An Homage to Chris Farley, Starring Ozzy as Chris Farley

Remember that one Halloween when Ozzy went as Chris Farley in that SNL skit with Patrick Swayze where they're auditioning to be in Chippendales? And he wore the collar and cuffs and danced with his belly like that? Yeah? Um, that was awesome.

I am El Nino. Yo soy El Nino. For those of you who don't habla espanol, El Nino is Spanish for: The Nino.

 Well la-di-freakin-dah! We got ourselves a dancer!

 Holy Schnikies, this guy knows how to put 'em back.

 At which point things get a little fuzzy. Fast.

I see a future where someone is doing a lot of doobie rolling while he's LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!

Remember that one time? I'm tellin' ya'--it was freaking awesome.
Happy Halloween!

p.s. Couldn't figure out how to fit this one in, yet I simply cannot leave it out. French fries!

Please

We got in a fight so she bought me flowers.

Granted they were ugly flowers, a bouquet of daisies dyed bright, and I am fairly certain Bryan actually bought them, but I know she picked them out so they were the most beautiful flowers ever and I wanted to eat the heads off each one I was so happy.

These days I find myself wanting to eat the heads off things more often than usual, equal parts in anger and in love. My love so thick I wonder if it's possible to love something too much, how quick I feel mean, her shoulders thin beneath my hands. Last night it was a Girl Scout party. I knew we shouldn't have gone. She was too tired from sailing, but we went, and when I threw away the paper ghost from the top of her cupcake she lost it and was mean so yes, I was mad. And mean. You hate me, she said, you always hate me, and I felt sliced through, as if nothing I do will ever be enough. Even now, writing this down after a night of sleep and a bouquet of daisies dyed bright, the fact that she said those words makes me feel like something dead. I don't hate you, I would never hate you. Right away I said all the words I am supposed to say. I love you with everything I am and even when I am mad at you I love you. That's what loving someone means, I told her, that you are able to be angry with them and still love them. I tripped over the words, said them backwards and forwards because if there is one thing I want her to be sure of it is that she is loved. Is loveable and loves herself. Pleasepleaseplease, let her know that. Let us both know that love is, by its very nature, thick and never spiteful.

And now it is today and she has already gone to another party where she kept the paper bird from the top of her cupcake which I did not throw it away. She has forgotten but tonight I will still slip into her room to kiss her eyelids as she sleeps.

First grade school picture. How could I not?

reepy Serets

The other day I found a fire engine in the fridge along with a shoe and later a part of something, not sure what. It was hard to write that seeing as how the other day the right side shift key on my laptop disappeared and then the letter -- you know, the one between b and d? That key--gone. Beause really it was a fire truk that I found in the fridge, a shoelae and later the plasti piee of a toy, not sure what. Quik! Tell a story without one letter. Diffiult fored to be hard, the world suddenly shrunk down to 25 letters.

Ozzy likes to be at the highest point in any room. He limbs (missing letter there!) on top of hairs (missing letter!), tables and ountertops (yes, again). He bangs and pulls at drawers, keyboards, opening things that are losed (not going to keep this up beause you get it now, yes?). My mind onstantly filling in the gap of what ould happen just like yours is right now filling in the missing letter. See? How our minds make sense of what is in front of us even if something is not quite right. Why shouldn't a shoelae go in the risper?

Have you seen this? This statue of an angel stood near a house door. One day a dog broke the angel's wing, and the statue's owner disovered a reepy seret inside.

I love shit like this.
xo,
S

p.s. Anyone know if I an just glue the keys bak, or will the glue fuk up my keyboard?

Though Now, Of Course, I Know She Was

It is 1979 and my brother wears striped tube socks with a fat lump in the inner ankle of one of them. You know how some memories are sharp like that? I smell the warmth of plum trees and am right back on Scenic Avenue wearing corduroy culottes while my brother stuffs his inhaler down into one sock.

The first time it happened was in early September. A stupid back-to-school cold that we passed around like the time. Not a big deal until it was and Ozzy couldn't breathe. A 2am trip to the ER where they put him on a nebulizer and I made jokes with the ER nurse about Dennis Hopper's gas mask in Blue Velvet. Only I think I said National Velvet because the nurse looked confused when he laughed and it was only later that I realized he was picturing Mickey Rooney with Elizabeth Taylor and that maybe it's standard medical practice to laugh at the jokes of scared mothers in the middle of the night. If it's not it should be.

I am not going to draw this out because it doesn't really merit a drawn out story. Another ER visit and blah blah later and Ozzy has asthma. Not a big deal, I tell myself, there are much, much worse things. (Still. Try saying that when he cannot breathe, the flip side of my gratitude a dull throbbing fear of fuckfuckfuck.) Shut up, right? And so it is that twice a day I give him a nebulizer treatment of budesonide, albuterol if he's wheezing. From now until the end of cold and flu season, we sit in his rocker and watch Elmo on my phone and read books, sing, Ozzy's mouth wet with medicinal mist and so I kiss it.

I remember my brother playing right field in little league baseball. Or left field. Whichever field is least dominant; he only played as rite of passage. Standing way out there in his Lions uniform with an inhaler lump in his sock while we sat on the hot metal bleachers and watched. I remember the smell of mustard and how one summer day our dog Alice pulled all the old chewed up gum from the sidewalk and got it stuck in her muzzle. I do not ever remember seeing my mom scared.

Fact: Your Brain is the Consistency of Warm Butter

So the other day I was seriously contemplating if I would rather have Ramona's crazy eyes or look like Aviva but be missing a leg. I mean, that's like the Sophie's Choice of superficial reality tv questions, is it not? With one you are a statuesque blonde who can hide her amputated leg beneath flattering fall boots, and the other you have all your limbs but must face the world with the eyes of pinot grigio'ed hyperthyroidism.

This is for the children with hemorrhoids. Do yourself a favor and watch this.

So yes, there I was, mentally flapping my hands trying to decide when I remembered that a.) I did not really have to choose, and 2.) if the brain is indeed a muscle then I have really let myself go.

The thing is I love bad tv and junk food, celebrity gossip, the spectacle of strangers living larger, stupider, drunker and sluttier than I ever would. If I were to meet any one of them I would punch them in the tits, yet most nights I turn on my tv to watch, and it's a super fantastic happy Susannah night when one of them graces the cover of Us Weekly. Add to that a steady stream of People magazine and Perez Hilton, and my brain is borderline obese.

What's a girl to do? I shut down at the ick of politics, economics, and historical entertainment, and everyone knows that crash diets never work anyway. So I'm taking baby steps. I opted not to renew my magazine subscriptions, and a season's worth of Honey Boo Boo Child sits unwatched on my Tivo along with The Real Housewives of Miami, Keeping Up With the Kardashians and The Real World (apparently I was the only one still watching that in the name of cultural respect anyway). Instead I finally tried Downton Abbey which--honestly--is the same level of oh no she di'int as any reality show out there, but the English accents and Masterpiece Theater emblem somehow elevate it to the equivalent of peanut butter: a fat, but the good kind of fat. In the past month I have also read some excellent books: Wild, Half Broke Horses, The Age of Miracles, and tonight I am trying to decide if I should start Tiny Beautiful Things or The Yellow Birds. Both are supposed to be amazing.

Which is not to say I won't still watch The Real Housewives of New York and New Jersey, the O.C. and ohmygodIcannotwait! for the new season of Beverly Hills, but when I do I plan on watching while eating a spinach salad sprinkled with ground Doritos. You know, because spinach is good for you.

My kind of cuisine.

xo,
S

p.s. Seriously though...one leg or crazy eyes? Why is the choice so hard?

Hang Up

Did you hear that horrible story about the (child-aged person) who was (past tense verb) by the (anything here, really)? This is my Misery Pørn Mad Libs, a stab at being funny when there is little to find ha ha. The thing is, I think I am addicted to stories of terrible things that go bump in the light. Take the Huffington Post, for example. In the morning I read the headlines on my phone while on the bus: titles about GOP fundraisers, Dem Polls, the Human Cost of Drones and bugs found with the iPhone 5S. I do not open any of these stories, scanning instead until I find something about a mom who killed her baby and cooked it. I hesitate for a second before clicking, but I do and then I read it and feel absolutely sick with oh god, fuck no, why. 

Why do I do this? The mere act of clicking a link a talisman of sorts to pleasepleaseplease, keep it a story.

(Last week a local 12 year old girl was hit by a car and died. And every day since then I read the same article in the paper with very little updates. She was riding her bike home. They do not suspect alcohol was involved. The same photos of a white dented Suburban and a pile of stuffed animals on the street corner.)

This is the way the world works. Tragedy mistaken for profundity. All of us so close to being written about as a (insert age) year old woman and her (insert age) year old child. Keep it far away, I think, not me, the musical chairs of it all unsettling enough that I download Jaycee Dugard's book, A Stolen Life, curious and thin with fear.