Watching The Candle That Burns Too Bright. Our Margaret.

I was always a little surprised that I referred to Margaret as my friend. It wasn't an easy thing to be. She emotionally drained most people that came into her light. We all understood that she was special and brilliant and, most importantly, crazy as a bedbug so we forgave her and managed our relationships with intermittent vacations from the drama. None of us were surprised when she was dead although alone asleep in her hospital bed from a heart attack at 39 wasn't the demise that we assumed.

Margaret was a star. She would tell you that herself. In most cases, this would just be part of the delusion. But Margaret actually starred in a television show with large muppets for a short run and probably would have been huge if she wasn't so bloody off the chain. Even at her worst, when she refused to put on a skirt that wasn't cut up to her crotch on the bottom and down to her hip line with her midriff exposed in the dead of winter, she could hop up on stage and be lucid and genius. Then she would come down again and obsess over a man who would desperately try to run in the other direction from her if he saw her first, try to get her doctor feel good to give her another prescription pill and plot the plastic surgery on her face that would detract from her horrifically thin body that she insisted was just fine because she was skinny.

She had gone into the psychiatric ward a couple of times before she died there. Every time they arrived at a new diagnosis, giving her pills that they would claim she was addicted to the very last time. Her doctor drilled me for proof that she was a drug addict and I told him that I was more concerned that she looked like a skeleton and boasted that she had cut down on her laxative intake. She never told all of the people bringing her sweets that about 5 others were coming as well carrying boxes of apple donuts and cheescake. I doubt she ate other food. I doubt that she kept it in her body when she did since they were looking for pills, not eating disorders. She gained about twenty pounds in a month on a physique that I spent hours analyzing in detail as I debated her throughout an entire night that she was indeed starving to death. Her argument was that she fit the same clothes in a picture that was from the past. I argued that her face was sinking in because you couldn't get smaller than skeleton which is the size she was when the photo was taken....she had gone from bone sized to sunken skeletal. She had a heart attack at 39 (or 29 if you ask me her last name) after gaining weight rapidly. You put it together.

Poor Margaret. I told her mom that I don't think that anything shy of having her live in an institution would have kept her alive. She was cunning and manipulative. Her brain told her the most insane reasons to want things and she would attack her wants like a tiny pitbull.  You could not remove the want from her head. She would rather die than change her mind. She would have gone back to her eating disorder driven, obsessive ways as soon as she was out of the hospital. She would have o.d.-ed on perscription pills because she didn't have food to handle the quantity or taken too many laxatives or picked up the wrong man because he looked rich and told her the right things. It wouldn't have ended well. You wonder why God would give someone such a lot in life. But then again, she shone a hundred times harder than most humans ever dreamed of being.

Her energy was relentless, her brain so smart, her determination obsessive. Success was the only thing she could cope with in her head. She had to feel hard. She performed like she knew someone was going to steal her vocal chords or cut off her hands the next day. There was no half assed. There was no wasting time. She was a bomb that hit the earth and blinded us and then died out so fast that I didn't have a chance to digest what the hell she was till now. Some of us are gone a long time before we are missed like we should be because it takes so long to see again from the light they blew into our eyes.

I miss you, my terrifying friend. I wonder how you ever could have lived out here in the world as an adult that aged and dulled. Some of us leave young because that is when we are done. The light went out. We moved on. I can still feel you shine next to me though. You live on because we will see the tiny dazzling sparkle of you in the corners of our eyes.

Why I Am A Mean Lady

We all get crushes. I have one right now. Actually, three. They are fun. They give you something to think about when the work, not work, money, reality, whatever cock blocks your happy place. I am mostly oblivious to crushes on me. I grew up in a very small town with three sisters and didn't stand a chance in hell in learning the social skills dance. I get it that if you flash a boob, someone may take delight in the action, but a real crush? Nah. I just don't see them because I'm too busy not making eye contact with men using the magic of not wearing glasses.  Which is why when I am bitching about getting too much attention, it goes way past being the subject of mild one-sided flirtation.

In stand up, my low self esteem probably has protected me. I avoid eye contact and hide off stage. You can't hit on me if you can't catch me. I'm also pretty intimidating as a character, a firm believer in controlling the room and too much information. I remember an old comedy friend saying to me, "If someone has a crush on onstage me, they seriously need some help." I expose a lot of foibles, some real, some for the sake of the joke. And when I go to the car by myself in the empty parking lot at night, I pray that I am not punishable for a sin that some wing nut has determined from in between the lines of my act that I didn't intend to write. Someone they hate because I am not a man and they don't get my freedom of opinion. Or they just see a woman who will be walking alone at night, an easy crime mark. The parking spot is always in a place that I can get to fast and I do the best that I can to get in without fighting the lock.

Comedy has become a business that requires a internet presence. I put out blurbs about shows without the intention of luring audience as much as keeping me visible to other bookers. The more you post, the more you are in their consciousness. Sometimes this backfires and too much information is released into eyes you didn't intend to see it. Block interlopers someone suggests and if you know who they are, this is great. And sometimes it is better that they have a little information to satisfy curiosity than going full bore google and showing up in front of your house where your kid lives.

Someone has a crush on me that crosses the line of a crush. I try to avoid him. When I see him in real life, it is like a scene out of Pepe LePu and his damned cat. He sits down, I look panicked and switch to another seat. He tries to sit next to me again, I repeat action until I land in a place that cannot sit. No touching. I'm too quick and it isn't a dirty old man groping thing. It's a 7 foot wall of needy. We have been doing this at least a year.  He tries to start conversations but he goes into places he shouldn't know about or care.  It sounds benign enough but the difference is it never stops. No matter how mean I am, how rude, he won't stop following me. He never hears no. He never quits i.m.-ing me, following me both on line and physically. At first it was innocent enough but now it is just disturbing. No. I don't like you. Look at at the fear on my face and the venom in my voice. And not having the ability to hear and consider the needs of another human because you want something scares me.

I am generally good at handling crazy. My specialty used to be diffusing drunks that are never wrong. I know that it is fighting an insane person and there is no reason. They never hear "no" when they don't want to hear it. All sorts of flavors of nuts out there...hell, I ain't claiming sanity myself, look at what I do....but only hearing what you want turns into "give me" and that is a special flavor of person.  I don't want to be got. At least by him. So I am mean and then he backs off a little. Until he justifies it in his head again. And then I am mean some more.  And I worry how this could possibly ever end.  Because if I reject him completely, I may find out just how loose that screw really is.

Telephones vs. Pustules

In 1981, the phone rang and a boy asked me out on a real date.  The kind with the movies and making out.  It was the first time that I ever loved a telephone. Possibly one of the last.

It took me a lot of years to build up to this kind of loathing for the telephone. I used to like the sound of the ring and the noise of a dialing rotary, more often or not followed by the female yell of one of my sisters (or me), "I've GOT it!!!" and then the pounding of feet running on hardwood floors to stop the noise. There was endless hours in the stairwell feeling oh so mature talking about boys and puberty problems. But eventually we grew up and moved on to our own homes. Rotaries replaced by buttons to punch with loud answering machines and slowly being replaced by cellphones as the fight in small places are lost to modern existence, making us technology's bitches.

I grew up in a world where you called people back . It was a time when there were less complications. There wasn't a queue of priorities and the telephone call didn't slip into the cracks of, eh, they'll understand. If someone didn't call back, it was considered horribly rude. But in recent years, we have learned to forgive the occasional drop in etiquette. Life is so overwhelming and detached. Sometimes. In others is just a bad pattern.

A not returned phone call says something about you. It can say, "You aren't as important to me as other things so I forgot you." Or, "I'm afraid to confront you with something so I'm going to stall any form of communication." Or, "I'm in control here." Or, "If I talk to you, you can reject me or make me feel less than I am or give me an answer that  I just can't deal with." Or all of the above at once. The more we have evolved into the communication culture, the more I have been burned by the telephone. Casting directors not calling back after great auditions or to only call you if you booked, leaving you in silent limbo otherwise. Friends forgetting to confirm plans. Someone dictating exact acceptable hours that they can be reached on a continuous basis, not considering that others may have lives too. Being put on hold by the telephone company that charges you by the minute. Or by the IRS.

Now we have emails, texts, instant messages, and, if you are truly desperate and archaic, faxes. Choices that we all have preferences for, each applied to individual comfort zones. I will do anything to rely on all of those above the telephone (well, except the fax). I am a control freak that does not like bad news. In fact, my real preference is in person as a human being.

I am learning to accept this. We live in a flaky existence. I don't like it. But how do I change it? By not doing it to other people? I'll try. Guilty as charged sometimes too though. But I'll try. "Who do I owe calls to?" I think. And then I realize that I just want to take a nap and will call them later.

I Wish Telephones Could Choke

They have ruled my existence since I've cared. At first it was a singular bell tone that had adjustable volumes. The heavy rotary beasts of the seventies. A phone you could kill someone with with a good blow to the head. None of this modern pixie material. Hard and loud. I'm HERE! It would scream. I've GOT IT! We would scream back.

To get a call from the outside states was a big deal. Expensive in a household with a modest income. An international phone call was an Event. A crackly not always satisfactory Event that you could never hear very well. The neighbors had other people on their lines who sometimes listened in on their conversations.  Getting a clear conversation was an indulgence that one didn't take for granted. Telephones were difficult machines that relied on other technical geegaws to operate, often thrown down with the receiver leading. Slam, "I give up!"

This is how I knew if someone was my new friend. They rang to ask you over to their house or to a birthday party. This is how I knew school was canceled. The neighbor heard it from a neighbor who got it on the radio.  This is how I knew a boy liked me with a dumb excuse. "Hey, um, did you hear the fifth question on Mr. Darder's chalk board by any chance? This is Kevin (voice switches keys) by the way." He called.  He called ME. All of my social awkwardness was erased because some poor male choked up enough courage to forgot the torture of potential rejection. I understood.

Rejection. Why are YOU calling me, you freak? That was always hanging over my head when I dialed the phone to ask something of someone that I had not secured a relationship with yet. And it continued when I punched in the digital numbers. And then when I picked up the tiny one bodied instrument and poked in the code into my keypad.  Why are you calling me? Leave a message call me back.

I need to see eyes where the emotions can hide but only if intentional. I need to see the movement of the mouth and the rest of the parts that drive the communication home. I need to build an image to go to the voice so that I know that they really mean what they are saying.

Seizures made me feel violated. Raped by an attack out of left field that I didn't ask for and accosted me regardless. I would come to and be alone. So many times I would dial the phone and I couldn't get someone to talk me back to safety. I'd get a voice mail. Or worse it just didn't work. It wasn't human and it prevented me from getting to human help. To this day, 8 years since my last epileptic attack  if I can't reach someone I feel I really need to talk to, I begin to panic. It feels familiar and awful. I've been left alone. It isn't rational. I know exactly why. But the fear is still there just the same.

Sometimes people say that they'll call back and don't. It is irritating but nowadays it seems to be part of certain cultures. Not polite but not the offense it used to be. I can live with it. Sometimes they let it go to voice mail and you never hear back from them.  They may or may not be blowing me off. I give them the benefit of the doubt and curse them with little "fuck you's" in my thoughts and then I blame the phone. Because in the end, I strongly suspect that it is, as it has since I cared, controlling us on purpose.

A Ghost Here Now

There is one plot left on the river.  That's it.  Carved out of all of our property that once was on both sides of the banks.  Hundreds of years populating the river valley and once this house is sold, my family will be gone.  It amazes me how we are rendered down to a sign on a building, a plaque in a hospital, a mention in the local history when a fourth grader writes a book report.  A human life has such a small chance of being remembered.  You would think grouped together we would have more of a shot.

This house was a newer one.  The old house sat across the driveway.  It was the only residential home in town large enough to qualify as a bed and breakfast because the previous generation added to the building, forced by familial pressure to stay on the property.  But not willing to concede and actually live in the same original house.  My grandmother broke ranks completely, demanding her own home with her own privacy. They didn't get off the land, but the made it to the furthest edge.

I was terrified to be alone in the family house.  People had been born in the living room.  An aunt burned to death in my Uncle Al's den (later my mother's art gallery, before that the sitting room) after her skirt caught fire. The room at the far end of the upstairs right hall was haunted by a lady whom some very sensible people claimed would sit at the end of the bed. My cousin found a crawl space that was filled with soot from the coal emissions from turn of the century locamotive engines that no one knew existed until he hid in it playing hide and go seek. There were rooms I had never been in till we sold it.

My grandmother's house was warmer, more modern.  It didn't smell as large.  You couldn't lose Easter eggs in it until the cleaning lady found them month later like at the family house.  The basement was lit well, not dirt. There was newer carpeting on the stairs to ride down on your butt. There was light and cookies baking and, for a while, my grandfather built us a pool until one day I came home from college and Grandma had filled it in again. This house had door that belonged to rooms that made sense unlike the ramble of an old building that had been rebuilt over and over. The staircase when straight up sensibly, where at the big house it was either weird angles with raw wood or wide with a banister that should have been easier to slide down but just looked dangerous at the end.

The properties shared a garage and an orchard.  The garage attic was creepy and mysterious.  It had accoutrements left from the nursery that I couldn't identify and half a tombstone that had been cracked off at the family plot awaiting repair.  And it had a root cellar, my favorite part because it was a hole under a building that didn't seem to do much.  The orchard had a peach tree once and apple trees that I loved to sit in and evil tasting grapes.  Mostly, during my era, it was a big field to park cars and a place for critters to eat grass although my aunt did have a garden on the edge by the big house.  This is where they found the musket's missing bayonette holding up a rose bush and Aunt Edie would wage war on Japanese beatles with a jar of kerosene.

The big house was sold in the late 1990's after Edie died.  One lone old lady in a property that had held generations of family, glad to be rid of the responsibility at the end.  "You like it?" She would say if she caught you looking at something.  "Take it!" I'll be dead soon enough she didn't say but meant it just the same. It is still a beautiful home but it is not our problem any more either.  Too much. Too big for families that are smaller now.

And now my aunt will escape a similar fate, albeit on a smaller scale.  There won't be a big house to heat and keep clean.  She is still young enough to enjoy a move into an apartment where the winters won't abuse the soul and if the pipes freeze it is someone else's responsibility.  We have 6 months left as we prepare and disperse the generations of belongings, determining what really was precious enough to hold onto without a house to put them in.  Dissipating our family into paperwork and the few remaining genetic codes alive and reproducing. No more home left. For the first time in 150 years, we won't be a place anymore. For the first time in 300, we won't be attached to valley.

Except our one little plot on the river.

My Favorite Old Blog: Ladies and Gentlemens.....Woodchucks Are Assholes.

Woodchucks are assholes: A favorite repost

Most people who know me in the outside of Callicoon world consider me an urbanite. With the exception of 2 foggy years in a trailer of necessity, I have spent my adult life in New York City up until I moved to a suburb north of Boston. But the truth is am a also a hick. I was raised by tree farmers. "Nurserymen" to the fancy. We had a huge amount of acreage on the Delaware River on both the Pennsylvania and New York sides and more in the mountains. And here are some of the things that I learned from the Borscht Belt sticks:

• Woodchucks are assholes. They look sort of cute for a large rodent. But they can eat an entire nursery. Upon his death, my father requested that his plaque be laid on his parent's grave. But we had to wait because a woodchuck dug up my grandmother's side of the plot and was living there. A hole so big you could shove an eight year old down. See. Assholes.

• If you are twelve and weigh about eighty pounds and you are learning to shoot a gun, stick with a .22. Anything with a higher caliber requires a truck window to prop it up and you probably will still find yourself flying backwards like a dislodged piece of steak post heimlich maneuver.

• Squirrels don't swim well. But they are excellent at floating.

• Walnuts found in the woods and acorns laying in your lawn may be edible but they still taste like ear wax.

• Some red berries are also edible but others can kill you really hard. Same goes for pretty mushrooms. Don't believe your sister. She only wants your Partridge Family lunchbox.

• You are not a wind goddess. You just aren't.

• It is possible to be bitten by a river fish.

• Tractors don't break down unless its raining out and you are way the hell out in the middle of a field. And lightening likes wide open spaces.

• Aloe Vera plants aren't indigeonous to the Northeast. I don't know what it was she was rubbing on her face but it wasn't that.

• If you are in a creek and you take find a really big rock that looks like it could have a space underneath, you can slam it with another rock and an unconscious cat fish may float up. Which may explains why there are not cat fish in the creek anymore.

• It's a shad. They have dorsal fins. But don't tell the tourists from the Bronx because "OH MY GAWD! IT'S A SHAWK! IT'S A RIVAH SHAWK!" sounds really cool when it echos down the river valley.

That's what I have for now. I will continue to ponder.

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/hoohajess/blog?page=4#ixzz11S2pf800

Concerned Mother's Anonymous

I have got to stop writing letters like that.  In the heat of the moment.  To the school principal.

Okay.  Maybe I will not regret it tomorrow.  But, in my head, social services is circling the wagon.   They are too poor to send their kid to the Museum of Science over night!  They must be feeding her paper and making her sleep under the stairs.

Truth is, if I truly felt like an overnight field trip 12 miles from the school warranted 90 bucks, maybe it could have happened.  If I totally trusted this group of strangers with my child overnight in downtown Boston, maybe. But I can do a helluva lot of things for my kid with 90 dollars that she probably would like a whole lot more down the line. A birthday present that isn't half assed.  The webkinz that she loves. Horseback riding again. She would love that so much more.  This money can be spread out to make her life seem less like living with her parent's struggle against paying the cable so she can have television and internet like the rest of the normal kids. Till we can leave when her dad gets his PHD and have a real job that pays well.  It is hard to convey that this is only for now.  That it is for a better life later with even better school trips.

Even these things are struggles and will drive us further into debt until employment picks up. And at least I know she won't wake up frightened in the middle of the night in a big room full of children and strangers or be lead away by a pedophile in the darkness.  The only true loss here is that she will feel left out.  Like the poor kid.

So I wrote to the principal asked to help us make her feel better.  I hate that she has to go to school at all.  That they force her to do the march of shame.   To make it feel normal and maybe a little fun even.  I wish that they would let her stay with me and I would take her rollerskating or to the movies or something that doesn't cost the electric bill plus some cable. And I wish I could take it back. But I guess I'm glad I did. Because maybe he will not assess us as inadequate parents for not paying 90 for an overnight trip down the road. And he will see us as people who are just trying to keep the little things in her world that makes her feel less valuable in a world where the kids all have have have.