Nothin’ But Killahs

Stone work and “Lucy” on the ground with twigs by Mabel.

Yes, my babies, it’s yet another Wisconsin camping trip post. Will they ever cease? As long as our children are too small to be tolerated on longer car trips and too young to pay their own airfare, it appears the campgrounds of the state of Wisconsin will remain the Official Vacation Getaways of The Gaytheist Gospel Hour. This time around, however, we’ve done a few things a little differently: an autumnal outing (our first in our 8 years) to Richard Bong State Recreational Area, a park heretofore undocumented within the untold treasures of this blog.  The guest stars are the same, but have finally consented, in the great firewater-plying/treaty-signing tradition of this great nation, to be named in a story.  As per GGH policy, guest stars are afforded relative anonymity, and are given the opportunity to select their own pseudonyms. That being said, I’d like to introduce my readers (love you both!) to my good friends, the Nutter Family: Whitey and his wife Brandy, middle-schooler Eden, and Mabel’s best friend Nevaeh.

The plan was to celebrate Lucy’s 3^rd birthday that weekend. A piñata was purchased, cupcakes were made, a little sign in her honor was erected at the entrance of our campsite. The plan was to enjoy life away from St. Churles, where the wearisome Scarecrow Fest had taken over, bringing with it gawking crowds, traffic, and untold BS to our home turf, which was barely tolerable to begin with.

The plan did not include Andrew Obregon. Accused of the murder of Tywon Anderson, whose body was found in a cornfield in Paris township the month before, Obregon was at large and had been eluding area law enforcement for several days prior to our arrival in Kenosha county.

So I guess you can say his presence as an uninvited GGH guest star is a little bit of a game changer. He’s not available to choose his psuedonym, so I’m calling him “The Guy.”

NIGHT ONE

• There’s a murderer on the loose in the area. Whitey was informed of this by a park employee as he checked in.  Kind of in the same sheepish, off hand way you might use to warn a visiting friend if the toilet is broken, the lady prefaced the news with “Just so you know…”  Of course, I did not believe Brandy when she informed me of this interaction. Her source was, after all, Whitey, whose relationship with “the truth” is just as greased up as mine. Nobody said anything to Kate when she checked in, I pointed out.  But after comparing notes, we surmised it was because she had Mabel with her.  Mustn’t frighten the children. A very dairy-white Wisconsin move.
• We talk it over with the Nutters. We consult the oracle I mean, Iphone. We learn “The Guy” is a crack addict, who has a knack for disappearing in cornfields.  Richard Bong State Recreational Area would be the last place a fugitive from the law would want to be, we reason: too many people. Rangers. Being the preeminent criminal psychologists within the 100 foot radius, we reason that “The Guy” would seek out the company of someone who could provide him with crack. All we had to offer here were marshmallows and our sweet, sweet marshmallowy asses, and not even we had much use for those. Deliberations ended when quoting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s landmark decision at the premier of  Village People/Bruce Jenner 1980 career murder/suicide “Can’t Stop The Music.“ I yell: “This is stupid! FUCK IT!”
• Whitey and I are like the Norman Lear of shitty TV shows no one would ever watch.  On Night One, seated at the campfire, we do what we always do: create TV magic. Tonight’s zeitgeist is “Joanie Loves Trotsky”, a hilarious family sitcom about the lighter side of the Red Scare of 1950’s USA.
• Jim Beam’s Red Stag reminds me of Cherry 44D, the child-killer of all cough medicine. I hated Cherry 44D. The wallpaper by my bed was permanently flecked blood red from the splashback from my battles with my mother who dared to deliver that hateful cherry snot to me. But somehow I managed to drink it anyway.
• Incidentally, we celebrated Lucy’s third birthday.
• Everything about this entire situation—a vacationing family, a killer run amuck, the laughably abundant warnings tragically ignored—reminded me of the subject of my very shitty undergraduate honors thesis: Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” I had chosen to laugh it off, but I end up getting sick later that night and waking up every half hour with panic attacks, which, if I’d learned anything from O’Connor at all, I knew served me right. B+!

DAY ONE

• Coming to the reluctant realization that we should probably at least know what “The Guy” looks like, Whitey and I look up him up on Whitey’s phone.  “The Guy”’s got a receding hairline and a buzz cut that seems to wrap around an unexceptional jaw and arch over a mouth frozen in mid-speech. The general impression he leaves is one of vague blandness.
  

  Children Of The Soy

  He looks like he could be anyone. His gaze is averted away from the camera. He appears to be looking just past our shoulders, perhaps observing himself sneaking up from behind. Scanning the article further, we find out that only a couple of days before, he had vanished into a corn field not far from Richard Bong Recreational Area.

• According to my non-mathematical calculations, there are probably at least 4 anti-anxiety prescriptions in our collective medical history, but not one actual fuck to give about what could easily be anyone’s paranoid nightmare come true.  During the duller moments of campsite drudgery, Whitey and I envision ourselves as the stars of a reality show called “To Trap A Crackhead.” Airing on the Nature Channel, the show is a sort  of vigilante/safari mish mash, owing an embarrassing debt to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. “The Wisconsin Crackhead is wily and resourceful,” we voice over as the show plays on the mutually imagined tv wedged dive bar-style in the lower branches of the nearest tree.  “Unlike his urban counterpart, the WC is a ‘lone wolf’, forgoing the constraints of the pack to run amuck, terrorizing the law-abiding dairy cows of small town USA.”  “The WC’s knowledge of the agricultural landscape is uncanny in its intricacy.  His world is a spider web of tractor trails, corn rows, and obscure dirt roads. Like an extra-inbred Duke boy born with no secondary nervous system.”
• The ankle-high 2.5 foot long string Eden strung between two trees near the entrance to Camp Nutter is no longer a clothesline for tiny horse blankets. It has been deputized into service as a trip wire for our quarry.  The odds of “The Guy” running through this tiny corridor in the entire camp site, in this entire park, in this entire county are understandably miniscule, so Whitey and I plan to bait the trap with a rock of crack on a tiny pedestal under a bitsy spotlight on the other side.
• Whitey thinks he’s gluten-intolerant, so he’s brought some kind of quasi-beer called Glutenberg. When I see the box, sitting in the hatchback of his Honda Honkeymobile, I think of 2 things: gluteus maximus, and 2. Steve Guttenburg. And then I think of Steve Guttenburg’s ass. And, of course, Steve Guttenburg, starring in “Can’t Stop The Music.”
• There could potentially be a murderer lurking behind every Coleman tent, every Jayco travel trailer, and all you get is wisecracks and sass from this crowd. But drop a single maggot in a fire ring and wholesale shit is lost. Where did it come from? Did it wriggle out of one of our hotdogs? Did it touch one of our hotdogs? What the crap??? Anything can be in those hotdogs, you know! There must be more where that came from.  WHERE THE HELL ARE THE REST OF THEM???
• The kids spent the better part of the day, sweeping the dirt off the ground in the center of a small copse of trees at the far end of Camp Nutter. Our kids are totally normal.
  

  They eventually laid down a variety of picnic blankets and built swinging walls made of hammocks. Perhaps I’d been too hasty with my snark.

• The eternal activity coordinator, Kate people herded us all the way from our campsites to the trailhead of the idyllically-named Trail B.  It happened to be a glorious day to hike: sweetly colorful and crisp, like a biting into an apple and finding a kaleidoscope inside.  Which happens all the time, right? No offense to the Sierra Club Kids amongst my “readership”, but the main attraction on any Wisconsin trail is, as far as I’m concerned, the Death Benches. Every trail I’ve walked has at least a dozen Death Benches scattered at various choice vistas along the way. It’s a Wisconsin institution. These benches are bought and paid for by grieving families and dedicated to departed loved ones. There’s a plaque on the backrest bearing a name and usually a touching statement dealing with the fleeting beauty of life, nature, and love. The Death Benches used to depress the shit out of me, but after a couple of cancer scares since my first Death Bench encounter, I can’t seem to get enough of them.  I lead Brandy and Whitey on a tour of the Death Benches of Trail B, and try to interest them in ponying up some due for our own Death Bench to end all Death Benches. It wouldn’t just be a bench, it would be a reclining bench. It wouldn’t just have a plaque; the entire back rest would BE a plaque: a tooth-rotting tribute not only to the three of us and our bravely inspiring lives, but also that of Tupac. Me, Whitey, Brandy, and Tupac: Together Forever In Nature’s Splendor. Just because. “If we all make it home, we totally have to do this,” I urged them, but for some reason, they didn’t seem all that interested.
• Two walking sticks are getting it on on the side of our tent. Kate frets that they might lay their eggs there.  I opine that it would serve them right in the Darwinian scheme of things, for these stupid insects to be stopped in their reproductive tracks.  Who needs more stupid walking sticks in this ecosystem?  As a  matter of fact, I’m pretty sure most naturalists would agree with me when I say it’s about time all of these lesser creatures get with the program and start driving cars and get involved in the housing market if they know what’s good for them! Survival of the fittest!
• The official motto of the weekend: “There’s a murderer on the loose, and nothin’ but killahs up in here!”

NIGHT TWO

• Two squad cars, in full flash, scream down the two lane on the outer rim of Camps Raisin and Nutter. We clutch our beers around the fire and watch the red and blue lights play high-speed peekaboo through the tree branches. A helicopter had been spotted, heading in the same direction a few minutes before.  When the noise subsides, the stunned silence is occupied by a lone owl, hooting close by. It is at that moment that Brandy reveals her true nature as a real child of hell by sharing her theory that “The Guy” is most likely at that very moment next door at Camp Nutter, hiding out in their Honda Honkymobile.
• I find myself in the ring of darkness beyond the campfire, and then I find Lu’s little piñata bat. Clasping it with both hands, I hold it upright, letting it touch my forehead, bow my head, and silently vow to beat the motherfucking candy out of any motherfucker who dares to show his crackalackin Wisconsin cheese curd face at Camp Raisin.

DAY TWO

• Me: “The wind is singing.” Lu: “And the trees are dancing.”
  

  Potato chips and piñata bat: eating feelings and cracking skulls

• The sun burns my billboard forehead as our daughters perform an odd little girl pony dressage at Dick Bong Ampitheatre. I listen to them sing the high points of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” and the national anthem, and almost forget I have a foot-long rod of festively-colored wood dangling from my belt loop. On the way out of Bong, we pass a cluster of horseback riders.  I see a hard spark of sunlight ricochet off a handgun strapped under the arm of a husky middle-aged man astride a pinto. I can’t see his face under his fedora. I don’t know who to be afraid of.
• Kate and I argue about the quickest way to get back to Illinois over the farmy-smelling blast of autumn stampeding thru the car.  We’re blasting “Tennessee Jed” and Mabel is singing along. We made it. We survived ObreBong 2015. IN YOUR FACE, FLANNERY O’CONNOR.
  

  Me and Kate and the hat she made me, FOR MY OWN GOOD.

P.S. “The Guy” was arrested two days after our return to Illinois.

THE SUMMER OF WOW

Wow, as they say… WOW. Wow, drawn out with at least 4 o’s. WOW, uttered in a low-note minor key of shock and awe. It’s the sound of amazement echoing thru the empty tunnels of a million mouth-breathers. It calls to mind the how-fucked-are-we-mothership-cresting-the-skyline moment we’ve all been waiting for: WOW. Until something that exceptional actually happens, we’ll practice the living shit out of these WOWs: build funeral wreaths for poached lions with them, lower a WOW-based gender-norm sneeze guard between ourselves and formerly male Olympians, wave a flag of WOW’s—your choice of stars-n-bars or rainbow. America: land of the free, home of the incredulous. Wait—that was way too wordy. I mean WOW. Just WOW.

I’ve taken the abundance of WOW’s allotted me as a suburban auslander, and as is my wont, fashioned a high tower crowned with crenellations from which I can tip over pots of boiling hot WOW’s onto the barbarian hordes, which is—trust me on this—an all-day job here in the Cubburbs. But somehow, I’ve managed to stitch up a comforting quilt of the more delicate WOW’s to cuddle into after a long and difficult day of WOW dumping. And yet, I have so many WOW’s to spare and share with you, bullet-point style, my lucky-lucky babies! As an added bonus, I’ve ranked each with a special WOW rating: the more O’s, the more WOW.

• We’re Bad, We’re Nationwide (WOW rating: 14 O’s) Same-sex marriage is finally a national reality. Kate and I can now carry on our decade-long debate of who’s not listening to who and who’s losing their mind, coast-to-coast, like a Lincoln and Douglas who occasionally give each other shoulder rubs and take turns wiping their toddler’s behind.
• Welcome To The Family, Keef! (WOW rating: 4 O’s)  According to the box it came in, this baby can grill up to “20 hamburgesas” at a time.  And because it has the capacity to smoke up the entire neighborhood, I’ve named it after the heaviest smoker alive today, Mr. Keith Richards.

• Fare Thee Well, Grateful Dead (WOW rating: 4.5 O’s) I know I’m way late to the party, but has Bob Weir ALWAYS looked like he was being goosed by the Grim Reaper?

• Go Set A What, Man? (WOW rating: 6.3 O’s) It’s probably pointless to be spoiler-sensitive now, but just allow me this moment to gloat about my decision to put all my eggs in the Flannery O’Connor basket, way back when, at the Southern Women Writers State Fair.

• “I’m a big girl. No binks. I’m not a baby!” (WOW rating: 8 O’s) After a two night pacifier-less stand, our daughter Lu has renounced all the trappings of babyhood.  We are now a family of “big girls”, just in time for me to begin my slide into liquid dinners and adult diapers.
• Slide Report (WOW rating: 4.6 O’s) I continue to grey like nobody’s business, and am widening quite nicely, thank you very much.  I loom on the horizon like a goddamn prairie menace full of golf-ball sized hail.
• Deep Dream Fry Daddy (WOW rating: 13 O’s) All of the photos featured here today have been tossed into an app I’m calling the Deep Dream Fry Daddy. Some, multiple times.  Judging from the reactions I’ve been getting on social media, it’s pretty polarizing.  I like to think that it doesn’t just bring out the dog in every picture, but every square out of the woodwork.  All you have to do is say “That’s just creepy!” and I know exactly how cool you aren’t.

• Charlemagne Oakes Shake-Up (WOW rating: 12.2 O’s) It started with the sudden demise of a beloved educator in May, and yet another one in July, and now the town is covered with ribbons and freaking the fuck out.  I am standing at ground zero of a sort of Cubburban carpe diem that is both bracing and disquieting. It’s manifesting itself in an anxiety spectrum ranging from the adorable uptick of neighborhood BBQ’s, to game-changing divorces, and perhaps most disturbingly, abrupt mid-life genital piercings. It’s brought out the best in some people, (see Girl Scout pic below), and the worst in others.  As is the order of things, the two people no longer with us were paragons of kindness and compassion, cut down in their proverbial prime, while those of us who have fallen short of their moral goals are left behind to sneak cigarettes behind their children’s backs and write cynical blog posts about a small community’s grief and loss.  But hey, Keef and I did host two BBQ’s; I can’t be all that bad. Hopefully not good enough to get cut down, though. I have a lot of fucking up yet to do.
• Welcome, Jenny And Donnie! (WOW rating: 3.98 O’s)You two crazy kids moved to Charlemagne Oaks in just the nick of time! We’ve been through a lot lately. Our chubburb turns its lonely eyes to you.  To further summon the ever-quotable “Mrs. Robinson”: “wooo-wooo-wooo”. I’m sure you can see, there’s at least one WOW in there somewhere for your troubles.

Renaissance Faire 2015!

Heard ya missed us! WE’RE BACK!!!

When I told my coworker I was going to the Rennaissance Faire, she said “That sounds like fun for you!”

For you… as in not for me. Not for me, and not in a million years, you pathetic dork-tard. While you’re clanking around in chainmail or whatever, I’m going to do something normal, like get my roots re-frosted and go to the Cubs game with my soon-to-be third husband.

It’s good to see that despite the changes I’ve seen in the five years since my last pilgrimage to where the bustier and codpiece reign supreme, at least one thing hasn’t changed. The chasm between me and the suburban them doesn’t just yawn.  It yodels.

Coworker is singular now.  I no longer report to the hive in Cubicle America. I work from home these days, for a fledgling element of the same company that is so new, I only have the one coworker. The two of us communicate via IM, which doesn’t dispel any loneliness I might feel as much as it makes me feel foolish for feeling it in the first place.  I am finally fulfilling my lone wolf destiny. I sometimes forget to change out of my pajamas. I shower once a week, and that’s only after the children complain about the smell.

The children.  Holding steady at the two daughters: Mabel and Lu. Mabel has grown up to be a Common Core math whiz, Katy Perry fan (wince), and enthusiast of the well-timed sarcastic comeback. And Lu? It’s still a little hard to tell who she’ll become at this point, but we do know she is fond of the word MINE in all caps, and the song stylings of one “Dave” Bowie.  The girls adore one another in every way.  They adore singing and dancing together as much as they adore slamming the door in each other’s faces.  This is parenthood on an entirely new level—the bouncer/Judge Wapner level.  The guitar and sassy little red hen hand puppet from my fun mom days have been relegated to silent jurists in the corner as I keep the motherfucking peace in the goddamn house.

I’ve changed, too, in the past five years, or rather, I’ve become someone I didn’t realize I’d harbored within me all along. I’ve summoned up a surprising reserve of parental badassery that I’ve apparently inherited from my dad’s sister Betty. An easy-going master of the wisecrack who could at any moment transform into a fiery Valkyrie of pure rage and clenched teeth and tangled mane, Aunt Betty terrified me even more than my dad, who was most certainly no slouch himself. When I roar “GO TO SLEEP!”, I can feel Aunt Betty’s blood-curdling battle cry “YINS KIDS!” resonating in my very marrow. And I even scare myself. Another destiny fulfilled.

But I had these children not to rain vengeful justice down upon them, but rather, enjoy them, and help them enjoy life’s possibilities.  Hence, a return to the mecca of the Fun Mom—the Renaissance Faire.  Gaytheist bullet points shall now ensue:

• Mabel doesn’t remember much from her last trip to the Ren Faire, but the experience did leave an indelible fashion imprint in her mind.  After outfitting both Lu and herself with the requisite tutus, she asked me as I sipped my coffee, resplendent in my aromatic work from home wolf fineries, “What are you planning to wear?”  After affecting a long, contemplative pause, I answered, “I’m thinking of going with clothes.” Her response– a snort of amusement mingling with a mild undertone of approval—is as close to a high five as I’m going to get from this kid.
• The clothes I ended up going with: a tie-dye tank top with bell bottoms. I decided that my personal journey back in time would be tripped up somewhere in the vicinity of the Summer Of Love. I topped it off with an eight mile high ponytail from the I Dream Of Genie Book of Styles.

Just another greying, tattooed free spirit at the Ren Faire. Huzzah, lords and bitches!

This look is not for everybody. When your hair is especially long and greying at the temples like mine, your hair ends up falling around your shoulders, and broadcasts your Bride Of Frankenstein streaks to the world. It’s a hairdo that is both up and down, young and old. But I take no credit for it, as I stole it from my buddy Meister, the high priestess of unapologetic contradiction herself.

• The Rennaissance Faire remains the #1 weekend destination for Chicagoland’s lesbian community.  This time, we happened to be parked right next to a young couple with their Rachel Maddow hornrims and saggy jeans.  We traded chin-juts of solidarity as we unloaded our cars and made our way across the gently rolling meadow leading to the witch-hatted Bavarian fortress containing our escape from squaredom.
• It used to be that the Ren Faire was basically a bubble of Shakespearian-era whimsy: lords and ladies, thee’s and thou’s, armor and lace abounds. Those days have been relegated to the past as dead and gone as the one it attempted to emulate in the first place. Now it’s a holding tank for every flight of fancy taxiing over O’Hare today, an Elizabethan UN festooned with freak flags of every stripe.  I saw a woman in a full-body cheetah suit, a set of cat ears perched atop her perm, an actual set of cheetah print tattoos prowling her fully exposed lower back. I saw a Japanese Elvis impersonator. I saw an elderly woman in full Jack Sparrow drag. I saw what I’m guessing was a man, dressed up in an indeterminate mound of swamp-green paper mache’ with inexplicable protrusions in odd directions. I saw more belly dancers than I could shake a tambourine at, many of whom were adorably more belly than dancers. Most remarkably, I saw some suburban alpha males pretending they were somehow better than everything and everyone there.
  

  I saw these two, perpetrating like they’re not going to throw everything they can get their hands on into that pond over there.

• No turkey legs for me this year. I’m getting too old to prove anything to anyone anymore. Fuck that shit, man. It’s strictly brats-n-kraut for me.
  

  My, how she’s grown.

• Kate quietly bought me a gift at one of the Hogwartsian boutiques, a reminder that under all the noise of our new lives, and all the conversations we’re too tired to have, and the wars we wage day in and day out against ourselves and each other and the world at large, it all started with us, and it will end that way as well. That she placed it on top of my lone wolf work station makes it all the more meaningful.

Fairy poke: danger imminent.

• We watched in amazement as Lu caught the spirit of the Faire like the tail of a glorious kite, and sailed away.  She learned how to curtsey, and did so frequently. She chatted at length with a lady in waiting. She hollered “GO GREEN” for the emerald-clad knight assigned to our cheering section at the joust. And most significantly, she was crowned the Grand Dame of Fairy Glen.  Now, this is really is something because Mabel was TERRIFIED of Fairy Glen when she was Lu’s age. Her fear of what she called “[pre]tend people”–clowns, mimes, and mascots—was so all-consuming, we just hustled her past that enclave of Froud Faery freakishness.  But Lu is a fearless embracer of make-believe. She was baptized with a pinch of fairy dust by a ram-horned fauna sprite with multiple facial piercings that I’m calling Portable Portland. She built a twig fortress with a tree fairy I’m calling Ch-Ch-Chia. Her nose was given a playful “one of us” poke by a flora fairy I’m calling Bouquet.  And she was sent on her way with a string bracelet courtesy of the most terrifying one of all, a grey spider spirit I call Arachnaphobia.  As two refugees of a barely-averted confrontation with Ronald McDonald at a recent McD’s grand opening, Mabel and I could only witness this commune in anxiety-tainted wonder.
• Orange Is The New The End.

Thud: Growing Up With The Bee Gees

My version of the Red Ryder BB Gun: “Bee Gees Gold.”

I was thrilled to receive a gift of a Bee Gees puzzle from my younger sister Lars last month.  This is not a joke: I was thrilled to get a 200 piece puzzle of the Bee Gees.  I love the Bee Gees, and not in the half-assed way that it’s become acceptable to love the Bee Gees, either.  They’re not a “guilty pleasure.”  Nor is “their early stuff actually pretty good” to me.  I love the disco stuff from the 70’s just as much as I love their British Invasion stuff.  They were my first favorite band.  I grew up with them.   My love, like all first loves, is crystalline and perfect: unencumbered by the cloudy complications that attend my “grown up” affections.   (I love Neko Case, for example, but I’ve backed away from her latest work, which seems stiff and agenda-addled to me.)  As a Bee Gees fan, I’ve become accustomed to snide comments and backhanded compliments.  After all, the Bee Gees have been given a bad rap. When called upon to do so, I’ve been their defender and I’ll defend them again in this story.  Like the contents of the box handed to me by my sister, this story is a jumble of pieces of the past: a past as distant as the summer of 1981, when my love for the Bee Gees became a full-tilt obsession and as recent as May 27, 2014, when I attended Barry Gibb’s “Mythology” Tour at the United Center in Chicago.   

A Million Little Salt Crystals

ROME and remorse.

I love my daughter Mabel more than I’d thought I could ever love another person.  For her, I’ve incurred cavities of the teeth and mind by way of multiple sugar shock episodes of “My Little Pony.”  I glory in the light in her eyes when we play “school”, despite being cast repeatedly as an illiterate little dullard named Denise Bernice.  Mabel is the ambassador of my fondest hopes; she carries my heart in her little purple leopard-skin purse. She is everything to me. Yet I took her to the (shudder) Olive Garden.   That’s right: the (shudder) Olive Garden.  Like the monster parent of urban legend fame who forced his child to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in one sitting, I did a horrible, valuable thing, and I did it out of love.   It’s quite possible she will resent me for it for the rest of our lives, but I have no regrets.