sweetheart redux

  I still remember the best elementary school slumber party I ever attended. It occurred in Westchester, California, Westchester was close enough to the negative ions the Pacific Ocean produced to give the air a tinge of good health and make the noisy proximity to LAX seem worth it. I was in fifth grade. It was 1990. I was always weird and gregarious. The way the middle class likes conservative fashion while the very rich copy street wear and punk rock, the boringly accepted kids teased me, but the very popular, who had no insecure need to put others down, were often curious about me,and I had one-off playdates with the upper echelon, as well as getting invited to their slumber parties, at least until I got blackballed from their parties after this best one ever, thrown by a girl so pretty she could have been a sitcom star. I had a precocious but confused sense of class consciousness when I was in elementary school, because I lived with the upper middle class side of my...

My husband's skull was found in a dirty neon yellow duffle bag left on a curb in downtown Portland. The rest of his body was found a week later or so, in a homeless encampment. This is new. My thoughts have skewed magical, like when a friend of his who I informed of his passing texted me late the other night, “He ain't dead,” and I didn't know he was calling me a liar. My first thought was that the medical examiner and police detective I’d been speaking with were actors my husband had hired to lie and tell everyone that he was dead, intending to start fresh, and now he had snuck unseen to our friend's apartment and said “Let Robin know.” Or else that they weren't actors, but that the body they'd found wasn't his, and the palm skin that was used to identify him was skin that he had cut from his palm and then glued onto the skeleton of a stranger. He really is dead though.

When I found out a couple weeks ago that I will be having major surgery, it inspired me to make some home improvements within the next couple days. For starters, I had been sleeping on a memory foam mattress on the floor - I bought a bed frame, with storage space, and now the  boxes that'd been in the corner of my room are out of sight. I also went to the bank to trade in a 20 dollar bill for quarters - the laundry room here doesn't have a change machine and I have often been out of quarters, perpetually chipping away at my laundry by hand washing it in the sink - low level depression housekeeping. The same day I got the quarters I did all my laundry, taking care of that subpar living condition that's often gnawed at my subconscious. I also stopped going to bed at 3:00 and waking up at 1:00, instead going to bed at midnight and waking up at 9:00. It's crazy how soon I changed, and I'm not completely sure why I'm doing it - the bed frame is going to help me when ...

 "Halloween" (1978) I don’t generally like reading or writing little autobiographical musings about past relationships – these stories are usually so “So what?” to me, and are also usually written in the David Sedaris-style narrative that only David Sedaris should use.  However, I'm writing a piece like that right here, right now, because lately I’ve started going to a video store in South Pasadena, and it’s a place that I used to go to with an old friend I’ll call Max  -- it’s made me think fleetingly about the time I spent with him, which was the saddest phase of my social life.  Anyway, this is more of a Shaggy Dog story. Max and I hung out for a month or so after I was done with my short outpatient stint at a mental hospital, where I’d met him but almost always managed to avoid conversation.  He was the tedious type of emotionally fragile, like Norman Bates in Psycho, someone whose long stories you have to listen to because you don’t want your hostility to b...

She was mine and I was hers Gambled hard and split the purse A patient and her patient nurse She was mine and I was hers Chapter One:   Wild Animal     Some of the damage caused by my mother, Gloria, scorched the earth, and sometimes those who adored her wished we’d never known her, wished we’d never even been born. I adored her, but to adore her, one had to figuratively roll one’s eyes at about half her declarations, especially when they were slurred. One had to figuratively shrug one’s shoulders in a gesture like “That’s our Gloria,” though only in response to a benign destruction. Only when she was just telling white lies or asking to borrow money while joking that she’d never pay it back. “I never, ever imagined myself with kids,” she said once. “I know, you hate it when I talk about having you -- you think I sound too objective when I talk about how much it hurt to give birth and all the drugs they had to give me and everything like that. But ju...