skip.town

It infuriates me when I'm too stuffed up to smell what I should be. Different things at different times of year, the luxurious sensual blossoms of the meyer lemon tree or the pungent sacharine odor wafting from the tiny pink roses, and always the the faint medicinal notes of the rosemary bushes and eucalyptis. There are other smells too. The dark, moist moss languishing over the bricks, cool bedding for bare feet. wet wood. Frying oil from the chinese restaurant across the street. I sit in the dark of the garden letting the moon reflect in the smudges of my glasses; hidden by the tall wooden fences and swaying bamboo I try to take comfort in pretending that things outside of my walls haven't changed so much, though the truth continues to buzz at a low frequency, reverberating through my ear and nipping at me like a particularly obnoxious mosquito. Things have changed outside of my tiny piece of past. I reclined on the bench down by the water at the end of our block. This used to be just a rocky shore and a few rickety, creaking houses, some built with wood carried around the horn by same boat over a century ago that brought the lumber used to erect my own childhood home. My father would hoist me onto his shoulders, open Ben Davis shirt and flowing white curls, both splattered with glazes and paints and blowing back in the bay breeze and saunter down to watch the sunset, four, immense, shaggy bouviers trotting behind. We always did have the most magnificent sunsets here. More beautiful than almost anywhere I've personally witnessed. It is something I always attributed to being a town surrounded by refineries, three, four, five, I don't even know how many anymore, belching smoky residue and chemical particles into the sky from tall towers. Occasionally they would be burnt off by what looked like dancing bottle brush flowers in the distance, but really were twenty foot plumes of flame. One year one of the workers fell in. I'm not sure how but I remember reading about it in our shitty small town paper and how his skin had essentially melted off his body, becoming one with his helmet and clothes unable to be separated from his crispy, burnt corpse. Talk about closed casket. When I was burning earwigs with a magnifying glass against the concrete of our yard I wondered if the man smelled the same way. I found myself longing for the pictures I knew the paper would never print. Tonight I sat reading down by the same rocky slope into the straights and tried to watch the sunset, the electric neons fading to peach and then robins egg until it crept up into the starry night, an old velvet blanket full of tiny mothholes, but I was distracted. The street seemed so much busier with the tracked houses they've thrown up in the years I've been gone, squished together in the empty lot where I used to pick wildflowers for my father.  Five or six of them, their muted, neutral palates and simple, slapped together architecture in stark, glaring contrast to the the brilliant colors reflected off the water and the small and dilapidated but once grand victorians more than a century their senior that pepper the rest of the street. There are other changes too...As the sun licks the black hills across and on either side of the straights, I try to blur my eyes so I don't see the difference between the silouette of the bridge I see now and the one of my childhood, now dismantled and sold in bits as scrap metal to a variety of rapidly industrializing third world countries. That the new bridge, with its tall, lit up towers looks much like the Golden Gate. So much in fact that I've read many gift shops sell T shirts with monochromatic pictures of the new Carquinez Bridge, passing it off as its simaller looking neighbor since any profits reaped from sold images of the of the Golden Gate requires the seller to pay royalties. The sun has fades completely and the lights in the small towns across the waves start to dapple the hillsides, those of the few people and the cane sugar plant and one lonesome bar. Back before they put up the new, very well lit Alfred Zampha Memorial Bridge, on cloudless nights you could let your eyes fall from the top of the sky, down through the sloping terrain and across the the skies reflection on the water and never really know where one ended and the other began. It had the effect of looking like the edge of the world. Of course, the new suspension does have a walking path across it, an addition that was sorely needed, but somehow it doesn't make me forgive them for tearing out burrito bridge. I remember the last night we could drive across it. Three times we turned around and came back to prolong our final drive staring through its thousands of angles. I think it was still only two bucks to cross then. Less than half what it costs now. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks on the final stretch. I tried to not be such a grump about the changes of my city, but in truth i'm just like my grandmother and all the other old Jewish women who grumble and moan about the rapidly modernizing city. Long for a more beautiful and simple time of which you could still find many traces until just a few years ago. Everytime I come back I find myself in mourning, holding another funeral for our secret places as they all disapear. Last summer I walked down to the big, old rotting pier. When I was a kid I would sit around with my grandpop there while he cast his pole into the murky waters, half heartedly hoping for some inedible three eyed fish or the occasional shrimpy shark, the wind matting my hair and sun darkening my freckles. I alway got splinters in my thighs from dangling my legs off the rough edges and cuts in my feet from the barnacles lining the oily rocks where the dirty bay lapped against them. When I came into my teen years, I still spent alot of time there. On the lone bench at the very end where the pier had jutted its furthest into the water, on a particularly black night was where I first felt someone elses hand snake up my skirt and into the soft folds between my legs, my gasps masked by the waves crashing and the wind howling. In the evening, virtually friendless, I would hide under the pier, drinking wine alone and spraying pink crimpshrine graffiti on the cement wall and feel very sorry for myself that I hadn't been born twenty years earlier. I loved that pier, all of its ragged edges and the gravel leading out to the splintered wood. A hundred years of shitty names carved inside hearts. I hate the expression, but it had alot of character. And now they fucking paved it. Smooth asphalt for cars to drive down to the end, and street lights and a fucking bathroom. The contrast between the old and the new too stark and jarring. Like going to see your beloved grandma, expecting her furrowed brow and thin cracked lips smiling out from her almost translucent face only to find that at age eighty she's had her eyebrows tattooed in badly, a garish green tinted navy, and her lips surgically plumped. A sight that is hard to recover from, the natural old parts in freak opposition to the shockingly new, making the whole thing look like a charicature of itself, a bad joke. Maybe the worse part is that the bathroom was built to look like a tiny version of the old train depot, yellow with white trim, but they fell short of the mark and it more closely resembles the tracked housing a few block back. And then the one time I really needed to take a shit and tried to duck in to relieve myself and vandalize a bit, it was fucking locked, which seems very stupid, but maybe its just because I only go there in the middle of the night now. I can't stand to see all the brand new, big, lifted trucks lining the recently paintrolled parking spots.

What's the best gift you received this year?

My boyfriend got me a 1920's prosthetic arm with a hook and his friend got me a 1940's defilbulator.

last night I dreamed that I saved Katie Holmes dog and then entered into a polygamous marriage with her and Tom Cruise. what a party. Or a nightmare.

What are your irrational fears? 

Olives.

I just read my last posty-dealio. I must have been high as fuck when I wrote that. I've been in present wrapping bliss. I am a good present wrapper. I have gotten everything for our Yakima holiday except for Joe and Steph. I still have to get things for my mom and brothers. Other than James having a gross dry socket from the giant tooth that got ripped out and me being all crampy, it has been a good day. I read a funny zine and finished the scarf I was knitting for J's pops. Lots of bad TV.

List five reasons (at least) why you are awesome.
Submitted by goobers18.

1. I am a fabulous cook. green chili chicken tamales and garlic-basil-bacon mashed potatoes. giant prawns with linguine in a white wine saffron cream sauce. baby back rib with my secret homemade sauce. baby asparagus wrapped in prosciutto with pepper and lemon zest. Fabulous green curry. rose petal and vanilla ice cream. curried apple-butternut squash soup with bacon and shallots, topped off with creme fraiche, chives and crispy fried sage leaves.
2. I'm fun. I don't like bars and crowds too much. I would rather run around with one other person and drink tiny champagne high up in playgrounds late at night and make out. I would rather have stencil making dates and climb fences that go to a movie. I can make my own ice cream. I want to cuddle and watch bad punk flicks and knit you scarves with beer-cozies in them. I'm not embarrassed to sing offkey and out of tune at the top of my lungs to my favorite punk songs.
3. I am compassionate and open. I love deeply. As long as you are honest and not an asshole, I am usually happy. I give a lot of myself to other people. I am positive and resilient. I love my life for the most part.
4. I give fantastic head.
5. I've got what a polite person would call curves, and a fun person would call "junk in the trunk". A sweet rack and a great ass for a white girl.

Today was pretty rad. We slept in and I donated some cash to the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls (www.girlsrockcamp.org). Its this really neat after school program and summer camp in Portland for girls 8-18 who's goal is to teach self love, confidence and empowerment through music creation and performance. I'm going to ask my parents to donate money to them as well in lieu of getting me any x-mas and hanukkah gifts. It is so beautiful outside. There are the biggest snowflakes falling all around us and we sat on the porch smoking and watched them flurry down in the headlights of passing cars. Everything seemed too silent and pretty. And Gus is having a ball. He has never seen snow before and he is prancing around and chomping away at the air, spazzing out. He tries to catch snowballs that I throw for him. Gus and his adorable, wet paws. I love this family we've made. We eat bacon and ice cream with strawberries for dinner. I have now known him for a year. Time goes fast. I love that memory. Of that first night when I was here visiting the house, making sure things were ok with the new roommates and all, and it was too cold to sleep alone. How warm and safe and protected I felt in his arms, on his little single mattress on the ground. And in that moment, I knew how much I would grow to love him. I love this. Listening to the Chinese Telephones while he gives me back scratches and kisses my head. 

QoTD: Ringtones: What's yours and how often do you change it? 

pump up the jam. Before that it was polyphonic madonna. It doesn't change very often, but I'm thinking prince next.

I'm slowly waking up in Brooklyn. I like this neighborhood better than the last, but I can't help wishing she still lived in Sunset Park, where the beer ice cream is plentiful and dollar tacos still reign supreme. It is so good to be back here with Rudi. I always feel home. It irks me that I never get to see my best pal more than once or twice a year. and to think we met on the internet when we were fifteen! and then became friends through letter writing and package sending and mixtape making. People who accompany me on vacation seem to be disappointed a lot of the time. Mostly l like to go to mysterious far off cities, and then pretend I live there. That is, reading a lot in friends' apartments and getting to know the local booze purveyors by name. Cooking. And generally not leaving the neighborhood. New York is usually so expensive. My way is cheap. And I usually have a much better time than when I'm running around all over the place, feet hurting and buying stuff I don't need, nor can I easily transport home on the plane. Jim is talking in his sleep between snores. I'm so glad he's better. All this EMDR stuff has helped a thousand fold with his depression and anxiety. For the first time he says he can see why people like him, that he knows he is a rad person.  That he is starting to like himself. It hasn't snowed yet, but I'm still keeping my fingers crossed. If it can happen on the upper east side, it isn't too far from us now. Later today I want to venture a little further and go to the amazing fry place that has about a billion kinds of different sauces for your crispy potato deliciousness. And among those sauces, about half are flavored mayonnaises. spicy mango mayo, rosemary garlic mayo, pesto mayo, vietnamese pineapple mayo, pommagranite teriyaki (sp?) mayo, horseradish mayo.... this is my personal heaven, in which everything is creamy and about ten thousand calories per bite.

QoTD: Who's the coolest culinary celebrity?

Anthony Bourdain. Duh.

I keep having dreams that I'm preggo. gah! I just wake up all pukey and upset and stressy. It's the scholastic season again and my class seems pretty bitchin. I get to do printmaking and metal working along with the art history components. In our first seminar we talked about Robert Mapplethrope, Andreas Serrano and Karen Finley, all of whom I have written papers on, so I felt pretty comfy. Unfortunately, the people in my class seem  like weenies. Mega weenies. Compliments tend to make me super uncomfortable to begin with, but when they reach the level of "wow, you are, like, the coolest girl I have ever met in my entire life!" (exact quote) I just wanna murder. Sheesh, these kids must not have led the fullest of lives if they think that I'm that rad. J and I went to office max and had a small financial breakdown. I have finally found someone else who gets hot just walking down the isles and isles of sweet, sweet office supplies. We spent too much. I wish I was a better thief. Its getting cold. Too cold for just long sleeved shirts. Its smells damp and cool and like fall. I bought a nice, warm coat to wear, hoping that it will snow, just maybe a little. If not here, at least when we go to New York in November...please? I miss the indian summers of the bay. Even the bees. Gotta go to the print studio... toodles

Oh Top Chef Season Three marathon... why must you taunt me so. I went to goodwill and got some neat sixties medical books with rad illustrations to cut up and paste around. J is all chicken soupy, achey clammy, snotty nose sick faced. Our bed is soaked with sweat and his fever hasn't broken yet. Laaaaaame. I can't stand seeing the people I love feel like shit. It feels like a drinkin' night.

Hours have passed. How can a gay bar karaoke night NOT have either the Cyndi Lauper or Prince version of "when you were mine"? This is the most offensive thing that has happened since I moved here......

+ Day off. Woo!
+ Seattle delicious vegan Mongolian beef
+ Jimmy went to the store to get me ice creeeeeam.
+ Oakland in five
    +buddies
    +real fucking food with decent service
    +my momma
    +my old bed
    +the ocean
+ Watching the Daily Show
+ The last good stuff

- Out of meds
- Freaked the fuck out about flying (I don't know why I'm such a pussy, I have flown hundreds of times and on every single flight I cry and clench my arm rests and fret the whole way.)
- Not stoked about school starting anymore
- Working too much
- Oakland in five
    -people I don't want to see everywhere
    -ghettttttoooooo
    -places I don't want to remember
   

I feel awesome even if we are out of what we need. My meds won't be ready for another week but I'm hoping it will be allright. The neurontin was really helping my moods but it makes me so tired. It hurts to be out of the other stuff.

The kind that make us look stupid. We are so fucked up sometimes and I have scary dreams about it. Beautiful and tragic and gross all at once. When is enough? How much is too much? Goodbye regret/ goodbye restraint.