Roadblock: New and Improved

Every morning we leave before it gets light. Every morning there are at least two (usually three) furry mounds waiting outside the door waiting for us to come out. I say outside the door- I think I mean on top of it. Her Majesty the cat is spooky- she's been stepped on too often- and usually gets out of the way when you wave a foot over her head. But the not-really-kittens-anymore still completely trust that of course we won't step on them. So they don't move. The only reason they aren't very flat is that they glow in the dark.

I think I should write about this to the Texas road department, if there is one. Their roadblocks don't keep moving to cut you off. They don't meow or purr or stare up at you with huge eyes either. They're obviously obsolete.

Mourning Darkness

I admire sad stories. Stories that make you cry. Stories that seem absolutely hopeless and yet have an intrinsic, I'll-give-up-on-it/you/me-when-I'm-dead-and-cold-and-buried brand of optimism. Stories that recount epic battles, the labyrinthine complications of politics, the class of foreign cultures trying to unite against a common evil. Stories that make you feel noble and strong and silent just by reading them.

Then I go and try to write one of these. And then I cry, because....

Well, the best example would be Eddie the Combat Worm.

Eddie the Combat Worm was (is?) a comic I wrote/drew a year ago on a personal challenge. Eddie began as a dark, drinking, glowering character, someone who was angry over the end of the war. He had a pet silverfish named Murphy, who ate newspapers. I think Eddie was a seargent in the war who led new recruits across the front lines and watched inept officers get them all killed, but I never knew, because a 24 hour deadline on this story and my inability to take dark seriously hijacked the story. Eddie turned out to be speed-happy, trigger-happy, war-happy, cynical, sarcastic, and daring-only-in-that-he-did-things-no-sane-person-would-ever-dream-of. I also had a French centipede (munitions expert and illegal immigrant), a female worm (Lola Spie, because she was a government agent and I'm very imaginative when I'm under deadline), a hayseed dragonfly veteran (pilot) and the infilitration and destruction of a beehive. The first five, six pages were classic twenties detective novel imitation. The rest was a farce. A badly drawn farce.

That, admittedly, I enjoyed very much. But I still admire darkness. I just can't write it.

It's very sad.

Forget the Plumbing

I came out of mutual last night very upset. Quivering, about-to-scream-or-cry-or-both upset. I won't go into why.

My dad knows me well. I'm not sure how, but he could tell how mad/upset I was, and then he talked me out of it. In twenty minutes he turned me from a sulking, raging mess to something vaguely human who could sing with the radio.

Forget plumbing. I need to marry someone who can help me when I can't help myself. Someone who can talk me out of a bad mood. Someone who knows when to agree with me and when to keep me off my sorry butt.

I'm not entirely sure there are two people in the world like that. But then, it was a surprise that there was one, so maybe there is.

It's Contagious

All growing up I observed the symptoms of move-it-itus in my mother. (More commonly known as if-I-don't-rearrange-all-the-furniture-right-now-I-will-go-insane-but-not-before-you-do-so-start-hauling-buster. It's a very common maternal disease.)

This disease shows most clearly (for my mother) in the living room. At one time it was so bad that her visiting teacher (who visited monthly) said that the furniture was different every time she came. I'm not sure even now if she was appalled or amazed or admiring.

For years I prided myself on escaping this one female fault. I was still perfectly sane and willing to let the furniture stay in one place for years on end. If I wanted change, I sat upside down. More fun than moving furniture and much less work.

I can't feel that way anymore. I've detected three separate occurrences of move-it-itus in the past week. First I switched the crock-pot (used twice a week) with the elephant of a juicer (used never) so that the crock-pot was in the actual cooking area. Then I cleaned out a sort of shelf/drawer/bin area and reorganized things so that I could move the cutting boards from the other end of the kitchen to be in the area I actually use them. Then, this morning, I moved the toaster oven a full four feet (to the other side of the sink). Never mind that each of these moves makes perfect sense from the point of view of the person who cooks all the meals and would like it to take less time, thank you very much.

I have move-it-itus. My only comfort (and revenge) is that if I keep going at this rate I'll be the only person who knows where anything is and when I leave home the Teacher won't be able to find anything. Ever. And it will serve her right for teaching me (oops, I mean giving me) this disease.

My husband will think I'm insane. So will my children.

On the other hand, they would have thought that anyway.

Story

I am a storyteller. I can't say anything without telling a story. When I see something strange, it looks like a story. When I hear a new name, I wonder what a character named that would be like. When I find out about something that makes my insides seethe and boil and yearn to lash out and spread the burning, I wonder how to tell the story that will light the wildfire.

I have always been a storyteller. Many well-intentioned people have tried to change that, but since they aren't God and they don't know anything about rewriting DNA, they haven't had much success. One of their last ditch attempts to recall me to normality, to force me into a shape they can cope with, is a quasi-question: "But what is story good for?"

I say quasi-question because they believe they know the answer: Nothing. And that's what I usually say, because to me this is a question like "What's the good of oxygen?" or "Why do we bother with this whole living thing anyway?" The only response I've ever had is a long, blank stare. I'm good at stares.

I have an answer now. It's a story.

I'm taking Drawing. We work with 18" by 24" drawing pads, which is small in the world of Art but huge when you only have forty minutes of class time left. One of the things about drawing is that you have to be close to the paper to work, but you can't actually see what you're drawing without backing up at least six feet. (Someday someone will make a bird's eye view of an art class and it will look like a firework of people running back and forth.) You can draw or you can see what you're drawing, but you can't do both. It's like working blind.

When you're alive, it's like you're drawing. Every action (line) or inaction (negative space) makes a mark on your paper. Your paper might be huge or it might be small, but either way, you can't really see what you're drawing. You only see each individual mark. This is like looking back on the last week and to you it looks like milk in the living room carpet and too much chocolate, and to someone else, standing six feet away, it looks like mentoring a desperate teenager looking for more than he has and not yelling at your kids for being persistently, well, children.

This is what story is good for. Story steps back. Story says, yes, this looks like hodge-podge normality from where you stand, but over here it's beautiful. Or hideous. Or confusing. Or boring. Story can't lie. It can try, but you wouldn't believe how hard it is to tell a lie with story. Story is, by it's nature, truth.

True 'stories' include Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stories look at something accepted and/or ignored, and tell you what it looks like from six feet away. And once you know what it looks like six feet away, you still remember that even when you're up close. It changes everything. That's how one novel, a harmless, helpless story, swept a nation and planted the spark to light the wildfire. That's why slavery is no longer an acceptable resident in the United States.

This is what story is for. And this is what I would tell the people who try to reshape me, except the people who try to change me aren't the people who listen to me anyway, so I won't.

But at least my stare won't be blank anymore.

The Ages of Growing Up

When I was ten, I first started staying home. Sometimes I would be home alone for four whole hours. It was very exciting.

When I was eleven, I spent a week away from home with no parents, relative, or friends in the company of lots of strange people. (This is otherwise known as 'girl's camp'.) This was also exciting, but not nearly as much fun. I felt much older and grayer at the end of it, and proud of my survival- the crying hardly counts.

When I was thirteen (a week away from fourteen; my birthday has put me on the shy side of a lot of these age limits) I went to my first dance, which was also exciting but almost no fun at all.

And now, at seventeen, I have reached the next coming-of-age marker.

I went on a walk. A two mile walk. Which took an hour. By myself.

Can't you just feel the antiquity radiating out from me?

On my scary and dangerous walk I met: one man, two cars, four excited dogs, and one pony who might've come to meet me except it had expended a lot of effort in finding the absolute sunniest spot in its yard and wasn't going to budge.

The adrenaline is still rushing through me.

I Don't Even Get a Pension

Grilling used to be a manly job. Something that only the Principal did, and we only ever had hamburgers/steaks/hotdogs/chicken breast/pork chops when he was home to do battle with the grill.

But I'm older and taller and older now, and am generally considered to be fire-capable, so it's my job to handle the grill now.

This is not a good thing.

We have a gas grill- that is, there's a metal canister underneath and when you turn the knobs to Light I can smell gasoline- not a briquette grill. This should make cooking food fairly simple. It's not. Because our gas grill is also an old grill. The things inside that shouldn't come apart are rusted/burned through and mostly held together by old charred meat and grease. It would be disgusting if you could tell anymore what's metal and what's not.

Lighting it is the most exciting part. First, as I already said, you turn the knobs to Light. Then, standing well back, you carefully light one match. The grill is now hissing like an enraged rattler and will remove your fingers from your hands if you let it. Still standing well back, line the match up with the gaps in the grill. Then carefully throw or drop it. If you throw it, you risk setting the yard on fire or putting the match out, neither of which is the result you're after. If you drop it, be prepared to pull your hand back very quickly. Remember the rattler metaphor.

When the lighted match reaches the interior of the grill, fire will spurt out of the sides, bottom, and top of the grill. It's exciting, in a it's-a-good-thing-the-fire-warden-doesn't-know-about-this way. After the fire has sullenly retreated, you throw the meat onto the hot spots (you can have two pieces of meat on that grill for the same amount of time and if you don't know where to put them one of them will be black and one of them will barely be thawed) and slam the lid down. Every time you turn the meat with the spatula (iron, with a handle that isn't long enough) you will risk your meal and your knuckles. When you remove the meat and turn the gas off, the fire will live on, devouring the grease I mentioned before. Close the lid. It'll go out eventually. Probably.

And for this, I don't get a medal. I don't even get a pension. Sometimes I don't even get leftovers.