Shame

In September I was so crazy about writing posts on my new blog that I thought I'd never be able to stop, in fact one person told me I had written too many posts and should cut back, but that's one of the funny things about life: Sometimes a person can stop.

There is something I must do which I don't want to do, so much that my inner voices are telling me it is imperative that I write a post, instead. I'm pretty sure I've already written a post about this dilemma but I can't remember what it was that I was supposed to have done that I didn't want to do in September, so much so that I wrote about it. That's another funny thing about life: How much you forget right away.

My inner voice just told me, "Oh, for crying out loud, there you go again, writing the same stuff, over and over and over, no one wants to know about what you really should be doing instead of writing this post and no one reads this post anyway so why do you write it?"

My inner voice is always on my case. My inner voice muttered, "Shame on you!" last Thursday afternoon when a knock-knock on the glass of my front door interrupted quality time I was spending on my bed under a comforter with a crossword puzzle and my four foster teenage kittens. "Shame on you for being in bed on a weekday afternoon!" said my inner voice as I stumbled to the door to greet a stranger who looked like a Deadhead who asked me if I was who I am and when I said I was, he handed me an envelope with a Notice to Quit Premises in 60 Days in it. "Shame on you for being process-served!" screeched my inner voice as I watched the Deadhead walk away. He turned and waved and I waved back, wishing that he had the power to undo the process he'd served me with.

The sensation of realizing I've been process-served , and it's happened four or five times in my life, is similar to the sensation of realizing I've been hit in the face with a pie, and that's happened at least once. I wonder if it's the same feeling you'd have as you realize you're being thrown out of a moving car or that you've lit an exploding cigar: Shock. It's happening but you can't yet believe it.

When I was 19, I used to accompany a friend on his rounds as a process-server in seedy neighborhoods of San Francisco. I never saw the people he served but I assumed they were all men, deadbeats, skips, low-lifes. My friend and I thought it would be fun for me to serve a few. What guy would ever suspect that I, a beautiful young woman, asked to know their name only because I wanted to hand them an envelope that was going to wreck their day and possibly a lot of the rest of their life? It was mean, dangerous and exciting work and I got hooked on it and I never once process-served a woman. That is why, several years later, the first time I was process-served I felt ashamed, as if I was a deadbeat, low-life, skip of a woman. Actually I was being ordered to testify against someone who had stalked me and made my life miserable, but I couldn't shake off the feeling of sleaze I connected with having been process-served. Almost forty years later, it still feels sleazy.

I asked Google: Are there happy reasons to be process-served? There was nothing.

So now I feel shamed that someone doesn't want me to live where I've been living for almost three years, so much so that they've gone to the trouble of having a process server deliver the news. Am I that bad? No. Do I have a history of not paying my rent? No. Am I disorderly, loud, careless, do I sleepwalk, do I frighten the neighbors, do I ever make crack cocaine in my kitchen? No.

It's funny, the things a person can feel ashamed about. I knew a girl from Kansas who was ashamed that her cat had brought fleas into her home. "It's the stigma," she said. "In Kansas they look down on you for that."

I thought I'd finished this post until I remembered I never wrote about what it is I must do that I don't want to do, which isto gather up all the papers I need to take to a lawyer to protest this notice to quit the premises in 60 days. It took more than two months of looking on a constant basis before I found this place, and it was by chance that I found it.

I've got 45 minutes in which to write this post and it's going to be tough because I've got a hangover from not having blown my nose for six hours and from staying up too late watching YouTube.

There are many things I want to cram into this one post and they are bashing themselves against my brain, all wanting to come out at once in the same way the glop in my head that's been waiting for six hours for me to wake up wants to be let out when I have my first nose-blow of the day but I'm just not ready to do it.

I woke up with a cold a few hours after I went to sleep for the night after my birthday party ended last Saturday. Since then, I've been blowing my nose. There was plenty of coughing involved but it was nothing compared to the nose-blowing that's been going on for the past 8 days.

I want to write about the dream from which I was wakened just now, one which left me in a sad, lovelorn state. Its effect has been dampened by describing my cold but I won't let that stop me. In the dream, I had two roles: Observer and and actual star, a high-school girl in a rebound relationship with a tall, dull classmate. We were at a school dance where I was surreptitiously looking for my former boyfriend, and feeling annoyance with my new b.f. who was bossy. Whenever I was looking for my former b.f., I became the observer who had never before seen the b.f. and therefore didn't know who I was looking for. I, the teenage girl, was waiting for me, the observer, to spot him, hoping I wouldn't and hoping I would, all of which made for an emotionally tangled situation. My new b.f. and I strolled around the dance and came to the food table where high school girls were starting to make a chili con carne. One of them had just put a pound of bacon into a huge electric skillet. I wanted to know if she was going to drain off the grease, or drain off most and toss the rest, or use only the cooked bacon - there were so many things to be done or not done with that bacon, and as we were talking, my new b.f. disappeared, never again to be seen in that dream. I'll cut to the chase because there are 10 minutes left in which to finish this post: My ex-b.f. walked in the entrance to the dance as I was walking out. My teenage girl had to tell me, the observer, that this was him so we could get on with the dream. He was much shorter than my rebound boyfriend and he had a crew-cut with a large circle shaved into it, not very attractive, but he'd done it since we'd broken up. We looked into each other's eyes. I said, "Wait, don't go!", although I was the one who was leaving. He said, "Okay." End of dream.

Next on the list of things demanding to be said is that this morning I am taking my kittens to their first mobile adoption at the Home at Last site which will be located at one of the most trendy spots on Fourth Street in Berkeley. I will say, "Goodbye, my precious babies," leave before I get all wierded-out, and head across town to the Oakland fire training station where I am volunteering to be made up as a disaster victim and then instructed in how to act like one. When I was still going through menopause I was already a disaster victim and needed no instruction but things have settled down a lot and I need a refresher. With all the nose-blowing I am doing,

It's All About Me

I don't want to think that writing this blog has anything to do with exhibitionism, which is sleazy and cheap, which is not how I feel once I've completed a post and clicked “publish”. I always feel good when I've finished a post.

However, the part of me that pretends it doesn’t know that feeling good and exhibitionism go hand-in-hand is the same part that pretends I can’t gain weight while eating all the milk chocolate I could possibly consume for as long as I want, whenever I want.

Exhibitionism requires a public display, although it's often a private matter. For example:

Does Meryl Streep act because she needs the money? No! She does it because it feels good to pretend to be someone else in front of millions of people she never sees or has to meet.

Did Pablo Picasso create art because he needed the money? No! He did it because it felt good to create and to know his work would be seen by millions of people he never had to see or meet.

Did Angela Thirkell write basically the same book over and over and over because she needed the money? Possibly yes, but No! She wrote because it felt good to write, and she knew that thousands and thousands of people would read what she wrote and she would never have to see or meet any of them.

Do I write my blog because I need the money? Trick question, and no! I do it because it feels good. Out of the billions of people who get on the internet each day, surely one person will see it but I may never find out and that’s okay with me but really, I do think someone will read it. Or is reading it. Or has read it. If I play my cards right, I won’t know who it is was will be and will never have to meet them/it. I haven't really come to terms with this issue; it is enough now that I figure out how to edit my posts.

Now comes the question of the exhibitionist who masturbates in public, and to whom is he directing his work? The silly, shallow, self-absorbed side of me wants to think he's doing it for me, that it's all about me! However, I've never experienced the work of a masturbating exhibitionist whom I've previously met, not even briefly, who wanted to get to know me better. They've seemed to want to keep themselves to themselves even while exhibiting themselves.

One rainy winter night I was walking on upper Grant Avenue in San Francisco's North Beach when I saw a man sitting in the street between two closely-parked cars. His back was against the front bumper of one car and his knees were against the back bumper of the other car. He’d pulled down his pants so his bare bottom was on the cold, wet asphalt and he was jerking off. I continued walking a few steps until my brain registered what I’d just seen. I turned and yelled, "That is disgusting! Why are you doing that here?" He looked up at me through the rain, still keeping his rhythm, and said, "I can't help it. I have to do it. " It made him feel good, especially since he didn't know me.

Then there was the exhibitionist-peeper in a movie theatre in Los Angeles. He had to keep paying admission to movie theaters until he found one with an empty row through which he could crawl on his hands and knees, maybe even slither, on the filthy floor in the dark in order to gain access to women who were wearing skirts and watching "That Man From Rio", sitting with their legs up, knees bent, and feet on the back of the seat in front of them. My peeper got a long look up my skirt and we know what he was doing to feel good before I was able to tear my eyes from Jean-Paul Belmondo on the screen to investigate tiny flashes of light that kept coming from the floor, and jump up from my seat, trampling the person sitting next to me as I got out of our row to run up the aisle to the lobby where I was going to scream at someone to call the police because there was a pervert in the audience but I couldn't because I was suddenly speechless, able only to wave my arms as the peeper burst through the auditorium doors and into the lobby, and ran out of the theatre and into the street.

There’s a connection between these forms of exhibitionism but it is far too late at night to try to make it. I’ll bet someone’s going to not like this post.

Galliwampus today, Gloomiferous tomorrow

Can I, who have never written a piece of fiction that anyone has ever liked, write a successful, fictional account of my sixty-fifth birthday party? Let's see:

I arrived two minutes past our agreed-upon time at the north Berkeley home of my dear friend Juliet, her husband, Donaldo and their teenage daughter Gardenia, where my birthday party was to take place. Juliet had expressed an uneasiness that I would actually be late to my own party, leaving her to greet guests she'd never before met who might show up at the time the party was to start, which was 3 o'clock in the beautiful Saturday afternoon.

In my life, I had already been late to two important parties in my honor. One was a bridal shower for a wedding that didn't take place, and one was a wedding that did take place. I was proud of my prompt arrival for this birthday party, seeing it as a sign of of maturity and acceptance of social norms involved in - I'm getting sidetracked.

Juliet and I got crackin' at unpacking the food I'd brought, and setting out plastic bottles of mineral water I bought only out of fear that people would think me just too mean if I served tap water. After all, I wasn't providing a drop of alcohol for anyone, nor had I allowed even one soft drink because I don't drink them so why should anyone else, and they can be addictive, at least the one I like is and it is diet Coke which I drink whenever I can get my hands on it but do not keep it in my home. I can't even write about sparkling water with "natural fruit flavors", nor do I approve of fruit juices that aren't fresh-squeezed or pressed. All of this is yet another of the reasons my unborn children are lucky.

A person who normally would be unlikely to arrive on time and who did get to Juliet and Donald's house before any other guest arrived, and who was bringing my birthday cake, and the plates and forks with which everyone would be eating, was my dear friend Jayne. Her arrival was followed shortly by that of my dear friend Roverta and her two guests I had never met before, Ana and Leopold. The day of my party, which is not my actual birthday, was Ana's birthday, her 89th, so Roverta had brought a large birthday cake along with halvah, dolmas and tabbouleh. Donaldo and Leopold went outside to male-bond. Ana and Jayne had female-bonded instantly and were talking intensely, leaving Juliet, Roverta and me to get in each other's way as we tried to do everything at once until the doorbell rang, heralding the arrival of my dear friends, Capsy and Nervonica who came bearing an elegant eggplant terrine.

There was a problem with the drinks table which had been set up in a hurry with a few bottles of mineral water, a few glasses, and my dish of sliced fruit and fresh herbs which, I was told, no one knew what do to with. I realized I had expected my guests to know that the fruit and/or herbs was/were to be put into a glass and mashed around the bottom to release oils and juices, although I'd forgotten to add an implement with which to do the mashing, then ice and mineral water added, and that omission is what pushed me into a state of confusion that lasted for hours.

While Juliet wrote instructions on how to use the items on the drinks table, the female-bonded Jayne and Ana were at the cake and sweets table opening the box containing the very large cake Roverta had ordered for Ana's and my birthday but they ran into trouble and caused the cake to slide off its foundation and a large fault to split open the top and ooh, boy, Roverta was mad. I suppose no one should have opened that box until the right time, not even one of the birthday girls, although had I known what Jayne and Ana were up to, I would have been right there with them. Someone did a nice job of patching up the cake and afterwards we were allowed to finger up lashings of frosting that had wobbled off the cake which led to why not have some of that cake right now since there's a gap in the top of it that fairly screams it wants to be busted completely open. After I washed my hands thoroughly, I scooped up cake with one hand and ate it, and more. Juliet wanted me to use a plate, but it was my party and I'd eat with my fists if I wanted to.

More tomorrow.

Blog, My Best Friend

I love to write to this blog. It's my best friend. It always wants me to write on it. It looks right at me while I tell it whatever I want for as long as I need and it never interrupts, criticizes, plays devil's advocate, or holds up its index finger and mouths, "Wait. I have to take this call and I won't be a sec, really, don't forget where we left off." It gently corrects my missspellings and typo's, knows how to arrange itself nicely on the page. Its total acceptance of my words has given me a newfound freedom to not care very much whether I put the comma before or after the quotation mark and if my post is perfectly edited and will therefore make sense to all its reader.

When I used to write by hand in a journal, or type my thoughts on the computer, print them out and glue the pages into a journal, I would write about darkness, my depression, little gripes, loss, the imperfections of friends and acquaintances and their never-ending ingratitude for all the things I do for them, and the general sorrow of my life. But one day I after my annual and emotionally exhausting re-reading of the journals, I weighed them and when I saw I had over ten pounds of paper woe, I began to rip up those pages because I just couldn't read that stuff one more time.

It's not easy to rip up or dispose of ten pounds of paper with highly personal information written on both sides. At the time, I was living in West Los Angeles in the triplex with the smoking neighbors. I could have put the pieces in our recycle bin but if they were blown into the street while being hauled into the recycle truck, one would not know who might pick them up and read about my messy inner life so I decided to turn my life into objets d'art by making things out of papier mache. I was able to use up only two pounds of my journal before I tired of the process of making p.m.. I wadded the wet stuff into tight balls, let them dry, and put them in the trash. I eventually used some of the remaining eight pounds of journal to make a life-size wall hanging of a bride wearing an elaborate white wedding dress made of tiny scraps of journal. I thought she was beautiful and brought her to many art shows but no one bought her. By the time I was living in Bad Move, CA, the scraps of her journal-dress were so grimy-looking that I had to put her in the trash, too.

With blog, I am unable to write for long about unhappiness before an inner hand takes over the typing and writes about the truth of my unhappiness. Blog told me that at 43, I was still too young for a first marriage, that my husband and I were brave and sincere the night we spoke our wedding vows and we were devastated when we discovered we couldn't keep them and that we had to get divorced just like everyone else. I am assuming he was devastated but was able to recover far faster than I was because he got a girlfriend right away and started making friends in West Los Angeles which had been a vast wasteland of unfriendliness for us as a couple, and he moved on with his life whereas I was baffled about why his life and not mine was so damned fabulous. I was knocked off my feet by peri-menopausal misery and depression which are the same thing as far as I'm concerned, and my mother was in the early stages of dementia, and I couldn't make a friend to save my life. Blog tells me that I had every reason to feel miserable during that time and that my Mercury was stuck in retrograde from 1994 until the spring of 2009 so that there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Blog reminds me that I kept on painting about my life during that time and therefore have souvenirs of it that I can sell.

Who else would be able to listen to all that? At what sentence or paragraph would you simply have to get up to get away from hearing so many words that seemed as if they would never end?

Blog is strong. Blog can take it, and more.

The Art of Distraction

There is something I must learn how to do and the way to do it is to sit with the thick binder that contains everything I need to know in order to learn how to do what I need to do, and study it. This is a project I've been putting off for a couple of months now and you have already guessed the gist of what I'm about to write next, haven't you, invisible reader of this post, and that is, "Today is the last day I'm going to put it off." However, I am a realist and know that unless I die today, there will be plenty more of those last days, but I'm giving it a shot anyway.

I first went through emails before knuckling down to the business of the project.

Oh, dear, what's that smell like red peppers burning? It's the smell of water and red pepper juice burning in the bottom of the steamer because I forgot I was steaming them, and time went by and liquid ran out. "Let's deal with that later," myself told me.

Back to the emails: I came across one containing a list of names that pertain to the project I've been putting off, a list that was well worth printing right then and there. The printer tray had only a few sheets of paper in it and what better time than the present to add more.

Last year I converted a simple cardboard box I got from Berkeley Bowl, one that once held 12 bottles of expensive Francis F. Coppola wine, into the model of printing paper-holding effiency you see here (look for my foster kitten Josefina in the background; she's available for adoption).

It gets plenty of use and has gotten shabby

over time so why not spruce it up as long as I'm taking care of business?

I went to the hold-everything box in which I keep scraps of cardboard for purposes such as this and realized the box could be easily organized to find things in it much faster if I put things in hanging file folders so I did just that, and once it was done I knew that tabs for the folders would complete the job. While looking for a calligraphic pen with which to write titles for the tabs, I saw clearly how to best make that printer paper-holding box work even better by gluing cardboard strips to the sides of the insides and that led me to an idea for a better container for the liquid white glue I'm always using so I got that project started, went back to cutting cardboard for the printer paper-holding box.

Things were moving smoothly so when I heard the voice whisper, "Be sure to vacuum out the printer paper-holding box before you glue the dust that's in it to the new cardboard you're adding", I had to write a note to myself about this because there were so many other things that absolutely had to be done and that I was afraid I'd forget. While scribbling it on a scrap of cardboard, it occurred to me that things were out of control. "No! No! Please not that, I can handle all of it, I always do! Please don't let me know I've forgotten the point of all this which was to let this be the last day I would not not start the project. I'll be okay if I just have a little something to eat."

Before I went to the kitchen, I vacuumed the box. Then I wanted to take pictures of it for this post because I knew I was write about distractions and wanted illustrations, but my digital camera had stopped working altogether a few days ago. I even looked at new ones at Best Buy yesterday but decided to shop around. I hate to say goodbye to my Olympus Camedia which weighs three-quarters of a pound and cost over $400 when I bought it in 2000. It's been a good friend. Could it be that all it needed was new batteries instead of the odds and ends of batteries I'm always feeding it? Yes. When I put in some batteries I've had since 2005, ones with bits of cellophane still clinging to them which means they've never been used, the Olympus came back to life!

Before anything else, I had to call my friend Julie who has a Costco card to ask if she bought her batteries there and if so, did she think she was saving money and if so, would she get some for me?

Then I took pictures.

I gathered the loose ends on the other projects, went to the kitchen, opened a can of sardines and ate them and started the rest of my lunch. While things were cooking I came back to the projects, tied up the gathered ends, went back to the kitchen and saw how beautiful lunch looked so I set up an arrangement of a beautiful abalone shell, Josefina at the sardine tin and my lunch and took this picture of it.

I Smell Smoke! and other things

Always in the back of my mind these days is when I will move again to yet another rental dwelling. My home situation has recently been changed by new people who are handling the affairs of this rental, from year-to-year to month-to-month which is seldom the best situation for a renter, but on the other hand I haven't forgotten that the last time I was evicted from a month-to-month rental, I was inspired to make an enormous change in my lifestyle because of it.

At the time I was evicted, I was living in a very nice one-bedroom apartment in a thriving coastal city I will rename Bad Move because this is not a work of fiction and god knows someone from Bad Move will read this post and sue me for something although when I left Bad Move no one was sad to see me leave, no one saw me leave, and what's very likely is that no one noticed I wasn't there anymore so the likelihood of anyone from Bad Move reading this post and recognizing its poster is not high and I shouldn't worry, but I do.

I moved into that nice apartment with high hopes for starting the-new life-after-divorce I'd been working at for the past six years. What I didn't know was that I'd been living the new life ever since I moved out of the marital home and into the first of the three miserable rental situations that were to come. When I moved into the first one, friends assured me that my unhappiness was a temporary thing. "You are starting over and soon your life will be better than ever!" and "This is just a time of transition from a bad place to a place of strength!"

One of the things that was making me so unhappy was living with the smell of cigarette smoke. That first apartment I moved into apres-divorce was one in a triplex with a neighbor to my right who smoked on her back steps so the smell wouldn't drift into her apartment, and a neighbor upstairs who didn't want her husband to know she smoked so she did it in a narrow space between our building and the one next to it. In each case the smoke went right into my apartment, whether or not my windows were open, and stayed there because there was no cross-ventilation in that place. Late at night, someone in the neighborhood smoked outdoors and the smoke went right into my apartment. During the day when neither of my neighbors was home, I'd smell cigarette smoke in my dining and living room but no one was smoking, not even outside! It was only those two rooms and it moved from floor-level to waist-high as I crawled around on my hands and knees, tracking it. It drove me nuts.

I eventually moved from that apartment to the first of two in Bad Move. The day I moved in, I smelled for the first time the stench that would rise from the living room floor each afternoon. It was caused by a pond that had been formed in the crawl space directly under my unit, fed by water, grease and tiny bits of garbage leaking from a kitchen pipe of the unit next to mine, and it was not going to be fixed.

That building was a fourplex with three renters who were heavy smokers and one who was not. The fourplex next door housed heavy smokers. I lived in a ground-floor unit with living room windows that opened to the street where ocean breezes carried in hash and cigarette smoke from smokers who conducted business directly in front of those windows. My neighbor with the leak in his kitchen pipe smoked in his bathroom which adjoined mine and which had a peephole drilled through our adjoining medicine cabinets. Shortly after I moved in, that neighbor began working at home in a small room that adjoined my small workroom and he smoked and smoked while he worked and I may as well have been smoking in mine if I tried to work at the same time he did. Under other windows in my living room was the garbage area for my building and the one next door. My neighbors were busy, preoccupied people who were unconcerned with garbage removal and you can forget recycling, so it was left to me to make sure the bins were put on the street for pick-up by the peculiar garbage service of Bad Move or else I would smell the lives of about 15 people if I opened those windows.

There's one more apartment to go before I finish this topic. Just you wait.

Obligations: At the reception at the Casquelourd Malonga Center for the Arts

It is a very small and good exhibit. You can see my piece in the photograph above. I especially like the work of a photographer who has three pieces in the show, one of which made me want to wave away the cigarette smoke and caress the face of its smoker. It's just lovely.

"I'm a People Person" - until October 23, 2009

Casquelourd Malonga Center for the Arts Annex

1428 Alice Street, Downtown Oakland

510 238 2786 for hours

Writing

In keeping with my suggestions for what to do at this time of the year when summer is ending and fall is beginning, I am writing my blog at 12:11 AM when I am very sleepy and really want to get some of that time-wasting sleep I wrote about in one of those first posts.

"Who are you writing to?" is a question I have asked myself since I typed the period after the last word on my first post and then clicked on "Publish Post" and am still unable to answer. According to good writing, I should follow this sentence with another, clarifying sentence, but nothing comes to mind so I'll move on to

I kept journals for thirty years and I never wrote anything funny. Rereading those journals was always a drag because they consisted of accounts of years of nonstop suffering from heartache, premenstrual syndrome, malice, betrayals, recurring dreams, marriage, divorce, the burglary and two subsequent break-in attempts in the same month by three different people of a nasty little apartment I had just moved into in Long Beach, menopausal symptoms, insomnia, parental dementia, and an awful lot of other stuff.

However, when I wrote letters about these things, and then time went by and the letters became emails, my friends would tell me how they laughed and laughed at my "adventures."

"You should write a book," they would tell me. But I never wanted to write a book. I just wanted to write letters or emails.

I did try to write, and by that I mean fiction. I worked long and hard in short story classes and I always liked what I wrote but no one else did. I couldn't understand where I was going wrong because I wrote fiction the way I wrote letters and everyone liked them. It took me fifteen years to realize that fiction isn't supposed to be written that way and that I'm incapable of writing fiction that doesn't annoy readers.

This blog feels as good to write as a letter or an email. I like the way my words look in this Georgia typeface, I like the way they look on the published page. I don't know who reads what I write and I don't know who doesn't. I don't know how to set up things so I can get responses from readers and that's how I like it. There's a lot to like about writing this blog and I still don't know who I'm writing to.

Obligations in the name of Art, Food Samples and Kittens

Last night I had to attend the reception for an art show in which I have a piece. I'm never comfortable at receptions, whether or not I'm showing, because of the obligations there are to

1. Stand
2. Compliment an artist whether or not I like the work
3. Graciously accept a compliment from someone I suspect could care less about my artwork but feels obligated to compliment it
4. Compliment an artist whose work I really, really like but am not going to buy
5. Graciously accept a compliment from someone who I know really, really likes my work but I know is not going to buy any of it
6. Not eat anything for fear of having food stuck between my teeth and having it show when I smile during obligations 2-5 above
7. Wear lipstick and risk the likelihood it will transfer to my teeth and will show when I smile during obligations 2-6 above

Obligations 2 and 4 can be applied to all of my experiences with food-tasting demos at supermarkets, street fairs, and farmers markets but not at Costco. I could never be a food demo representative because of constantly having to give in to obligations 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7.

Every so often I have to bring my foster kittens to mobile adoptions and it's a dreadful experience. I don't really care if people don't like or want to buy my artwork but I do care if people don't want to adopt my foster kittens. When someone approaches the cage my kittens are in, I don't care if shreds of beef are hanging from between my teeth, I will tell them everything they could want to know and more about my babies, whereas if I see someone approach a piece of my artwork at a show, I'll pretend I don't see what's going on and will head for the bathroom. Obligations 1, 3 and 5 are the bugaboos of mobile adoptions for me when I'm showing my fosters.

At the top of the post is Dobro, who came to me when he was ten days old. His eyes had just opened and his ear flaps were only beginning to lift. He was a miserable wretch of a baby kitten, mainly because he had no siblings and only me for his mother. He suffered terribly from teething and had perpetual runs. The only time he didn't cry was when he was nursing from a bottle or sleeping. About two weeks later I brought home six orphan kittens just his age and overnight he turned into a happy little guy. There is more, so much more, to say about that and I will, you can bet that.

Continuation: Equine Pregnancy and a visit to the clinic

I was seen by Dr. Doctor shortly after noon. I'd been trying to persuade the doctor to give me a prescription for an extra month's supply of Prettypills to have on hand in the event of a disaster ever since I completed a 20-hour disaster-preparedness training course sponsored by the City of Oakland. I have even volunteered to be a victim for the grand finale of the next course which is when a mini-disaster is created and most of the people who took the course realize how utterly inept they are. Volunteer victims are made up by a volunteer professional make-up artist to have a skull fracture, a missing eye, a broken clavicle, or big spillage of blood and I can't wait.

Dr. Doctor is very conservative, drug-wise, and has been a real heel-dragger regarding those extra Prettypills which, by the way, are not addictive and have no street resale value, but today the doctor surprised me by agreeing to write a prescription for 60 pills instead of the usual 30.

I asked about getting another form of estrogen, telling the doctor I never even opened the package I got from the clinic last month once I realized it was Premarin, Dr. Doctor wanted to know what was wrong with Premarin. I explained a little about the continually-pregnant mares and other things that caused me years ago to vow I would never use it. It was news to the doctor. Never heard of a controversy about Premarin. The doctor wrote me another prescription for estrogen but unfortunately the clinic pharmacy doesn't have anything except Premarin and I'll have to go elsewhere to fill that prescription that has "no estrogen made from urine of pregnant mare" written on it.

By the time we said goodbye, it was 12:20, too late to bring the prescription to the pharmacy which closes for lunch at 12:00 but stops taking prescriptions between 11:15 and 11:30 and you never know which time it's going to be, until it reopens at 1 PM. Over a tasty lunch at McDonald's I did the Prettypills math and calculated that I wasn't given an extra month's supply at all because my next appointment to come for another prescription would be in 8 weeks, at which point almost all the Prettypills will be gone. Sometimes I wonder if Dr. Doctor is on my side.

I drove back to the clinic parking lot, took a nap in my hot little car, woke up and went to the pharmacy. Along the way, I saw folks in the hall who'd been waiting there in the morning and were still waiting in the afternoon. We waved at each other because the clinic is a friendly place . They were drop-in patients. They would all be seen before the clinic closed for the day. I know this because the first time I went to the clinic, I had an 11 o'clock appointment but was mistaken for a drop-in and wasn't seen until after 6 PM.

4 1/2 hours to get 60 free Prettypills and a prescription for anything except Premarin isn't that bad, I suppose.

Equine Pregnancy and a Visit to a Clinic

I wrote the following as an email to my pal Cindy in Los Angeles who has been kept in the loop with my participation in the world of government assistance and you haven't, whoever you are. It's an always-interesting, enlightening world and I truly appreciate every good thing I've gotten from it, especially since the City of Oakland deemed me indigent and made me a member of the West Oakland Health Clinic which is where I went one day for an appointment with one of the doctors who will be named Dr. Doctor.

The appointment was for a prescription for a medication I will call Prettypills and I was going to have it filled at the clinic pharmacy. I was also going to ask Dr. Doctor if I could be prescribed an estrogen cream that wasn't Premarin.

I arrived at the clinic at 9:55 for my 10 AM appointment. There was only one woman ahead of me in the check-in line. At the check-in window a woman was giving what sounded like her entire medical history to the check-in person. At 10:15 I was still waiting but I knew not to get ruffled because there was plenty more waiting to come. I remembered what the receptionist told me last time I was there and had had an astonishing wait, which was, "People don't think we workin' but if we movin', we workin'." The staff doesn't get stressed out about anything & when I'm at the clinic, I try to be like them.

By 10:25 I was registered and on my way to the next line to hand in my medical file and clinic card. While I was in that line I counted 48 people waiting to be seen by one of the clinic's two doctors who handle gen med. There may be more than those two but I've only seen two people in that department who looked like doctors (stethoscope, u know) and one of them is Dr. Doctor.

In line with me and so many, many others was a white guy with a Band Aid on his face. He was standing next to a black guy who was holding the seat of a bicycle and the pole thingy that's attached to it. The white guy complimented the b. guy on his cleverness, said he'd seen people remove all sorts of things from their bikes in order for them to not be stolen, but had never seen the seat removed. The black guy muttered, "Fuckers will steal everything they can," and didn't engage in further conversation with the w. guy. If this exchange had taken place between a white and a black woman, they would have immediately become forever-friends and exchanged life stories and then forgotten each other when one of them was the first to reach the window where you hand in your medical file and card.

To be continued............

There are so many things to write about that I am tempted to write about all of them at once and why not?

I'm writing in a stupor because I got around 3 hours worth of sleep last night, the way I'm supposed to now that fall is on the way, and I consumed an abnormal amount of dry-roasted peanuts in honey, and a salad of two huge ears of corn's worth of niblets with chopped tomatoes and lime juice for a late dinner around midnight. I'm a good fall girl. This is an inside joke. You would have to have read my first post to be in on it. There may be only one of us reading my blog and laughing my head off, but at least I've made one person a lighter-spirited person for being in on an inside joke.

A short time ago I was about to add a large bag of pastries from one of the bay area's finest bakeries to my compost heap when I remembered I had to start a laundry so I left the bakery bag on my kitchen counter and went to gather things to be washed.

Why put sweet things from a fine bakery into a compost heap? Because I could in a snap eat that entire bag of pastries and not feel a thing and I'm already well past being big enough for a lady my size. Where the bag of pastries came from is a post in itself so I won't go into it now.

My landlady's house is up a path from my little rental house in the woods. She lets me use her laundry room once a week and that's where I went to take my things. Mary, her part-time caretaker, was there but my landlady wasn't because she was, Mary told me, having her first dose of chemotherapy right about that time. My landlady, who is 81, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer three weeks ago and opted right away for chemo rather than do without. I found out from Mary that my landlady never eats and is malnourished so she may suffer more from the chemo than if she had eaten. She pretends to eat, Mary says, or takes one bite of something she claims she really likes and leaves it, and fills her used liquid-meal-in-a-bottle containers with water so it would appear that her refrigerator is well-stocked and no one nags her about not eating.

I was appalled to hear this because when my landlady has visited with me here, she's eaten like one of my foster kittens which is to say she ate like she was hungry and she sure liked her feed.

Well, forget the compost and my terrible addiction to eating any sweet that's been left unattended in my rental house! I will make a sweet little pudding for my landlady and bring it to her tomorrow because her anti-nausea pill will still be in effect.

Speaking of rental house, my landlady's family has just put me on a month-to-month lease in the event they need this place "for emergencies" and we renters know what that means.

I'm not painting the obsessive way I used to, and probably will never do so again. It's not about hating my work or hating myself or fear of expression or not enough time. The desire is just not there anymore. I do other things now, such as rip paper and paste it to something else and it is NOT collage, I don't know why I so dislike it being called collage, especially when no one has seen it, but I do. A person can't help these things, sometimes.

I just realized (I'm always just realizing something) that as I once stayed up way too late painting, and I painted when I should have been doing something else that really needed my attention, and I painted even though I was exhausted because I wanted to paint far more than I wanted to sleep, I now do the same thing with writing. Writing pours out of me the way paintings once did. On this, my second day of writing a blog, I hated to stop but I absolutely had to. Then I went straight to read new emails, bypassing what I absolutely had to do, and came to an email that caused me to copy my response to it and turn it into a second blog for day 2.

This is about art supplies: Most of the time it's not necessary to buy everything that's on the supplies list provided by your instructor (but u already know this). When at The Art Store I hear someone asking a salesperson if this or that is in stock, and they're holding a sheet of paper with a lot of things listed on it, I know they're first-year students from CCA across the sreet and scared spitless they'll buy something wrong. I listen to them read from their list and I think to myself, "Dont need that, don't need that, I never used that, not necessary," and what I think is: Look on CRAIGSLIST!

How many The Painting Experience students have dumped their no-longer available paints when, after a period of time passed, they figured they'd never use them again? How many TPE students would give their frickin' eye teeth to get those paints back because that kind of high-quality paint is no longer available?

Of course, if they'd stopped painting, they stopped painting and having the paints back wouldn't change a thing.

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It's 11:20 on the dot on beautiful Wednesday morning. I have exactly 10 minutes to write everything I want to tell you, my dear, invisible and perhaps imaginary readers, before I get to the point.

Friends frequently ask, "Is there a point to what you're telling me?" or "Is there going to be an end to this story?" My response is usually a knee-jerk reaction to shut up entirely and not say another word for as long as I possibly can, although I don't know why I bother because this gracious action on my part is never acknowledged which leads me to believe my listener hasn't noticed that I stopped talking.

And I wasn't telling a story. I was relaying information. So there!

I get to the point by building it upon a foundation of detail-slabs, just as slaves in Egypt built pyramids upon a foundation of stone slabs and wouldn't some of us be sorry if someone had yelled at those slaves, "Would you puh-lease just get to the point?!" and the slaves stopped working altogether with an end result of: No pyramids in Egypt?

However, if I respond with, "Why do you ask?", knowing in advance that I won't like what I'm about to hear, the friend is taken by surprise. There's always a pause before there's an answer and it generally goes like, "Well, you were just going on and on and on... ." Now we're both embarrassed and a little bit ruffled, and we talk about something else.

Not getting to the point and enduring someone not getting to it are two undeniable facts of life. I admire a person who sets a limit to the amount of foundation-laying they will tolerate, and knows there will be some amount of hell to pay when they blow their whistle but the person does it anyway.

It took a lot longer than 10 minutes to write this.

Fall's coming!

I'm sitting with my computer-savvy friend Beth next to me on the speaker phone. We've just created this, the start of my first blog. It's a big deal for me. I feel as if I've crossed a bridge to a new world, that something about me has changed, as if I might look different, the way I thought I would look different after I lost my virginity but I probably don't. That night, after it happened, my boyfriend and I were still in his bed when his roommate came home because my boyfriend forgot to put the special yellow bulb in the porch light. I scrambled out of bed and right into the bathroom to put on all the clothes I'd taken off only minutes before. I made a point of not looking at myself in the mirror until I was dressed because I was looking forward to seeing how I looked as a Real Woman, finally, in that really nice red wool suit I'd borrowed without asking from my mother's closet after she'd told me I could absolutely not wear it. I put on my white cotton underpants, my white cotton Maidenform bra with the cups like cones, my full slip, my girdle, my stockings, the two pieces of the suit, and my black patent leather heels and then I was ready to see myself as this new person who looked exactly the same. I had expected my face to change so that my cheekbones would protrude or I'd have black circles under my eyes. It was a great disappointment.

I like to think that as summer turns to fall, we should stay up as long as possible and test our body's ability to consume forbidden foods to the max. It's the time to begin writing intense emails and blogs only after 11 PM, and to worry about the emotional effects of holding back our deepest feelings and of letting them out. It's a time to flip a coin about every major decision, a time to make an appointment for anything we've ever dreamed of making an appointment for, and to cancel it within the 24 hours we're allowed to do so without punishment. It's a time to get on any bus and ride it to the end of the line and then call a good friend to ask to come pick u up because u are lost. It is the time to run out of gasoline on any of the 4 bay area bridges at any rush hour.

As shadows deepen on the walls of my rental house, I realize how long I've been working on this blog and how already I've forgotten the name of it. For a moment I was wondering what to do about it, and if I should call Beth to ask her if she remembered what it was, but then I looked at the top of this page and saw, "So what's wrong with that" and my first thought was, "Why did I give it that name?" but I'd probably think that no matter what the name, and then there was relief.

There will be more, and soon.