If You Belonged Here

Pandora: It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp

I want to start out with an advisory:

    I’m not making this sh*t up (I honestly don’t know how one can)

    All of these quotes are not edited

    My father really does love me, I swear

“The Po-Po is all up in the hizzle, fer shizzle!”

That, my friends, is how father announces his arrival from work. 

He goes by Papa Gangsta Pete or sometimes he asks for us to call him “Diddy, just Diddy.”  It’s how he signed my 16th birthday card.

Let me point out at this point that my father is also a fifty year old balding white male....  

I’m not sure if he thinks that by being born in Sacramento he’s somehow “hood”

Everyday questions, statements and gestures are given unordinary responses:

Me:  Hey Dad, do you know if Mom’s working right now?

Papa Gangsta Pete:  My Biotch is downstairs doin’ her bizness.

Me:  How was work?

PGP:  I kicked it with my homies out on the yard.

Me:  Barack Obama won!

PGP: Barack O’Bizzle is up in the White Hizzle!

If I give my dad a hug, I get mixed results:

“Don’t touch me, I have inmate juices on me!”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t git all up in ma grill.”

I have fond memories of me running down the soccer field when I was seven and my father yelling out to me, “If you don’t make goal I’m going to rip your heart out and shove it down your throat while it’s still beating!”  After I missed that goal, my father would then proceed to yell “I wanted a boy!”

Relax!  

My father has never laid a hand on me which is why, he claims, that I never listen to him anymore. Oh, but you should have seen the looks the soccer moms gave each other.  I’m sure they secretly contemplated calling CPA most nights.  Speaking of wanting boys though; apparently I had a brother.  He died tragically though.  Actually, he died tragically many times.  He fell off Half Dome, fatally ate a mysterious food, died from not wearing a helmet on his bike, etc.   Any normal father would have told his children not to do something because it was dangerous.  I, instead, got the “that’s how we lost your brother” phrase.  Why aren’t there any photos of said brother?  According to my dad “it was really hard on your mother so we had to destroy all of his possessions and photographs.”  While, we’re on the subject, my father also claims to hate boys and that they are “the spawn of Satan.”  Also if a boy was to ever touch me I would “get pregnant, contract aids, drop out of college, live in a trailer park, and die.”

I’ll constantly remind him that he didn’t have to have children.  But, then I get, “Oh, I really didn’t want to.  I was only out for a good time.  You and your sister are just the bi-products of unprotected sex.”  Then I retort with “Why did you keep me then?”  He claims it was for the tax deduction.  

Papa Gangsta Pete loves getting a reaction out of people.  He’s that obnoxious person who stands in lines and makes jokes loud enough in hopes that other people will hear them.  He’s notorious for laughing at his own jokes.  When I sit the living room and read a book, he makes noises to amuse himself.  His latest fetish is trying to touch my nose ring.  I got it pierced my fifth week into college and didn’t bother telling him until Thanksgiving.  He wants to know if I’m concerned about my breathing and if that’s why I felt the need to get a “third nostril.” 

Family gatherings become a circus.  When Skipper and Papa Gangsta Pete team up, there’s no mercy for anyone.  Both of them have the same humor and can rally a cynical joke like no other.  Not even Baby Dol and Secret LuLu stand a chance from sarcastic comments about how their parents are going to abandon them.    

Now to the shock of many people, my sister and I have turned out quite normal.  The Dol claims it was my mother’s good karma.  In my personal opinion, there needs to be more people like my dad in the world.  Maybe not exactly like him, but most things.  You see, my father has a really positive outlook on life.  He’s the one who’s inspired me to be carefree and not to take things in life so seriously.  I know right, an honorary Crip member is inspirational?  He’s taught me to joke around and we feed off each other’s energy.  He’s an amazing person and an amazing dad. 

If you still doubt the authenticity of this blog, please consult Polly, Skipper, or The Dol, I’m sure that they will confirm what I have just said.  If you’re lucky, they’ll probably shell out some embarrassing stories about my youth.  

So don’t be a playa hayta and keep it real.

This blog was cross-posted at: http://iruinmenslives.blogspot.com/

Alice Gets Naked In The Real Midwest

Wouldn't you agree that Colorado is much more the Midwest than Ohio is?

Me too.

So I'm moving here.

Now lets talk about hot springs. First and foremost, I feel slightly ignorant for being so.... ignorant. When I thought hot spring, I thought puddle, big, deep puddle in the middle of the desert with bubbling hot water coming out of the ground and steam and mud and critters and creatures and water shoes being absolutely necessary. Maybe you thought that too, and if you did please fess up so I don't feel so silly.

If you thought that and you haven't been to a hot spring, let me help you out. A hot spring is a swimming pool, people, a freaking heated, chlorinated swimming pool. In the middle of nowhere, which is at someone's house, really. Now, I've been assured numerous times that there is no heating pump and no chlorine, but I'm skeptical.

All I know is that we arrived at Desert Reef Hot Spring and signed our names to a water stained sheet of notebook paper and paid our hefty fee and were warned that there was to be no, absolutely NO sex in the spring and I was waltzed into a world that I just can't go on in life pretending like I haven't known. A world of nudity with strangers. It felt wrong and not just because the strangers were as old as the dino's and had their private “this and that's” flopping about in the giant desert bath tub. But just because it felt oh-so-naughty-wrong.

Maybe it was the blazing hot sun mixed with the ice cold rain. Or the naturally-hot-mineral-heavy-mountain-water. Or maybe it was the mountains, themselves. Whatever it was, after about an hour of staring at the most giant pale boobs and the smallest wee-wee I've ever seen (I couldn't even imagine one that small!) and the saggiest and wrinkliest skin known to man – being publicly-ish naked seemed like maybe a good idea.

To be fair (and honest) it was because everyone else left and we were there alone and hey, this is a vacation, after all – we got naked. NA-KED. Man, that is exciting just to type.

Anyhow, it went from feeling naughty to weird to risky to right. It felt so right that I'm wondering now why we've left the non heated, non chlorinated swimming pool in the middle of nowhere and come back to civilization where there are such things as electricity and clothing? Why? Why? Why?

I started to write today knowing that I had to share this experience with you – whoever would listen – and I thought maybe I could try to contemplate why it is that being naked in public places feels so naughty. But screw it, I don't care why. And I'm going to another hot spring today, right now, really, so I'll just have to settle for writing about the experience and leaving you to think what you will. I can't wait to hear if any of you have been to a hot spring – and if anyone has found one that isn't a giant back yard bath tub. That is, of course, if I ever come back to the world of clothing.

Don't Tell Anyone

I just threw away the journal. You know, the one that documented the last two years, in all their gory glory. Now that journal is sitting on the curb, tucked under an empty pizza box, waiting to be recycled.

I get tired just thinking about it.

The whole book weighs maybe a single pound and yet dumping it was a lot like trying to get rid of a body. First there's the ick, then there's the gross, and then to top it all off it's just such a pain in the tush that the ick and the gross start to look a lot like secondary considerations. I could sit by the window and watch for the recycling truck but somehow that feels a little too Miss Haversham from Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations."

Mr. Poppins says the secret to happiness is low expectations. I prefer not to think about what that means for our marriage, except to mention that Mr. Poppins has learned to accept his potpie with a smile and be glad for it.

Heh.

But I am in no mood, people. No Mood. Or maybe even, NO MOOD.

!

The forgetting has not yet begun. I am ready to let the forgetting begin. Instead, I am so Miss Haversham, with every day a shrine to remembering and no moving on in sight. I might as well be gathering dust and cobwebs, I am so stuck in the past year.

For those of you who are not familiar with Dickens and are having trouble following this metaphor, well, use google. That's what it's there for. Cultural enrichment. And finding porn. Or click on the link that I so thoughtfully inserted above. That took time, people. Don't let me efforts go to waste.

But most of you know exactly what I mean. You've maybe seen the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke. Or even read the book. I read it when I was ten and, seriously, it was a hard slog. And I was freaking ten. And it was in maybe seven point type. No wonder I'm blind as a bat and a little batty to boot. Miss Haversham formed part of my psyche, shaped my world view, laid the foundation for my expectations of life and relationships.

This so explains my reclusiveness and my love of wedding cake and my desire to waltz through everyday life in a formal gown and matching tiara. Although, I prefer fresh wedding cake to twenty-year-old fossilized, home-to-mice-and-spiders wedding cake.

I really do.

I also prefer being happily married to the aforementioned, not-too-great-of-expectations Mr. Poppins because that's so much nicer than being a bitter spinster who was jilted on her wedding day. Although, I wouldn't have necessarily blamed Mr. Poppins if he took one look at all the potpies in his future and high-tailed it to the nearest all-you-can-eat buffet.

Anyway, in the time since I started writing this post, the recycling has come and gone, possibly twice. I lose track of these things. And my mood has improved. I'm not exactly in the mood, but at least I'm not in no mood anymore. There's something about the symbolic act of tossing the past, of reducing all that angst and goosh to next week's newspaper that makes it seem so not-that-important. Sure, it happened.

Happened.

Note the past tense. And it's done now. And gone. I've got a new journal, one with a lot of blank pages, to fill. I'm even considering the possibility that I might want to keep this one. Because maybe it's going to document the most glorious year of my life.

You never know.