Oops. I missed La Bla-Blas one year anniversary...

I've been blabbing for years but only began sharing my bla bla with total strangers on October 13 of last year. I want very much to say something other than the cliche 'How time flies!' So I will say: 'Death comes closer every second!'

The latter depresses me less than the former. I have 'time problems.' I've tried to come up with some technical term to describe them. I sometimes call them "The Schopenhauer Syndrome" and this is the best I can do so far. It's not informative enough, I think. Schopenhauer was such a freak. Obsession with the passage of time was the least of his problems. And I haven't drawn any grand conclusions from my sorrow over constant transience.

I started the bla bla thinking that if I made a concerted effort to reflect on my inability to appropriately conceptualize (let alone manage) time perhaps I would conquer or manage it.

Things went awry very quickly after that. But at least I was distracted.

And so. Ta dum.

The Girl Who Went To Orgies

Some sad and some very bad things have happened to the girl who went to orgies. She was a wild girl but she was also unlucky and had been assaulted a few times, had a baby, gave it up for adoption but later found it was very sick and might die.

She did things that amazed me. In the library she made eye contact with this guy at the card catalog and had sex with him in the stacks. Later, she said he was ugly. She had sex with a stranger on a plane. Then she had the embarrassing moment of walking past him as if she never met him because he was greeted by his wife and children. She had many beautiful women friends, most of whom she slept with at least once. One beautiful Spanish woman who she said sometimes wet the bed.

Some things she did I didn't understand. Often she slept with her friends' boyfriends or crushes. It would be the girl she always cared for--why did she sleep with the boyfriend? One would come around to our apartment in secret, write her poetry that annoyed her. She was pretty and it seemed that could have any man she wanted but not only because she was pretty. She wasn't classically beautiful but she was sultry with smooth, cool dark skin and perfect white teeth. Incredibly confident. There was an edge to her--an edge of anger almost. A kindness also. At least for those whom she didn't hate. "Peasants!" she would call those whom she disdained. I always cringed at that one.

There were some embarrassing and terrible moments between us that I can barely stand to remember now.

And she went to orgies. For the life of me I can't remember where she heard about the orgies or how she ended up in them. She found them in New York City. I wanted to know the details. I thought an orgy was a kind of joke--that they never would happen in real life and could not imagine what sort of people would want to go to them. I was very innocent and pretty much stayed that way. But I thought I might learn about sex or about life from her. I think the only generalization I could draw from our year of friendship combined with some other tougher roommate situations was: Don't live with people who grow up in rich families. They don't clean up much and if you don't also come privilege you will end up being bossed around.

Practice...

I hate, despise, loathe the unknown.
I always want to prepare myself for what I may face in the future. I like to visualize, I like to steel myself for the worst. I like to crush all hope to avoid disappointment. That's the kind of gal I am. No surprises.

(Actually, the sort of preparation I'm able to do just involves the mental kind. I'm too lazy to actually do anything.)

But how do you get ready to be a parent? I've done childcare. I'm the oldest of lots of children. I've changed diapers, lots and lots of stinky diapers. I've been obsessed with the well being of tiny creatures. I've had nightmares and woken up in the middle of the night praying for their safety. I've worried about the nutritional intake of fussy toddlers. This was a long time ago.

Parenting is a bit different than childcare. I'm not lucky enough to have an older child so there's no one to take over when it gets hard.

The boy has no idea about babies so I was trying to train him. I hand him a loaf of bread and say: 'Pretend this loaf of bread is a baby...but it has been crying for 4 hours. What do you do?'

I laughed 'til I choked when he got this crazy look on his face and threw the loaf onto the ground.

--No, Mongo, no! Bad Mongo!
--But Mongo no understand baby...Baby cry too much and bother Mongo.

I suppose that isn't the greatest sign about our preparedness.

Occasionally, I think to myself: Am I supposed to be doing something? Like pick up the cans and newspapers and popcorn kernels strewn across the floor? Buy a crib? Remove the many toxic chemicals? But our apartment is so small. Barely a one bedroom. There's nowhere to put that can of DDT I've been hoarding.

I can't quite think of what I'm supposed to do. Can't we change the baby on the desk we don't use? Can't it sleep in that pile of old t-shirts?

So I don't prepare in the real world. Only in my head.

In the 'steeling yourself for the worst' mode I think about the stuff I do and say: 'Pretty soon I won't get to do this (sleep 'til noon, read novels)...or this enjoyable activity won't work the way it once did...(boobies, spanking, maybe all sex?) and I better not buy those back issues of Love and Rockets comic books or CDs or extra rich body butter. Save money for the baby. We can't have ice cream for dinner. Set a good example and all that.

I'll probably never be totally up to speed so my main strategy is to hope the kid doesn't have really high expectations. My siblings' gratitude toward me is mainly due to the contrast between my attentiveness and my parent's flakiness but there's no one around to make me look good. And I used to compare my mother to housewives with no jobs and tell her she just didn't make the grade. Gotta make sure my kid only plays with ghetto kids--make sure they never visit the suburbs.

Anyway, I think the boy is probably getting a lesson in parent preparedness lately: I am a baby.

And the lyrics to Tom Waits' kinda brilliant 'Chocolate Jesus.'

What's he BUILDING in there?

Never could stand that dog

Hey I found something

Celebrity bestiality!

Alright it's not the thing but it's something. Ya proud of me?

I tried...I tried...

I tried to find something to put here. Some tantalizing and fascinating thing that would make you come back again and again. Something that would reveal my awesome web surfing talents and indicate my sense of irony. Something you'd never forget...Ever. That you'd want to spread across the world like Nutella and the English language.

First I thought of some witty idea--like about cavemen eating meat (wooly mammoth) and didn't it just drive them crazy because they had no dental floss. A comic rif--original and yet comforting as it draws on shared frames of reference.

I surfed a little. I thought to raid the blogs of others (although this would have not impressed you so much)...I hoped to stumble, through random googling, on that thing--that amazing thing--that no one could believe existed or would have ever thought of...

And now I'm tired. Very tired. But please remember: I tried. I really did. And maybe next time my efforts will pay off. I can't promise anything. And by then you'll forget all about this little slip...I think. Thank goodness--we forget about most of what we encounter here after all.

Lottery Winnings So Far This Year: $1,125.00.

I don't know how much we've spent on the lottery--less than $100? Not much. I tell ya I'm starting to become superstitious.

And --Maneki Neko you rock!

Does it jinx us to put it in the blog? Or are blogs too new to generate superstitions?

Scary evil Magic Kingdom

On the evils of Disney...

I knew about the Disneyland CIA...'Cause my uncle Speedy worked at Disneyland...They have hidden cameras everywhere and their own holding cell.

I try to think about what I loved it for--Not Disneyland, but Disney. The animated movies are beautiful--well, the old ones. Most of the old ones.

I associated Disneyland with food also. Most of my childhood I remember I spent thinking about food. I outgrew this. I was a very thin child, I should say. Now I pay little attention to food but am a bit plump. I gained weight about the same time my appetite declined.

Was that normal? Does every kid grow up and think about every experience in terms of the food he/she might acquire during it?

Anyway, I associated Disneyland with many kinds of food. In great abundance. And this gave it an extra-magic sheen.

Mainly, it was that there was this very charismatic girl in my school named Cindy and she constantly obsessed about Disney and made the rest of us obsessed. She was this strange multi-talented girl who was over 6 feet by the age of 13. She could draw, play Mozart on the piano. She was also very smart. She might have grown up to be famous but she got married when she was 19. She was a born again Christian so there's a strong likelihood she stayed a housewife. Last I heard, that's what she was.

Other Disney in my life: I had an encyclopedia called the 'Wonderful World of Knowledge' which I read every volume of at least 5 times. They had one Disney propaganda volume about the life and greatness of Walt and Roy. (Reminds me of the pirated Encyclopedia Britannica I got as a child. Made in Taiwan. No mention of the People's Republic in the 'China' section. China was Taiwan and what happened to the mainland will remain a mystery to anyone dependent on that particular set of encyclopedias.)

Finally, I tripped on acid at 19 and went to--where else? Disneyland! Not an original choice I'm sure. I doubt a day goes by where some teenager doesn't get the brilliant idea to dose and do Disney. However, I did see the extraordinary beauty of fake smoke arising over the giant fake castle ride warehouse at sunset. While the comforting smell of old chlorinated water wafted up while we rode the Skyway.

A few amusing highlights of this experience: My friend Janine made us matching 'Hammer and Sickle' t-shirts to wear. We offended many parkgoers however several employees gave us the thumbs up. Turns out they had just been on strike...or at least tried to unionize.

I was in 'Frontierland' and the fakeness of each detail was...unsurprisingly...tripping me out. They even had fake bug noises in the bushes. So when I saw an employee whose name was 'Becky' I simply could not believe that this was her real name. It seemed far too thematic. However, she did not welcome my 'insider' attempt to find out her real name.

Well, it was all about capitalism then--The sign at the end of the 'Small World' saying: "Wherever you go there's a Bank of America" near you.

How could others not see the irony?!? The celebration of imperialism that was "Jungleland"! The whitewash of American genocidal history that was "Frontierland!"

No matter how cool "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" is (or how classist!)

I thought I was above it all. Disney's cultural products nevertheless infiltrated my consciousness in a permanent way, though. I still know all the words to about 75 Disney songs.

A theory...

So...it just seems strange. What happened to the opposite sex biological parents of the Brady Bunch children? Why were the children never sad? Why did they never think about or miss these parents? And why were there no surviving relatives of these vanished parents--such as grandparents?

Yeah--come to think of it, why did they add this 'stepparent' twist? Why not simply have a couple with six kids who hadn't lost a spouse?

Ah, but then when there was this incestuous frisson between the siblings it would have troubled people. The fact they weren't genetically related made many things possible...

Could that be true? Perhaps this website will explain it.


This picture of Kissinger with the Brady Bunch makes me think that many other conspiracy theories are apt when thinking about this nefarious show...

Because I'm a bit of a brat lately...

M: I want to point out that I don't always get my way.
C: Yes, but that's just so that when you do get your way, it's all the sweeter.