2011
Forgot to Tell Y’all (Update)
Oh yeah guys, forgot to tell you. My fiancé and I broke up. He was, as I hope has been conveyed in the blog, a great, bright, innovative guy and a wonderful friend, and I wish him all the best, not that he needs any luck.
But. It was the right thing. In the almost-year since breaking the engagement I have been significantly less crazy and more, you know, me. The downside is that I haven’t had much to write about here.
Surveying the archives after some distance (the blog is like, almost four years old!) I was a little harsh on poor ol’ mom, levying judgment on her cray-cray town as though it came from some sort of objective place. I should be more diplomatic. I’m sure in some societies, like the ones where you only wipe your ass with a certain hand (for real), that things like relegating one of two household bathrooms entirely for show could also be a completely cultural norm. And to be fair, clearly anyone who airs her dirty laundry to Joe Interwebs as I do is at least slightly crazy. I’ve also developed a fear of going to the bathroom since the breakup, for fear that I will wake up mid-stream, or worse. Because now that matters.
Point is: Justified or not, my crazy is not my mom’s anymore. And the following is funny, so I’ll share. In the interim, in case the other crazy comes back.
Last week I was in my parents’ kitchen, eating oatmeal amid the permanent morning ambiance: Dad in his loosie whities and black socks, filling a flowered coffee mug with mounds of instant coffee and Sweet’N Low. The Jumbotron preacher droning on from mom’s portable radio, blessing her with access, in the 21st Century, to the non-denominational word of Christ in the kitchen, shower or den, between Real Housewives of XYZ commercials. Mom asking intermittent questions I couldn’t possibly answer (once: “Did you accidentally throw away the salad tongs without knowing?”) while I readied for work mode in Facebook.
Suddenly there was a suspended break amid the banter, like Wile E. Coyote sobering up over a chasm. PreacherMan demanded our attention, having increased his pitch and tempo for some undoubtedly pending revelation. And the payoff, what he says is—you can hear him walking around the stage in his three-piece Preachersuit, ready to bring it home—”You know what? The next time your friends wanna go shopping, you tell them (arm doubtless hurtled away from Jumbotron and toward crowd), ‘I have a better idea. Why don’t we go to the park and read our Bibles instead?’”
At which point dad and I lost our shit, which sent mom stomping angrily to another room, tin box preacherman in tow.
But she got me back later that day. My precious wild Alaskan canned salmon, part of the Perricone diet I’ve been following half-assedly in the way I conduct the rest of my life, was too many ounces to eat in one sitting, especially with the bones they leave in the big-ass-can version. So I left half of it, covered, in the fridge. Except that apparently my foil’s drapey dimensions didn’t meet Lonia’s standards for vacuum-sealing, and the “whole fridge smelled like fish.” It didn’t. But damn if she didn’t wrap that shit six times to hell, in aluminum and then plastic foil, as though Jesus’ libido was inside and fighting to get out. Of course, we know Jesus’ libido doesn’t exist. Like the stench.
