Chocolate City

A prophetic old man at a bus stop in D.C. once said to me, “Things aren’t always what they appear.” Well, he wasn’t so much saying it particularly to me, as he was everyone in earshot. And by “earshot”, I mean pretty much anyone within ten city blocks could hear him shouting it at the top of his lungs like Paul Revere in the late seventeen hundreds. Except he wasn’t on horseback, and there were no British coming. Only police.

Those six simple words stopped me dead in my tracks. And not just because afterwards he pulled out his penis and pissed actual urine on the actual pavement in the very spot I was getting ready to walk, but mainly because I was a little scared that he might have a bomb underneath the heavy down parka he donned, complete with blood and feces-stained thermal underpants and combat boots in the middle of one of the hottest days of July.

Metropolitan Police Department officers tackled the man to the ground and his skull met the pavement with a, resounding, made-for-television, crack but he laughed jubilantly like a child being playfully tossed onto a newly raked bed of leaves. Crimson red blood oozed from the man’s head like an oil spill as the cops wrestled him out of his filthy parka. He continued to laugh as if he were being tickled to death.

Half-eaten boxes of chocolate-covered cherries he’d stolen from a flower shop just moments before, fell from the overcoat, scattered across the sidewalk and burst open. Some of the candies were smashed by police in their efforts, and some rolled down into a nearby storm drain. The man continued to laugh, grasping wildly at the candies within reach and shoveling them into his mouth along with gravel and dirt until his flailing arms were again, seized by police, pinned behind his back and cuffed.

A mess of chocolate and cherries bubbled from his toothless grin and drizzled down his bare chest onto the front waistband of his thermal underpants which were drenched in sweat, or piss, or both, but neither blood nor feces. As it turns out, he didn’t have a bomb, but rather a passion for sweets that would land him in jail and shield him from the demoralizing pain and hunger of homelessness at least until autumn brought cooler weather, better scenery, and new ploys for shelter. A shower, a full course meal and a cool, dry bed would await him at his destination and he’d not stop laughing at the irony until he arrived.
Things aren’t always what they appear.

What Dreams Become

Is it just me or does it seem that the older we get, the more we tend to tailor our dreams and aspirations to the cowardly, downsized, dimensions of what we perceive to be our actual abilities and limitations? For instance, if when I was six years old, some one would have asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd have said, "I want to be a X-man like Gambit!" I'd have professed it with so much conviction and ignorant tenacity that I just might have convinced even a slightly-sane adult that I might one day, actually posses the ability to impregnate inanimate objects with ungodly amounts of kinetic energy and then hurl them with unmarked precision at anything that I very damn well wanted to blow up.

And I practiced. I practiced my "bo staff" until my mother needed it to sweep the kitchen again. I practiced flaming card tricks until I set the bathroom rug on fire and set off the smoke detector; twice. I practicing jumping off of high furniture and landing in dramatic, looming crouches to make the stunts appear effortless. I practiced being an X-man for three long years. And from the ages of six to nine, I set no ace of spades ablaze with my bare hands. The purple and blue bruises about my brothers' noggins served as a testimony to bo staff skills or lack thereof. My feeble attempts at replicating Gambit's sultry, Cajun accent got me a lot of blank stares and landed me a couple speech therapy sessions with a man who possesed the very accent I was trying to mimic! And my mother, my poor, saint of a mother, would not, for the life of me, buy the damn costume! Not for Halloween or any other occasion. My abilities, my gender, my genetic make-up did no match that of person I aspired to become so, at nine years old, I learned what it meant to "settle". And I did.



I settled on becoming a teen-age mutant ninja turtle! No special powers required, just a half shell, a weapon and a swath of colored fabric with eye holes removed. I abandoned my love of bo staff fighting (because no one wants to be Donatello!) and took up the nunchucks! I became skilled at kickin' ass, takin' names, and eatin' pizza! I even tried my hand at skateboarding and have the scars to prove it. "Cowabunga" found its way into most of my elementary school work and not just in my writing lessons. For example; two plus two equals FOUR COWABUNGA!!!



Months later (I won't admit how many) I'd settle for being a Power Ranger (the green one, Tommy). Its clear that I never quite grasped the whole gender aspect, but least they were human. I learned to keep my goals of becoming a super hero between myself and my peers, because grown-ups had the uncanny ability of reminding children that they could be absolutely anything in this life they wanted to be as long as it came with good benefits and could support a family of of at least 2.7 children and a Labrador retriever.

By my preteens I learned that "physician" served as a great diversion when asked of my future occupational plans and I used it all the way up until college and somewhere along the lines convinced myself as well. That is, until, I came face-to-face with calculus and the realization that the function of "x" in regards to the derivative of any cubic polynomial does not and will not ever equal "COWABUNGA!"


My father stewed himself in worries when I changed my major to anthropology. I think sometimes he awakened in cold sweats after nightmares about being chased through the rain forests of Papua New Guinea by a spear wielding Margaret Mead and angry Huli wigmen with poison darts. He'd often call me at odd hours of the night asking me what I expected to do with a degree in anthropology as if I was going to be attempting a career in alchemy or street mime. My mother, though much more supportive and hopeful, began heaving all of her monthly income into her retirement plan. "Never can be too prepared for a rainy day", she'd say, nervously. I've stopped telling my grandfather of my intentions of becoming a writer and a filmmaker out of fear that his pacemaker might not save him this time around. I can't even use the term "artist" in a sentence around my grandmother without her tactfully incorporating "poverty", "starving" and "cardboard boxes" into something that sounds too much like casual conversation to be a real lecture.


Currently the most outlandish of my dreams involves me playing lead guitar and vocals in my raging, feminist, cover band. It'd be named something spectacular like "The Vegan Cupcakes" or perhaps "Vagina Wig". We'd cover Tracy Chapman to Dave Matthews Band to Korn and tour the globe performing at gay celebrity weddings and sociopolitical banquets about animal rights or the legalization of marijuana. Who knows? Maybe we'll win a Grammy or two and be featured on E True Hollywood Story or VH1's Driven, at best. And the point is, I know this ideal is ridiculous! Why, you ask? Because I've been playing guitar for upwards of three years and couldn't convince a deaf man that I've ever held one! As far as singing is concerned, I'm not the one you want to give a microphone to. I don't personally know enough musically talented feminists to have a ping pong match with, let alone start a band! But my point is; a girl can dream! Can't she?


Who said our dreams had to be trimmed to fit our current abilities as if talents can't be acquired, connections can't be made, or bridges built? There will always be safe roads, and secure, well-lit pathways into other people's ideas of success and fortune. But if people take the time to light their own ways and blaze their own trails, there will be many more lights left on for the, otherwise meek and meager, to take the roads less traveled.


These days I hold fast to the remnants of my youth by refusing to bury my childish fantasies under piles of mundane rubble. As adults we tend to become saturated in the stink of humdrum society and we lose our grasps on our dreams when the grit and grime of hard times and survival makes them slick with reality. Maturity is an expected and sometimes welcomed phenomenon in the lives of the vaguely regular, but it needn't come at the cost of that which makes us uniquely human; our ability to manifest dreams into reality.

Still Waiting.

Four years ago today I journaled on this day because the day before had been too traumatic for me to think of jotting down even a single a trivial thought. I'm writing again on this day because that held true for yesterday as well. I think of him all the time, but when that specific day comes my mind races with what could have been if only I'd called him or been with him, or perhaps if I'd more strongly voiced my discontent when he told me of his plans to purchase the motorcycle. Yesterday I used work as a distraction, yet played our favorite songs over and over in my car until my eyes stung with yearning. We loved Bone Thugs and one another.

Four years. Who would have thought I'd be waiting this long. Four years ago I was a different person. A person I couldn't imagine being again. I can't help but fantasize of the person I'd be today if he were still "around". I imagine "lonely" would not be in my vocabulary. It is a sad yet honest realization, but surely his constant presence would be taken for granted as losing him would never cross my mind. I'd not have this desperate desire to hear his voice say my name because I would never have known the insurmountable pain surrounding the inability to do so. As for the others in my life, each day that I see them face-to-face further solidifies a most irrational sense of invinsibility and an untouchableness that I've somehow attached to them in a pitiful attempt at shielding what is left of my heart from the idea that I might one day grieve in their absences as well.

As much as I've heard the chliches; "You never miss your water til your well runs dry," or "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone,"; as much as I've been told to live each day as if it were my last, as much as I've learned of the fragility and brevity of life, I still don't think that in a hundred years I could have loved or appreciated him enough to make his not being here any less painful.

For more information on Coma and Waiting visit http://www.waiting.com/

Simply tofu. Simply.

Today I lapped the supermarket too many times looking for tofu. I wasn't thankful for the exercise because I had just gotten off work and the blisters forming on the tips of each of my big toes were sending signals to my face to appear sour. The third associate I asked for direction probably picked up on my attitude and there were no obligatory smiles exchanged. I didn't even look thankful, let alone say thank you. I was an angry lady.

All day I'd been tip-toeing around my notoriously unpredictable mood swings like a mother afraid of waking her demon child. My rage roused from its slumber but was craftily quelled by a chocolate soy pudding cup eaten in the car on the way home without a spoon. Memories of fourth grade cafeteria food and after-school snacks swirled around my tongue as I drove across town in a vehicle reminiscent of an adulthood I was forced into by time coupled with my mother's constant insisting I get a job with good benefits. The beast within drifted off again like a half-sleeping, whimpering infant grasping and suckling an invisible breast in his dream.

At my front door I juggled my groceries and keys and chuckled at the simplicity of the situation that frazzled my nerves past rationality and the simplicity with which they were calmed again.

I love soy pudding cups and tofu just the same.

Stupidity should be painful

I've been legally employed off and on since I was 14 years old and in close to a decade of working I have never held a position behind a cash register. Judging by the wide-eyed, mouth-agape expressions that follow this revelation, I will assume it safe to say that most people with any notable work experience have. Surprisingly so, too, since it seems that most cashiers I've had the unfortunate luck of encountering have the IQ of a gallon of washer fluid. Being that up to 90 percent of all illnesses are stress related, I'm willing to bet that my avoidance from here forward of all things cashier related may be the key to my immortality.

I'm not sure if it's indifference or a fatal riff in our nation's education system that keeps our cashiers about at an intellectual parallel with licorice! While, I'm willing to bet the farm on the latter, I'd say about 20% of cashiers just don't give a crap about their jobs and about 99% percent of those are still dumber than mattress fluff.

Just the other day I was buying coffee at a local vender and noticed, when I walked in the door, that the usual, sweet-natured, twenty-something college girl had been replaced by some, unusual, ill-natured, twenty-something college girl who was leaning against the back wall examining her French manicure when I came in. I greeted her with a smile that she did not even have the decency to return. Instead she started in with, "You know what you want?" still looking at her nails!

If I didn't hate Starbucks' typically repressive capitalist regime with a passion strong enough to break every bone in her frail little body I would have turned around and taken my money to their "new, more convenient than ever, drive-thru" for a less-human interaction with a faceless voice and speaker box, but instead I returned her attitude, by pretending not to hear her and scanned over a menu I had memorized months ago. I was in a hurry, but she was going to wait!

"Ring the bell when you're ready", and the little brat, swished her little size two booty to the back room where I SAW her sit down on some milk crates!

I rang the bell a thousand times.

She pretended not to register the urgency and glided back into the front much slower than she had left. I ordered without even looking at her, "Let me get a venti, soy mocha, half-caf, with sugar free syrup, light on the foam, on the fly."

"Wait, wait whaaat?" she said with a furrowed brow that made me want to slap her. "What's on the fly?"

"To go!", I snapped back.

She made my drink, still without a flicker of a smile and then mumbled, "whipped cream?" and picked up the aerosol can expecting me to say yes.

What I started to say was, "Oh yes, please, I just spent a whopping, 50 extra cents for soy milk but by all means I could not live without a big 'ol dollop of that milky, butterfat laden chemical concentrate to seal the deal! And while you're at it, why not add a couple pads of butter to the mix, you know, fer' like, texture and stuff."

What I actually said was "no thanks" and snatched my coffee from her before her stupidity leeched in through the cup and some how contaminated my mental faculties once I consumed it.

As if she couldn't grind my gears any harder, she acted out one of my biggest pet peeves. She gave me my change in dollars, layered with a receipt, with the coins strategically balanced on top! I wanted to throw hot coffee in her face and beat her to death with the percolator. I hate when people do that, and I don't think I'm alone. Every evening I come home and empty out a purses or pockets chock full of pennies wrapped in receipts, wrapped in dollar bills! It just don't think it would take that much effort to hand me my paper money, give me 1.8 seconds to put that away (yes I timed it!) an then hand me my change separately into my bare hand! Pennies slid off onto the counter, as they usually do when placed on a smooth, uneven surface and she fumbled around to get them and place them exactly where they had fallen from; back in my hand, stacked on top of the paper money!

I just balled up my penny wrap and left.

As for that coffee shop, I'll go back, if for nothing more than to support local business, but I'll have my revenge on Little Ms. Sunshine sooner or later, and much like the mediocre mocha she made for me, it will, indeed, be served cold.

At grocery stores cashiers annoy me with their plastered on smiles (even though these are better than no smile at all) and their one-hundred-times rehearsed, "Did you find everything you were looking for?" No, I drove across town using gas money I had to dig into my children's college fund for, ignored every single isle sign you dimwits hung in here just to give up and get in line with some random cart full of groceries!!! Insensitive? Indeed. Unwarranted? Perhaps.

What I don't get is how cashiers manage to taint half the customers who come in contact with their lines, and especially at grocery stores. One man I had the unfortunate luck of being behind in a Winn Dixie line spent 20 minutes debating on whether two pounds of grouper at $4.99/lb would be a better deal than one pound of halibut at $4.99/lb. They're both $4.99 per pound you freaking space engineer! Pick which fish you like the best and lets keep it moving!!! The cashier, who I blamed for the whole debacle then proceeded to place ten pounds of canned goods into one flimsy plastic bag and stood there mouth agape and drooling apologies when the bag exploded cans all over the floor!

I abandoned a cart packed with about seventy-five dollars worth of groceries that day.

Few of us are fortunate enough to pursue our dream jobs, but what sense does it make to pursue one that occurs only in our nightmares? When you have a position in which you are forced to deal with the public (i.e., bus driver, nursing, receptionist, prostitute), you're never fully dressed without and smile and at least a modicum of common sense. If you hate your job and are simply using it as a stepping stone to get to what you really want in life, like I am, you can't expect everyday to go down as smooth as imported gin, but you can at least, make an effort not to soil everyone else's with a bitter disposition on life. I've learned that sometimes all you can do, is grin and bear it because frankly, not many of the people you come in contact with will care how your day is going. What's the worst that can happen when you try to be pleasant to others in your day-to-day routine? Heck, in the end you may come out with a couple of new friends, a business connection that will save you from your miserable existence, or, most importantly, all of your teeth.

For the birds

It's 11 minutes past 11 am on Tuesday morning and already my day has gone horribly wrong enough to warrant documenting. Call me a complainer, but perhaps this will serve as a memory refresher on those days I can't get out of bed because an excruciating, mind-numbing hangnail or potentially life-threatening sty is inflicting its wrath along the rim of my eyelid threatening blindness or death or both. Dramatic? Hardly.

Already, today has been really shitty. Literally. Just out the door and on my way to work following a less than satisfactory night of slumber, I discovered a gift, delivered by beautiful Mother Nature herself. Much to my dismay, a friendly little neighborhood sparrow decided to land a turd the size of tangerine on my front driver side window this morning. Aside from the horrendous smell (I didn't even know bird crap had a smell) it was a rather embarrassing predicament to be in. I mean this was quite the sizable piece of pooh! Seriously, it looked like some one came and juiced a constipated infant right on the side of my vehicle! It made me think of the old saying, "when pigs fly", because surely that is what must have been occurring last night while the world slept. Either that, or my alcoholic neighbor decided to welcome me into the neighborhood with a peace offering two months past due. I would have settled for the more traditional J-ello mold or fruitcake for that matter.

Me being the genius that I am decided that a discarded post card would assist in minimizing at least the visual corruption this larger-than-life mass of excrement might impose on it's potential viewers. Sure, I was late for court but couldn't possibly be expected to be seen in traffic with my face obscured by this obscene mass. However, what I expected to work more like a make-shift squeegee, only served to smear the offending blob into a peanut butter shaded tint down the middle of my window. And in my great intellectual haste I concocted the bright idea of lowering the window in order to scrape the rest of the mess off my window much like one might do in a blizzard to remove ice or snow. Needless to say that was a bad idea and now there is foul fowl dung lodged in the inner cavity of my door forever! It might have behooved me to make a disclaimer at the beginning of this entry in an as fruitless-as-it-may-be attempt to excuse my early morning inanity, but at this point I don't think that the stupidity could have been avoided because it's true what they say; "haste makes waste". Little did I know, my own haste would be in regards to actually removing the aforementioned "waste".

Had the offender been aware of this well known adage, perhaps s/he would have taken time out to find a more fitting venue in which to release the contents of his or her bowels. But alas, how could I fault the lowly beast. We have become so rushed these days we are hardly thinking clearly anymore, let alone finding time to defecate in socially acceptable regions. Now, thanks to Mr. Birdbrain, not only I was ridiculously late for a disposition this morning set to be held in front of a notoriously, quick-tempered judge, but I now had shit on my finger, shit on my window and shit lodged in the crevasse of my car door for eternity!

Later on that same morning, again in reckless hurriedness, I'd barely miss mowing over a senior citizen in a crosswalk, spill a scalding soy mocha in the crotch of my newly dry cleaned trousers, be chastised by the bailiff in court for forgetting to silence my cell phone, forget to close the fuel door after filling my tank with my life's savings, bite my tongue while choking down a questionable, convenience store-bought granola bar while sitting in traffic and render myself temporarily blind by poking myself in the eye with a brittle mascara wand. And all this; brought on by my inability to stop and smell the roses; instead I opt for bird shit. Its hardly noon now and already I could use a gin and tonic. But alas, there is work to be done. I just hope that when the time comes for me to finally stop and smell those roses, I won't be pushing up daisies instead.
If you ask me, this shit is for the birds.