A Conversation Between Myself And Two Small Children At A Fourth Of July BBQ

Small Child # 1: "What are you drinking?"

Me: "Campari and Orange Juice."

Small Child # 1: "Is Campari alcohol?"

Me: "It is; it's a kind of Italian bitters."

Small Child # 1: "Is the orange juice because it tastes bad without it?"

Me: "I wouldn't say bad, but it's kind of bitter and the orange juice is kinda sweet, and it's, like a lot of things, kind of an acquired taste, so."

Small Child # 2: "My dad eats bad dreams!"

Me: "Your dad eats bad dreams? what is he, some kind of psychic vampire? that's terrifying."

Small Child # 2: "He eats bad dreams and then he eats alcohol!"

Small Child # 1: "You can't eat alcohol, not unless you freeze it or something."

Me: "Or make it into jello, I guess."

Small Child # 1: "And anyway, nobody drinks just alcohol."

Me: "Sure they do. I do."

Small Child # 1: "But I heard alcohol is poison."

Me: "Well, yeah, it is. That's sorta how it works, actually."

Small Child # 1 (with incredulous look on his face): "So it's a poison? That makes you feel happy."

Me: " . . . That's . . . well, actually that's exactly what it is, yes."

Small Child # 2: "My dad eats bad dreams and alcohol and then he turns it into jello and puts it in his hair and then he eats his hair!"

Me: "Your dad may have an eating disorder called 'Pica'"

Small Child # 2: "And he's SO STINKY!!"

Me: "It's hardly surprising, considering his diet."

Watermelon Disappointment Sounds Like A Progrock Band

Grocery Store - Interior - Day - The Fourth of July

Cashier: "Picking up a watermelon for the big BBQ, huh?"

Me: "Yup. I hope it turns out to be a good one. I don't really know what I'm doing, picking out watermelons; I just sort of slap them and listen to the sound for some reason. I don't even know what I'm listening for."

Cashier: "Looks like a good one to me!"

Me: "So watermelons come from the Sahara Desert. They grew naturally around oases, buried in the sand. Arab traders used to gather them up and load their saddle bags up with them to take across the desert. Isn't that wonderful?"

Cashier: "Noooooooo, it isn't!"

The Happiest Day Of My Life

So yesterday I'm walking across campus and I'm sort of not paying attention and I must have veered slightly to the left or something and I collided with the unicyclist who was just then passing me from behind, causing him to bobble and fall over.

This was the greatest thing that has happened to me in YEARS.

She's A Summer Girl

Chiara, trying on dresses for me, just came into the room to show me a recent purchase. She took a wide eyed look out the window at the clamshell sized snowflakes heaping down, made a face like a kitten that was just made to lick a lemon and said, in a little raspy voice: "winter."

The Chiara Heresies VI

Chiara has some coworker with a teenaged son. The coworker (and her son) are Mormon and the son is of an age where he is about to go on a two year long Mormon proselytizing mission. The coworker is describing how, before the son can be sent to the city or region where he will serve his mission, he must first go through three days in the "Missionary Training Center" in Provo, Utah.

"What's the Missionary Training Center?" asks Chiara.

"It's like three days of intensive church, more or less," she is told.

"What?!" cries Chiara, "Three days of church?! That's the worst thing I think I've ever heard. I'd shoot myself!"

The Chiara Heresies V

Chiara is talking with a friend of hers who went on a Mormon mission.

"But, did you really convert someone?" she asks, incredulously.

"I converted this whole family; I never saw a group of people with worse teeth," replies the friend.

"Ahh," says Chiara, "so you converted insane people. That makes more sense."

Invited To The White Party

Chiara: What am I going to wear?

Me: Well, you have those white skinny jeans and I guess you must have a white top of some kind, right?

Chiara: Yeah, but I don't want to look like someone who sells ice cream.

Who The Hell Let That Guy In Here?

Said by a much more salt-of-the-earth fellow than myself as I passed by him on my way in to the Kamas Rodeo.

One of us was wearing skinny jeans and a sportcoat and flip flops and aviator glasses. The other of us was him.

Made me feel like a hundred damned dollars, frankly.

Six Degrees Of (Creepy) Terror

In bed, Chiara relates to me the content of one of her many nightmares, this one from last night:

"I was in a strange old hospital; one of those creepy ones where bad things happen. Keven Bacon was there.

We were in this room and a creepy old man came in, a cripple of some kind. He made us uncomfortable, so we went to my room in the hospital. Kevin Bacon said he had to give me an injection, but he was acting very strange. He didn't really look like himself and he was creepy.

I told him that I didn't know if I could trust him and he just smiled. He stuck me with a needle in the side and it hurt, but it wasn't too bad. I told Kevin Bacon that it hadn't been so bad.

Then he stuck me with a bigger, longer needle and it HURT.

Then I woke up."

"Kevin Bacon was in your nightmare hospital?" I asked, laughing.

"Weird, huh?"

"I don't know. Not really. That guy is in everything."

Marriage, Airwolf, Scott Bakula

Last night, at three in the morning, as Chiara and I were getting to sleep, we reminisced about television shows from the 80s. We discovered that we missed Quantum Leap desperately and could, neither of us, understand how they had a plot every week on Webster or Alice. We both definitively agreed that Airwolf was the stupidest show ever. A super helicopter? a helicopter?

This, for us, was a sort of impromptu renewal of our vows.

Chiara, Her Righteous Anger

An eagle-eyed Chiara spotted that the young boy on the fire escape who has a chance encounter with Batman in Batman Begins is none other than a young(er) Jack Gleeson, Game Of Thrones' Prince Joffrey.

"Kill him! Kill him NOW!" she yelled at the television Batman.

Ginlemonade And A Conversation About Death

I'm that sort of person who much admires hammocks, but finds them sort of uncomfortable when lying in one and trying to drink from a long straw inserted in a tall cocktail.

Similarly, I cannot quite manage to relax while lying on a blanket in the grass because I spend very nearly eighty percent of the time scanning the blanket for insects.

After one has taken the time to spread a large blanket out on the grass and has gone back and forth into the house several times to bring out and place carefully beside that blanket such things as a small stereo, a large book, and a mason jar filled with would appear, to the untrained eye, to be lemonade, but was, in actuality, almost entirely Plymouth gin, one feels silly to spend the entire afternoon sitting crosslegged and swiveling sharply to and fro, flicking insects (and bits of backyard flotsam that resemble insects) from the blanket instead of, you know, lying on it.

So, you make a go of it, mostly for the neighbors' sake, lying first on your back and holding the book above your head at arm's length like the steering wheel of a car pointed at the sun. But that grows tiresome quickly and you shift to your side. But then your leg is asleep and so you move to your stomach. But you can't really enjoy this either because you can't concentrate on a book when you are devoting so much of your mental capacity to reminding yourself not to kick your legs up at the knee and rock them gently back and forth like a teenaged girl does on television when lying on a bed and talking on the telephone.

So I was rather happy to receive the phone call from my friend, because it gave me an entirely plausible excuse to sit up straight and flick studiously at anything that looked like it had crawled or would like to have crawled near to me on the blanket, hoping for a summer home in the inside of my pantleg.

"So guess where I'll be living this summer," said the friend.

" . . . " said I, wittily.

"In a small apartment above an art studio!" said the friend.

"That's nice. I bet it hardly ever smells like failure if you keep the windows open," said I.

"There is a pond out back!"

"Ponds are nice; they give the mosquitoes somewhere to be from."

"It's only going to cost us a couple hundred dollars a month, because the lady who owns the gallery needs the money. It's kind of a sad story, actually; she's a ceramics artist."

"That IS sad."

"Oh, shut up. Anyway,  she married her highschool sweetheart, a painter . . . "

"Oh, god. Stop. I don't want to hear any more."

"And he was also a forensic scientist."

"Nope. Don't want to know."

"And they opened up this gallery and had two beautiful daughters."

"Yep. Good Story! Definitely that's the end of the story, because that is obviously a good story, right there, all wrapped up and narratively satisfying. Let's talk about something else now and not belabor it."

"And then, one morning, he's just dead."

"Better than one evening, amirite?"

Spied a spider the size of a smallish fried egg on the open page of my book. Gestured at it so that it would leap onto the blanket where I will never find it again. Will have to burn blanket later this evening.

"They were married for 34 years, were madly in love, had this business together . . . "

"And now she has to rent a room to you fuckmonsters just to make ends meet. Why did you tell me this story?"

"Well, we'll just have to fuck quietly when the gallery is open."

"Jesus."

"She sculpts these forest goddess statues. They're a bit dreamcatchery, actually, but pretty."

"Forest goddessing is, like gibson martinis and creative writing classes, generally better in theory than in practice."

"What are you, drunk?"

"I am what many intolerable people are but all decent people aspire to be: well read, unemployed, and moderately soaked through with gin."

I flicked a large and frantic ant even then struggling to scramble onto my leg thousands of millimeters across the yard.

"Listen," said the friend, "coffee Friday?"

"Yes," said I.

The usual pleasantries exchanged, I returned to my book and blanket and afternoon. I went for a large swill of my ginlemonade and found an expired gnat floating among icebergs on a yellowish sea.

Waiter, what's this gnat doing in my ginlemonade?

He's sinking to the depths of the mason jar when you insert a finger to try to fish him out, sinking to the the Davey Jones' Locker reserved for those fortunate gnats who drown in alcoholic drinks every summer.

Sod it. I'm going inside.

Chiara Unchained

I'm standing in front of the stove this evening, cooking dinner, when Chiara rushes up to me, grabs me by my collar and, eyes narrowed and teeth bared, raspingly shrieks:

"I. Neeeeed. Chocolaaaaaaate!!"

Then, as I stand there stunned, she releases my shirt, darts over to the small desk in the kitchen, grabs her car keys and her purse and launches herself out of the house and into the car.

She came back from the market ten minutes later and wordlessly, with furrowed brows, began mixing brownies from the mix she'd purchased.

Gnothi Seauton

The jewel case said Bryan Ferry, but the CD inside was Neil Young.

Librarian: "But you wanted the Bryan Ferry or the Neil Young?"

Me: "I'm wearing a sportcoat; which do you think?"

The Chiara Heresies IV

Getting home at four in the morning, Chiara complains of the lateness of the hour.

Says me: "But what do we care? We have nothing to do tomorrow. We have no kids. We don't have church in the morning."

Says Chiara: "I have church in the morning - The Church of Sleep."

Oprah is THE BEST (at being THE WORST)

I am in the office, doing some work. Chiara is down the hall in the bedroom, watching Oprah. I cannot really hear the program, but I am suddenly aware of the whooping and hollering of a couple hundred middle aged women coming from the TV.

Me: What is all that noise? Did Oprah just give everyone some milquetoast country singer's CD?

Chiara: No, she let some kid play guitar with his hero, Lenny Kravitz.

I nearly laughed up a lung.

The Chiara Heresies III

We are in the supermarket. I have been in the baking aisle, trying to select a baking soda. Chiara comes up behind me with the cart and leans in conspiratorially.

"Deed you see those missionaries?" she asks me, eyes wide.

"No, why?" I reply.

"They were soooooo ugly!"

"You mean because of their cheap suits or their 1950s haircuts or something?"

"No, I mean they were ugly. Like trolls."

"You mean they were just physically unattractive people?"

"Yes, and there was a group of them, all ugly like each other."

"Why do you care about this?"

"I would never believe in some invisible man for people so ugly."

"You mean you would consider it if they were better looking?"

She thinks for a moment, cocking her head for comedic effect.

"They'd have to be pretty hot."

I Am a Double Agent for Love

Went to my pal Doug's birthday party the other night. He has (and many of his friends have) kids and the kids were invited.

Because of how I am, I spent most of my evening with the vodkas and tonics and the kids.

At one point, I was invited upstairs to see the Lego "drop ships" Doug's son had constructed. We were quickly followed by the three other boys at the party, who had factionalized against the girls and were determined to find weapons and armor.

"What team are you on?" I was asked.

"I'm on the girls team," said I "I'm not a moron."

"What team are you on?" and a Nerf brand machine gun was pointed at my face.

"Boys team. Boys team," said I.

I asked what the plan was. The tallest of them said it was to write a Valentine to Doug's daughter. I told him it seemed like a good plan. He had construction paper and a pencil. I looked over his shoulder while he composed his message. The other boys were busy strapping whatever plastic items they could find to their chests and arms.

Here, with his name changed to protect his dignity, is the entirety of what the tall boy wrote in his Valentine:

Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie

I mentioned to him about a job I thought he would be well suited for as the winter custodian of the Overlook Hotel, but he was too engrossed by the elaborate folding and packaging his Valentine then required.

Later, after refilling my vodka tonic and rejoining the girl's team (as I said - not a moron), I asked Doug's daughter how the Valentine had played. She pitched her head forward, slumped her shoulders, dropped the tip of the sword she was carrying to the ground, rolled her eyes as hard as she possible could and said in her most exasperated tone:

"I just threw it away."

I told her that it was probably for the best, as he seemed rather disturbed. I suggested the possibility to her that "Pie" was a cipher for her and that he was wooing her with metaphor. She cocked her head at me and gave me an expression of impatience and disbelief.

"He's an idiot," she said.

"You realize that this is like a microcosm of the next fifteen years of his life, right?"

"I don't care. All he wrote was 'I Like Pie'. Ugh."

"Yeah, you're right I suppose," I conceded, "but go easy on him, okay?"

She just rolled her eyes again and went back to the living room to collect the Nerf gun that someone had carelessly left unattended on the sofa.

The Rear Window (of Section 17, Row 21)

At the Jazz game the other night, the guy sitting next to Tim (middle aged, ugly like a bridge troll) has binoculars around his neck.

But he never used them except when the cheerleaders came out to do a routine.

The guy's wife didn't seem to care at all.

The Chiara Heresies II

On Easter, Chiara and I eschewed the traditional family brunch and went for a walk around the Avenues - the neighborhood where we live.

The weather was fine for walking as long as you stayed in the sun, but turned bitter cold as soon as you went beneath the branches of a tree or the shadow of a house. We had intended to make a picnic outing of it: stop at the neighborhood market, buy some provisions, sit in the park and get our mind off of things, but it was just too cold in the wind and the ground was still too damp from the previous day's rain.

We walked back to our house through the cemetery. It is, or so I'm told, the largest city-operated cemetery in the United States, so it is gigantic. It is filled with tombstones worn down to illegibility by the years, pitched at odd angles as they slowly sink into the earth. Here and there something really tragic, like the stone from 1870 that listed a woman and three unnamed children - a death in childbirth we guessed. Mostly we tried to spot the masonic symbols and the most old-timey names:

(Jedidiah, Zebedee, Tharquad).

At the edge of the cemetery sits a church. Parishioners were filing out of the doors in their cheap suits and floral dresses, heading home from Easter Sunday services. We tried to guess their denomination based on their hairstyles and clothing. A group of teenagers were sitting in a circle on the grass, be-suited and be-floraldressed, reading from the bible and talking.

I had to stop Chiara from shouting at them "Aren't you tired of believing in imaginary people?!" by admonishing her that it was Easter.

She reminded me that I was the one who was always on about the pagan origins of Easter - its Anglo-Saxon roots as a holiday for Eostre, Goddess of the Dawn and of Spring, celebrated as a fertility festival with colored eggs, rabbits, and baby birds.

All true enough, but still . . .

As it was, she pointed at them and barked out, in Nelson the Bully's telltale singsong, "Haa-Haa!" as we passed.

I don't know if they looked over at us or not. I looked firmly at the wet ground and the misshapen headstones and quickened my pace. Chiara chuckled evilly.

"Aren't you glad we can sleep as late as we like on Sundays and then go for a walk or do whatever we want?" she asked me with a smirk.

I said that I was glad of those things. And that we didn't have to sing unmelodic and droning songs in the company of our neighbors every week. And that there were at least two days of the week we didn't have to leap out of bed at some (un)godly hour. Still, I didn't want to taunt those poor dopes - look at their haircuts!

Then we went home and made waffles.  We picnicked at the kitchen table and watched the Daily Show on TiVo.

"Happy Easter," said Chiara to me.

"Happy Easter," said me to Chiara.