes needy, sometimes terrifyingly unbalanced voices of men and women across the country.  It came as quite a shock to me when I first started this job that these men and women did not call with the express intent of basking in the enlightenment and joy of my mouth sounds.  In many cases, quite the contrary.  They call to make mouth sounds of their own—sometimes unhappy, sometimes needy, sometimes terrifyingly unbalanced mouth sounds.

Again, I don’t know about you, Anonymous, but for me, keeping my job isn’t just a matter of making mouth sounds; it’s knowing the right mouth sounds to make.  That means having to listen carefully to whatever is pumped into my ear, regardless of how unfavorably it compares to the danceable 80’s classics of New Order and Love And Rockets.   This is not a complaint.  This is what I get paid to do.  I thank the Great Flattering Conceit Of Human Worth In The Sky every day for the privilege of listening to unhappy, needy, terrifyingly unbalanced people.  The problem is, everyone seated around me is doing the exact same thing. And the problem with that is built right into the gussied-up plywood that comprises our Moneycomb.  Let me put it this way:  if the sounds made by my coworkers were sharks and my cubicle were a cage, I would be reduced to a floating red cloud and maybe a thumb ring within 10 minutes of the standard work day.  I hear everything.  Not just the ordinary mouth sounds we need to make for our livelihood, either; I mean I hear everything.

An Itemized  (but admittedly not exhaustive)

List of Everything

• Remote parenting phone calls in which children named Demetrius are fervently promised “whuppin’s” and those named Braden are PRN’ed their sister’s amoxicillin.
• Sports Talk.  For many people, it’s important for there to be clear-cut winners and losers in life.  In Cubicle America (where we are not so much players in the game as we are as the game that is played), it’s more than important, it’s of pants-pissing urgency.  I understand the psychological necessity of Sports Talk, but let me say it’s been no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise having to listen to one of my neighboring comrades hum “We Are The Champions” after gloating loudly about her March Madness brackets.  Particularly the “I consider it a challenge before the whole human race/And I ain’t gonna loooooooose!!!!!” part.
• “That’s what she said!”  Every ten minutes, like freaking clockwork.  Thank you so much, NBC’s “The Office”!
• Corporate Kennel Cough Chain Reactions.  If one person coughs on the east side of the first floor of the building at 7:05 AM, it is a fact that by 12:52 PM, that same cough will have worked its way cubicle by cubicle to the west side of the second floor.  By close of business, it will make its way back again.  It’s true.  Just ask the CDC.
• Garden Variety BS.  I’m still trying to get over the time I was party to a lengthy monologue justifying the purchase of a 3D television with a dissertation on the enriching importance of “depth”.  I felt we were all the more shallow for it.
• Breast cancer scare calls to my doctor.  I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to my comrades for having to hear those horrifying, disgusting conversations.  In case you’re wondering, I’m okay and will live to discuss my needle aspiration biopsies another day!
• Burnt Popcorn Outrage.  The BPO is a loud and lengthy mass monologue in which cubicle workers of all creeds and colors join together to bitch as one.  Woe betide the “idiot” who burnt the “motherfucking popcorn”, for he is the “asshole” who subliminally reminds us all of our lot in life as flightless worker bees hopelessly locked within the corporate moneycomb.
  

  Which one of you bitches burnt the motherfucking popcorn???

And within this maelstrom of noise, we are expected to function in our cubicles as if they are deluxe office suites.  I’ve said that cubicles are made of Wheat Thins and gussied-up particle board, but what holds them together is a giant lie, that lie being Your Cubicle Exists On Its Own Plane Of Reality.  It’s the same kind of purposeful, self-willed delusion that has empowered people to walk on hot coals or break boards with their heads or eat the brains of a monkey.  “I am a cutting edge culinary adventurer,” the monkey brain eater tells himself.  “I am brilliant”, the board breaker tells himself.  “I am walking on sunshine”, the hot coal walker tells herself.

Affirmations are much more powerful than mere denials in extreme circumstances like fire-walking and cubicle-working because the act of denial is in itself an acknowledgement.  To think “This bazillion degree fire is not hot,” or “I am not a dolt,” or “This gelantinous monkey brain is not disgusting” is to allow the idea of heat or stupidity or grossness to enter into the consciousness where it can mingle dangerously with alarming sensory data and the corroborating counsel of common sense.  A denial is therefore a losing maneuver in the Mind Game Playbook.  The battle of the mind is won with delusion.   Therefore, to work successfully within your workspace, you must accept that Your Cubicle Is Its Own Plane of Reality.

Anonymous, my friend, this means you are a citizen of a three-walled universe.  At your back horribly yawns the abyss.  Your Cubicle Is Its Own Plane of Reality, is, as far as delusions go, admittedly a pretty elaborate one.  To sustain anything elaborate, you need extensive back-up.  The cubicle delusion is not unlike Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” in this way.  A wily shyster as well as a gifted artist, Botticelli wisely surmised that no one’s going to buy that a spectacular, nude Uma Thurman prototype would just drop in out of nowhere (on a clam shell, no less!) so he augmented this inspired poppycock with even more glorious nonsense: a sexy pair of swinging angels, blowing up a bracing gale explains how she got here, a handmaiden on James Brown stand-by robe-replacement duty assures us her nudity is only a temporary lapse in decorum.   If you want it to, this painting almost makes sense, because these pleasing “if this, then that” suppositions top one another in a empirical pyramid beautiful bullshit.  In short, Botticelli clearly understood that buying into a whole worldview is much more satisfying than swallowing down one unadorned lie.

The (Beautiful Bullshit) Birth Of Venus

SO!  Your Cubicle Is Its Own Plane Of Reality when you accept that your headset is your one and only physiological connection to the outside world.  In accepting this, you must also accept that the outside world itself is drifting somewhere in a dimension all its own like a Pepsi can in the icy North Atlantic.  But most importantly, Your Cubicle Is Its Own Plane Of Reality when you accept that while you are seated within it, no one else exists but you.

You can get a lot of work done if you’re the only person in the universe.  I daresay that this is how God managed to accomplish so freaking much in 7 days, if the fable is to be believed.  I myself have on past occasions attained such a state of perfect singularity and productivity that my entire being seemed to be condensed into its functioning agents alone.  To wit: I was nothing more than 2 typing hands, 1 listening ear, and 1 talking mouth.  But to say I was nothing more than that is actually to say those elements were all that there were to be.  Within this state, the tiny voices piped into my right ear become all I hear.  The voices of America’s unhappiest, neediest,  and most terrifyingly unbalanced people become the silent voice of my consciousness.  It is in this fugue state that worker becomes the work.  And shit gets done.

But if no one other than you exists, it begs the question: who’s to say that you exist?  Lacking a frame of reference (and a mind and body, as well, for that matter), how can you convincingly state your existential case?

Enter The Cackler.  I haven’t forgotten your Cackler, Anonymous.  It may have seemed as if I had spiraled into a digressive K hole of no return, but I assure you, everything I have to say has everything to do with you, even if it seems to have nothing to do with no one but myself.  This is what 4 years in a cubicle has reduced me to.   Work with me here.

Your Cackler has reached a state of existential ambiguity so complete she has literally lost track of herself.  She may have become so good at tuning out her outer and inner worlds that she has tuned herself into no world at all.  Perhaps she fears that she no longer has a center, that she has flown apart in the yawning abyss.  What may sound for all the world like the cackle of insanity to you and the entire clinical psychological community, is actually a sonic beacon of reassurance.  Your Cackler is a modern miner lost in the void of his vocation, keeping the terror of negation at bay by whistling in the dark.  When your Cackler cackles, she is engaged in the act of actualization: she is here, here, here, hee, hee, hee, HEEEEERRRREEEE!

You find this annoying, Anonymous, because when the Cackler cackles, she overspills the physical and psychological boundaries of her cubicle with that horrible sound, and in so doing, reminds you that you are still captive within yours.

Not content to merely add the sound of her laughter to the List of Everything that you have to tune out, she has gone on to inflict her existence upon your snack dish.  She is clearly on a rampage.  What’s the point of having these pretend walls between us if they do nothing to help us pretend?  I will concede to you, Anonymous, it is quite upsetting.  You are by no means alone in your resentment of the border-jumper, the interloper, whatever form she takes.  For instance,  when I recently noticed that a carrot coin had somehow escaped its designated compartment and took asylum in another, completely incorrect one in a frozen dinner  I’d brought for my lunch, I nearly lost my proverbial shit.  There it was, that carrot coin, just lounging obscenely and arrogantly in the hot goo of my “apple crisp,” like an uninvited Ron Jeremy smirking and soaking in my bath tub.  At the time, I was consumed with a rage so acute, I almost couldn’t control it, let alone understand where it was coming from.

At first, I thought I was upset at Healthy Choice’s poor packaging or its lame quality control, but even then in the red haze of my rage, I was vaguely aware of the disproportionate relationship between its innocuous cause and the bewildering effect it had on me.  I almost had to go home, such was the magnitude of my outrage.

Everything in its own place.

It was only after several days of meditation and drinking that I was able to come to terms with the fact that I was actually upset because that asshole carrot coin had the nerve to demonstrate the futility of ALL artificial, arbitrary boundaries, right there in the imaginary sanctity of my own cubicle.  It is for also for this reason the smell of burnt popcorn is the official aroma of Cubicle Rage.  It is an olfactory reminder of how our lives compare unfavorably to that of an insect who works itself to death within a lifespan of 1-4 months.

Anonymous, when I saw how quickly the logic of your email’s rhetoric unraveled and then disintegrated into screaming atoms of pure unadulterated freakout, I recognized that working in Cubicle America has certainly taken its toll on you as well.  I wish I could tell you that the solution would be to somehow re-envision the American Workspace in such a way that would permit optimal performance while respecting basic human rights.  I wish I could say that my earnest account of these mind-warping working conditions would somehow make its way onto the desk and into the heart of someone who matters, but whenever I imagine this essay in the hands of some corporate power-that-be, I can’t help but see the “take-away point” being a ban on microwave popcorn.

As the pretend personality borne of this fetid environment, I can assure you that madness is the only sane response to our circumstances. I can also assure you that you really do exist, unlike me.  So laugh it up!  Help yourself to somebody else’s snacks!  Write a blog!

My cubicle not only exists on its own plane of reality, it also happens to have its own currency. And I am the richest woman in my whole cubicle!

Uptown Flav Wants You!

After a spectacular four-month occupancy as a roadside attraction at the junction of WTF and FTW, Flav’s Fried Chicken is no more.  It came as a whirlwind, whipping off the Iowa prairie amid a miasma of disrupted topsoil, trans-fat vapors, and crack cocaine smoke.  It left as an acrimonious fart, embarrassing all within its association.  In its wake, we are left with only bitter recriminations and chicken bones.  And beautiful memories.

I was there, but to avoid incurring the wrath of the haters who missed the boat, I’ll switch to the second person point of view, and write about the experience as if it is happening in real time to *you*.  You are there.  You drove all the way to Clinton, Iowa with your ladylove and four year old child because you insisted on doing something non-suburban in celebration of surviving another year in the suburbs.  You are also occasionally plagued by the phantom smells of bacon and are sometimes distracted by the hooting of your own private flock of owls.  But I digress.

You (yes, *you*) sit in the parking lot in dazed amazement.  Once you get your head around the fact that rap star/reality show oddity Flavor Flav has, in true fever dream fashion, reinvented himself as a restaurateur, then you must come to grips with the fact the restaurant in question is indisputably a former Long John Silver.  Which is located right next door to a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  As you walk across the parking lot, you can feel entire paradigms shifting like tectonic plates beneath your feet.  By the time you walk into the door, you don’t know your ass from a Salvador Dali in the ground.  You feel sane and healthy for the first time in a long time, because this time, you are not the only one losing your damn mind.

A chicken restaurant inhabiting the reanimated corpse of a Long John Silver's

Inside, you become a temporary citizen within a four dimensional pastiche of rap legend: the decor is a more visceral take on the opening credits of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire”, Flav’s catchphrases rage in red graffiti on the walls all around you.  You are surrounded by various phases of Flav.  There’s Viking Flav, Classic Flav, Uptown Flav, Oddly Resembling Muammar Gaddafi Flav.  In short: The Flav is with you.

You order the Mack Daddy Special: a breast and a leg.  You order greens, too, but there are no greens.  You are told maybe there will be greens next week.  Or possibly next month.  No matter!  There’s still plenty of deep-fried corn on the cob to go around!  As you settle in by the bay window overlooking the Bay of 2^nd Street, you are smug in the knowledge that you have already received a huge return on your investment: you are far, far away from the world from which you came, the person you are, and the time you inhabit.  In short, you have become another Iowa redneck trapped in the 80’s.  Congratulations.  You may call yourself Junior.

But the goodies just keep coming.  To bastardize and misappropriate the words of lesser hip-hop legend LL Cool J: the chicken is delicious.   With each bite, you can almost hear the Colonel rending his clothes and gnashing his teeth next door.  It is so good; you briefly consider biting the bones, but then you have to remind yourself (yet again) that biting is an inappropriate expression of enthusiasm in the broad daylight.  You don’t know how you lived before you encountered this chicken, not that it matters anymore anyway. You know you will never be the same.  You have your picture taken with Uptown Flav as a souvenir of your rebirth.

But as you reveled in your new life, the FFC was already entering its twilight.  Perhaps the dearth of greens should have been your first hint.  Less than a month after your visit, Flav severed ties with his business partner Nick Cimino, alleging grievous and potentially deadly mismanagement.

“Let me be straight up with you, I went up inside there on April 2nd and I found potato salad that expired on February 28,” the rapper said. “And it’s then when I realized I can’t do business with this man and I really hope no one ate those potatoes.”

This potato salad epiphany has sparked a firestorm of defamation.  Cimino has retaliated on record, calling Flav out as a “fraud.” I myself happen to take exception to this particular allegation.  It is simply outrageous.  I suppose next we’ll hear that his real name is not Flavor Flav, or that the clock he wears around his neck isn’t synched to International Atomic Time, or that his teeth aren’t really made of solid gold.  Cimino also claims that “the idea” to open a chicken restaurant was, in fact, his idea, a notion that might make Colonel Sanders laugh himself incontinent in his grave.

Coverage on the squalid aftermath of the FFC’s closure has been extensive, but the real story goes unreported.  This is a good thing because if that story were told, there would be no reason to write stories or fry chicken or go around yelling “Yeah Boyee!” ever again.   Let us hope for the sake of the continued existence of the human race, no one ever publishes the words “Flavor Flav’s Iowa Chicken Restaurant Closes Because There Is No God.”

Oops.

No Boyee!