Nature's first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf's a flower, / But only so an hour. / Then leaf subsides to leaf, / So Eden sank to grief. / So dawn goes down to day, / Nothing gold can stay. 
God, how I loved me some Dallas. Still do.
I should think the hair balls (not to be confused with, well, hairballs) would go nicely with this frock from my fantasies, n'est ce pas?
But the very best part? The part that will have me watching commercials in a Friday night fugue state rather than bableep bableep bableeping through them on my Tivo? The best part is that in my pretty little head of daydream believers I am going to swagger through the weekend like a Solid Gold dancer workin' the line.
I have been holding onto this photo for months now because I adore it, Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, her mouth slightly open so. And then I stumbled across the above factoid and it just clicked. Do you see it? The connection? No?
Last night the bridge was backed up. What should have taken 15 minutes took almost an hour, and my cell phone was dead. Excuse me? Do you know what's going on? I asked the bus driver lady. A few weeks ago this same bus driver had yelled at me. Quiet down back there! This 'aint no happy hour! I had been talking to a friend and she had laughed, and then we snickered when we got yelled at, both of us children of California in the 70's when Proposition Something took away the state's school buses. It felt funny to be yelled at by a bus driver, like some sort of hackneyed after-school special starring Missy Gold. But last night the bus driver lady was my friend, and so she turned up the volume on her radio. There is a situation on the bridge... And of course I thought of Jersey Shore because I am broken like that.
I asked the woman next to me if I could borrow her phone. Which, on a commuter bus going home in which nobody talks and the hour has been deemed unhappy is kinda' like asking the person next to you if maybe you could borrow her undies. Just for a second? But she let me, and I cupped my hand around the phone as I whispered a message to Bryan real quiet. Then we crawled along around the curve to the toll. Still, we could not see anything.
Real. Maybe you think me macabre, and sometimes I do worry this is the case. How I drive over the bridge and look at the people walking alone. What is it? Who are they? The fog whipping through the gates like that. How is life so fucking unbelievably beautiful and so gut-wrenchingly empty at the exact same time? The moment it takes to slam a yellow Ferrari into park, and how I want to swallow it all to understand.
This is not me but it totally could be if I was someone else.
This would look smashing above our bed, but since that's not going to happen then I implore my husband to draw me his own version on a piece of printer paper, mixed media of Bic and Sharpie. That's all this girl wants for Valentine's Day, some hand drawn soft-core porn and for my husband to forever see me as a girl with boobs as big as her head.
Not 24 hours go by, sick from the boy at the playground, I am sure. He wore no shoes and a thin tee-shirt, sneezing all over the fiberglass turtle as he climbed. Every day, the light of the universe shifted.
When she is sick she is still, and so I stare at her on the couch because I can. Sometimes it is like holding my breath underwater, how I flail my hands to keep me there. Exhale so that I may sink, it is so peaceful, this place behind her eyes full of everything.
Yesterday was my 5 year anniversary. We sat on the couch together and watched Big Love. I found the Halloween candy I had stashed away months ago and thought of the irony as I popped one Whopper after another into my mouth. They were waxy and white, but if I sucked on them long enough they collapsed in my mouth and it was satisfying. 
We never really took a honeymoon, having gotten engaged on a Wednesday and married that Friday. But since we had already planned a vacation to Costa Rica we called that our honeymoon and away we went. When I look back on that trip I think of lying on sandy unmade beds with my bare feet on the walls, how I told Bryan that if I got pregnant we would name the baby after the town in which it was conceived. This was in Pavones which I later found out means “vulture.” I think of the two dogs that followed us on a walk down the beach one afternoon; they had been having sex and were still hooked together, the female dog dragging the male behind her awkwardly, the both of them looking rather annoyed and hungry. The airlines lost Bryan’s surfboard on the flight to San José and he was pissed. Once he got it back, the surf went flat and then he drank some funky water and didn’t move for 4 days. In the photos from our honeymoon Bryan’s face is too thin, my eyes too pleading. It wasn’t until we got home that it became a wonderful honeymoon, romantic. Perfect! 
In my white woman way I wonder if I am only allowed degrees of happiness. I can have this, but not that, here, but hand it over. We are never going to get ahead, Bryan said to me the other night, and just like that I hated him. Why do I always have to be the cheerleader? I said. It’s exhausting! You’re always bringing me down! I don’t want to be with someone like this! And then he said something and then I said something and then I left the room and he stayed. 
I’m sorry, I said. Thirty minutes later. I’m sorry, and I love you. I would never leave, and I meant it, mean it, 5, 10, 15, forever years, my family. We are perfect in the way that dogs fuck and get stuck together, romantic sandy feet on white walls. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and if it’s true? If I am only allowed certain happinesses at the expense of others? Then I choose this, hands down. Waxy, dirty, broke but loved.
It's Tuesday and I'm sick of myself. Sick of wet cars and no cars, bills, buses, birthday parties, my kitchen lined with ants. God, remember Adam Ant? My friend's older sister had his posters all over her room; my parents went to Hawaii for a week when I was in the 7th grade and left me there. My friend and I spent seven nights making prank calls, her mom had a mirror on her bedside table criss-crossed in white powder and her sister had Adam Ant on her walls. It all felt slightly sad and cooler than I would ever be. When my mom got back she gave me a bottle of pikake, the smell of which still makes me want to strip and cover up all at the very same time.
On Friday I went to work. Took the bus, had some meetings, wrote a little of this, ate a pb&j, wrote a little of that, took the bus back to my car--we've gone over this before, right? The minutiae? But this time I unlocked my car at the end of the day only to find the floorboards 2" deep in water. Which was very confusing, as you can imagine, not being able to see the brake pedal through the silt. I checked my windows, not sure why--my roof--it was still there. Suddenly a man rapped on my windshield with a microphone and asked if I wanted to go on air for KRON 4 News to talk about the freak 7ft tides flooding all the cars and how none of them would ever work again seeing as how sitting in salt water will kill an engine not to mention fry a computer. And so I did what any drama queen would do in such a situation at 5:30 on a Friday night with a microphone pushed into her face--I cried.
If you are my Facebook friend no doubt you have read my weekend emo updates lamenting the loss of transportation, the financial suckerpunch, the very moon itself, that bitch who pulled the tide up and over my car. But you guys--I lost my car because I went to work. Nay, because I was being fiscally responsible slash environmentally aware by leaving my car at the commuter parking lot to take public transportation TO WORK. There are simply not enough upper cased italics to get me through the absurd woe-is-I-ness of that sentence.
On Saturday Bryan took me back to the scene of the crime to have my car towed to its more than likely *FRP. It was 8am and already there were 4 tow trucks dealing with the fiberglass cadavers: a Porsche, an Audi, Mercedeseseses (how does one pluralize Mercedes?). In total, roughly a dozen cars were killed that day. It's funny how insurance companies find religion at times like this, the tide an uncoverable act of God when everybody knows there is no God to be found in a commuter parking lot.
We estimate her time of death at 11:08am. High tide, while somewhere in an office building in San Francisco I was probably doing something like looking up a word in the thesaurus. Had I known, I would've looked up fuck:
Synonyms: be intimate, breed, copulate, fool around, fornicate, go all the way, have sexual intercourse, lay, make out, mate, procreate, sleep together, leave your car to go to work and find upon your return that it was been flooded, fried, you're screwed, fucked.
*FRP: Final Resting Place. My southern grandparents bandied about this term in casual conversation which I always found to be the height of sophistication, that and Cheerwine; of course this probably explains some of my more macabre leanings.
**Anyone have any recommendations re: how to find a super cute family car with low mileage for roughly $25? CA$H!!
