sweetheart redux

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...

  The window on the passenger side of my old car had been thoroughly shattered, but nothing valuable was missing inside, because there was nothing of value in there.  The one strange thing was that whoever it was that did this had taken my favorite compilation CD, one I’d made recently and had left on the passenger seat.  I wasn’t sure if the cops were only called when a car had been stolen or something valuable like a cd player boosted from it but my room mate said an attempted break in was worth their time so I spoke with a team of cops that came by the house and took some photos of the old car.  Later I ripped up a thick green yard waste trash bag and duct taped it to the hole left by the broken window glass.  This made me look poor, but I didn’t mind; I was young and I’d been to college and it felt good to look poor.   One day a few months later I was driving down Sunset and there was a fragile, slow-moving blue Hyundai driving in the next lane, which I...