Monday, May 24, 2010

My Own Private Idaho

Someone on Facebook posted a link to a page called Shitmykidsruined.com, with the comment "hilarious!" I went to take a look, running low on vagina humor that day, and honestly, I could not decide between nausea and rage. So i went with both. Picture after picture of child-caused destruction--children cutting their own hair, children ripping apart the toys of mere acquaintances, children barfing on their parents. As it happens, I have experienced all three of these things, and many, many more indignities documented at shitmykidsruined.com. But I personally did not find any comfort in the camaraderie of the tormented parent. I think I have reached the end of my tolerance for torment. I don't like children anymore.

Now before anyone calls the Department of Social Services, let me say that OF COURSE I love my children, and they are well cared for, doted upon and obviously brilliant and gifted at everything they do. Of course they are. I wouldn't have any other kind. But when they are very young, there is a level of capitulation that must take place in order to survive parenthood. You KNOW your shit is going to get ruined, so you hide it. Cabinet doors are locked. The toilet bowl is inaccessible. Stairs are blocked off, poisons carefully housed in high cabinets. No glass chachkes or decorations of any kind. Anything that can be destroyed will be. So you avoid what you can and clean up after the disasters you didn't anticipate. And you believe that it will go away as they get older.

Now HERE is why i don't like kids anymore. They are older. And they still touch my stuff. They TAKE my stuff without asking. They break stuff and hide it. And then lie about it. My vibrator was left running in the drawer (it has since been moved, but it was ALREADY HIDDEN) and my pitiful amount of weed was embedded in the bedroom rug. E-mail is read, because they "thought it had something to do with me." In short, they have absolutely no respect for anything that is mine, because I simply don't exist. I mean I don't exist as an entity separate from each of them. Thus what is mine is theirs, and they literally don't get why I pop a vein when they go in my purse. My shrink tells me this is a sign of bonding, that they feel that I am simply an extension of them. And I have to say, after so many years of being an extension, I am kind of done. And, incidentally, they do not do this to the husband's stuff, just to mine. Which pisses me off ever more.

Obviously, I am not done with parenting, but I am DONE with understanding.DONE with complete and total sacrifice. I am no longer going to say it was MY FAULT for not barricading the door to the Sugar Shack when I find grubby fingerprints on my new bass. Or a million other absolutely, completely and totally CLEAR statements of HANDS OFF, JUNIOR. I am not totally sure how to address this without resorting to no Age of Mythology for the rest of Medium's life, but I am sick of the wordless, tearful rage I feel when something is broken/used/left for dead AGAIN. Suggestions that do not involve physical violence are appreciated. But I suspect, most depressingly, that there is no way to address it, short of banishment from my kingdom.

I recognize that I sound like a terrible mother, and if I do, so be it. But being a parent has so many sacrifices, sacrifices in ways that I could not ever have imagined, that the millimeters of independence I regain as the kids age are even more painful when they are turned into a pile of glittery eye shadow powder all over the bathroom sink. Yes, I entered into this parenting thing willingly, and I am glad to be here. But not every minute. Not all the time.

I want my own fucking bathroom. Give me that, and I swear I will stop complaining.

Monday, May 17, 2010

It's Here.

I kind of hate what I am about to do, because no one hates the schmaltz more than I. I am not sentimental, really, not in a conventional way, and I hate anything that is purposely trying to make me cry. In fact, that sort of thing pisses me off. Above all, I HATE ANYTHING MOTIVATIONAL. Pep talks, web sites, positive thinking quotes and those stupid posters they sell on Skymall--I detest them with the power of a thousand suns. Ask the person who sent me encouraging platitudes EVERY DAY. I defriended his ass AND blocked him. Don't tell me to be positive. I'll be as fucking negative as I like, thank you very much.Yet here I am, about to write something that could be construed as any of the above. I beg you to NOT be inspired, NOT get teary. I am still the snarky bitch I always am, just a wee bit less snarky than usual. Maybe even nice. Maybe even happy.

I am waiting for my new bass to arrive. Not new, just new to me. It is a 1975 Fender Musicmaster, Olympic White that has aged to a creamy yellow, with most of it's original parts intact and it's original orange shag-lined case. And the big-ass tuning pegs, which were a must. I am looking for the UPS man like some sadly-single man awaiting his Russian mail-order bride. I have been afraid to leave the house all day, for fear that the five minutes it would take me to get a burrito would be the 5 minutes in which UPS Steve would arrive and find me gone. I vacuumed the whole house to keep myself occupied and away from the industrial size bag of M&M's I foolishly bought at Costco. I am as jumpy as an expectant father. And I say father, because having been an expectant mother, I was anything but jumpy. I was begging for the alien to be removed from my body.

When I started playing music, only a few years ago, I was at the breaking point. Kind of like a mid-life crisis, but more so; not just an "is this it?" feeling, but an "if this is it, i am going to kill myself" feeling. Exclusively raising my kids and all the complications and emotions and energy and stuff that came with it left me depleted of myself. There was no me. My wonderful children (and they are, I say that sincerely) had sucked the life out of me and left my bones to bleach in the sun. I thought if I didn't do something, ANYTHING, creative, I would literally disappear. Why I chose music, I am not sure, because I come from a musical family in which I am definitely NOT the musical one. But I did. I learned to play rudimentary guitar (i.e. G, C and D7, G and C done on single strings) in a Mommy and Me guitar class, got on the internet and learned a bunch more. I went to Ladies Rock Camp in Brooklyn and forced myself to sing in public. I came back and answered an ad on Craigslist, and met my beloved Joe,with whom I still play with to this day. Because I couldn't play barre chords or power chords, I wrote songs that I could play. And lyrics. I just did. I didn't think about it, knowing I would talk myself out of it, knowing I would retreat from this "musician" I was pretending to be. So I didn't think. And, slowly, I am becoming that musician, not a fake anymore exactly, but evolving into something real.

The bass is different, though. The bass is completely new. I can't rely on muscle memory right now to know where to put my fingers, I need to learn notes. I can't retreat into the background of the music, because the bass is vitally important. And I have already committed to playing bass in a band, when I don't know how to play. Because I am forcing myself to learn. Because I can. And I will. I am.


P.S. I got my bass. UPS Steve practically threw it at me and ran, I looked so crazed. The box looked impossibly narrow and small, kind of how I felt when I looked at my grandfather's casket at his funeral. Can a box that small really contain what it is meant to? And as I pulled off the bubble wrap, looking at the tweed-ish case with the ancient stickers (WHAT DO YOU DO IN CASE OF A NUCLEAR ACCIDENT. KISS YOUR CHILDREN GOOD BYE. STOP URANIUM MINING.) I knew it would be exactly as I hoped. I held it and it feels exactly right. Exactly.

P.P.S. You can go throw up now.

Monday, May 10, 2010

The Only Bright Spot in a Crabby Day


I am in a bad mood. It is one of those days when nothing, NOTHING, is going to make me happy. When I get like this, I like to isolate myself so as not to bite the heads off of innocent people around me. I need to go down to the Sugar Shack and play, and wait for my new bass to arrive from California so I can learn to play "Fell in Love With a Girl", after which I will reappear with a readjusted attitude. I went through the checklist of all the great things in my life, and there are many, and I am grateful and fortunate, and blah blah fucking blah. I am still pissy as hell. So I am not going to sit here writing something clever and delightful and pithy--ok, none of that shit today. I am going to tell you a quick story and then go back to my solitude, where I can't hurt anyone. And if you choose to contact me, you have been warned. I bite.

The only thing that made me smile even remotely was the story I read at every fucking silly site--according to a new television show in the U.K. that describes bizarre medical cases, a woman was rushed to the ER complaining about pain in her abdomen and "private area". During a physical exam, the doctors found something well beyond your garden variety cucumber. They found a rolled up poster of Donny Osmond. Donny. Osmond. DONNY. OSMOND. In her pussy. A rolled up poster in her pussy. Did I mention it was a poster of DONNY OSMOND?

So many things about this story puzzle me. So many. And most of the sites I looked at asked the basics, such as "What possessed her?" and "WHY DONNY OSMOND??". But the question that has been puzzling me, nay, PLAGUING me, is this: how did she respond when they pulled that nasty page of Tiger Beat out of her privates? I mean, did she say, "Huh! I wonder how that got there?" Did she look defiantly at the doctors and say, "Oh, like YOU'VE never done this!" Or maybe, "Oh! There that is! I totally forgot I put that ROLLED UP POSTER OF DONNY OSMOND in my pussy!"

I think I want to be friends with this woman. And I want to get her really, really drunk. And I want to supply a variety of objects and see which one she wakes up with in her twat. Who needs the drunk fucker that you can draw penises on while he is passed out? THIS woman is the life of the fucking party.

Monday, May 3, 2010

I've Got The Curse!

I got a message on Facebook a few days ago asking me who I was rooting for in Celtics/Cavs basketball playoffs. Being born and raised in Cleveland, but having lived most of my adult life in Boston, this was apparently supposed to cause me some consternation. So I said "I have lived in Boston longer than I ever lived in Cleveland. But I would have to give a shit about basketball to answer that question." And the message back was, "Do all your responses require profanity?" I actually had to go back and reread. Oh, yeah I guess "shit" is a profanity.

The answer is yes, cute guy from Cleveland who shattered my heart once upon a time.Yes, I do need to use profanity every time I respond to a question, every time I make a comment, every time I voice an opinion. I need to liberally lace my prodigious vocabulary with "fuck" and "shit". And I don't stop there--I have taken back the words "cock" and "pussy" and turned them into instruments of daily destruction, e.g. The Big Guns. Destroy who, you ask? Oh, you know who you are.

I would like to say that I can predict which men will melt when I say "No way, motherfucker!" but I really can't. It doesn't seem to be predicated on level of education, age or field of employment. The fun for me is figuring out who likes it and who winces. And watching for the wince is great fun. No offense to the lovely people who do the virtual wince, but your use of * in place of a "u" in "fuck" or the "s" in "ass" is hilarious. It makes me want to unleash a string of naughtiness that would make my father (from whom I learned all my curses, in Arabic and Hebrew as well as English) blush.

I went through years of trying not to curse, to protect the delicate ears of my children. The truth is, like many things in life, repressing will make it volcanic when it actually erupts. And erupt it did, while driving. Driving in Boston is notoriously stressful, what with there being no law and everything. Being the family chaffeur meant my stress level was through the roof. I finally had to call the fucking asshole who BACKED UP ON THE ENTRANCE RAMP TO THE MASS PIKE a, well, fucking asshole. I screamed it out the window actually. And no one in the car died. Not me, not my children. Everyone survived. Even the stupid douche who backed up on the Mass Pike.

So now I embrace this potty mouth. It is a quick way to separate the wheat from the chaffe, as it were. If someone does more than wince, such as adopts the look my mother gets when I say "fuckhead", I know there will be no love between us. And if there is a little twinkle in the eye, I will unleash The Big Guns. If you smile when I call Trey Anastasio a pussy, we are golden. What else could I possibly call him that would capture what he is? See? Pussy is the only word.

And, by the way, I got a message from Mr. Cleveland Heartshatterer today. And it turns out his virtual mom-face was a fake. As if I didn't know.