Categories
Blogroll
Meta
The Ass Age
We have entered The Ass Age, and The Apocalypse is sure to follow. I would like it to hurry up.
I’m not certain about the beginning of The Ass Age. Jennifer Lopez was the precursor many years ago but no one could’ve imagined what was coming.
Astute bible students may have predicted it, though.
And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she fell down under Balaam: and Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he smote the ass with a staff.
That’s just one of 143 times the word ‘ass’ appears in the bible. And as we know, Things Happen For A Reason. The Lord was warning us about the worship of asses. And in the fullness of time, it has come to pass.
Kim Kardashian is the Anti-Christ, obviously. We are suffering for her sins. I am, anyway.
That huge ass is following us everywhere, threatening to block out the sun. Maybe it’s causing Climate Change for all we know. It keeps getting bigger. It will need a wheelbarrow or crane or something if it keeps growing at its present rate.
What does that huge ass want from us?
It has already spawned disturbing imitators, especially in the art of hip-hop, who might be the Apostles. How many Apostles were there? I once has an awful wall-hanging depiction of The Last Supper that I used as a rug, but I failed to count the attendees. Were there eight? Ten?
Whatever. Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalea are two, and Khloe Kardashian makes three. When we get the full cohort, the doomsday clock will strike midnight. The End Times. It will be a bummer for most of us but for others it will come as a blessed relief. No more huge asses taunting us, frightening us, swelling uncontrollably the The Blob.
We will be free.
Toilets
If you’ve been following this story, you will be glad to hear that the Window Treatment issue has been sorted out.
We are getting blinds in fake wood that looks really real, ordered from a fantastic Persian lady who also showed me curtains with little Japanese guys in boats that would cost $2,000 for one room! It was a huge relief to get the window decision behind us.
We disagreed about the couch placement in the living room and got people to come over and render judgements and help move stuff around. When I told my psychiatrist about the couch dispute, he shared that he and his wife had a couch dispute a few days earlier, with one of them using the phrase “over my dead body.”
I have not been moved to say “over my dead body” so far, but I did start writing a song called “I’ve got a bridge and I’m gonna jump off it.” We live a couple of short blocks from a park that overlooks the ocean, with a steep drop that I can’t look at without the thought of jumping. If I jumped, it would have to be a sure-fire fatality. It would have to be several stories high and I would have to be more despondent that I am at this moment.
No one likes to hear me talk about death. Death is with me every single day, as a heartache and and a fantasy solution. My niece came to visit and was happy to talk about death, which was a delightful surprise. She had given the subject plenty of thought. I confided that my husband once got angry when he told me he wanted a coffin burial and I asked what he wanted to wear for the occasion. She responded, “Probably because he has too many choices,” referring to his collection of 94 shirts.
In any case, I can’t die before I get the pink toilet I so richly deserve.
We walked into a plumbing shop after finding that the tile shop was closed. There, I asked if they had a pink toilet, and the girl told me Sorry, pink toilets are a thing of the past. Armed with my knew Toilet Knowledge, I said smugly, “No, Gerber still makes them.” She went to her office to look this up on her computer, and I heard her exclaim “Unbelievable!”
I felt wonderful, more informed about toilets that an actual toilet girl! She took me to a hallway decorated with toilet seats in every color ever manufactured. She was a genuine Toilet Enthusiast. She pointed out a color called ‘Merlot,’ a deep wine color, almost like Chanel Rouge Noir, and noted that it’s the hardest color to find. We discussed the wide variety of green hued toilet seats.
The Toilet Girl ordered a pink toilet for me. Did you know that the seat comes in both wood and plastic?
I want to be best friends with the Toilet Girl and talk about toilets until the end of time, or until I get a Tile Guy to bond with.
Window Blinds: A Fight To The Death
We are moving box by box, until Monday when the moving truck comes to take the big stuff. The new house is nice, and a neighbor from across the street gave us a bottle of wine and some cookies to welcome us. We bought huge rattan porch chairs from a guy on Craig’s list, and sitting on the porch enjoying a gentle sea breeze is genuinely idyllic.
But then there’s the window blinds.
I have never had one single thought about window blinds. They played no role in my existence. But that’s over. We’ve entered into a tense conflict over what kind of blinds to get. I want real wood. He wants faux wood, I guess made of vinyl. Wood is expensive and bla bla bla. But vinyl blinds seem creepy and not homey. Why wants vinyl anything?
I kept on promoting wood, and my husband kept on noting that he couldn’t tell the difference, so fake wood was fine. We got increasingly frustrated. It became one of those ‘just admit I’m right’ argument. I suggested that the one who cares most should trump the one who doesn’t fee emotional invested.
I went into another room feeling angry, wronged, resentful, and wounded. Who gives a shit about fucking blinds, I thought. Why give a shit about anything.
I wondered whether the fight was really about control, fear, loss, insecurity. For me, yep, all those things, plus grief, going through old schoolwork and mother’s day cards, art projects, stuffed animals, used hypodermic needles. I have to keep all these things in my heart while letting go of them physically. At least some of them.
Meanwhile, the motherfucking blinds. I wish we could just get curtains instead. And I need to buy a pink toilet to match the bathtub. I don’t care what it costs because life owes me a pink toilet.
Dumbing Down
We are packing our shit and preparing to leave our house, the house where nobody likes to throw anything away.
I like the idea of a fresh start, in terms of starting over in a clean empty house and pretending that we’ll learn to not pile things on every available surface. We’ll want to keep things tidy because we’ll be motivated by the nice empty canvass of the nice empty house.
Ha.
But still, I am trying. I’m giving shit away and getting rid of stuff I can live without. So I started getting rid of old books, the kind that are really yellowed with tiny print and smell really musty. Eventually, I had boxes of books to take to the thrift store.
I realized that now when someone visits me, they won’t know I was once smart. They won’t have any idea of how well-read I am! Most of the fiction I bought over the years was in the form of cheap paperbacks, with a few rare exceptions when I felt justified in splurging on a hardback edition. I packed up dozens of wonderful moldy books that I would still recommend to anyone who likes to read.
All that Balzac, Zola, Bronte sisters, Goethe, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Nabokov, Iris Murdoch, Hermann Hesse, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Camus, all those great books that helped me to understand human nature while escaping the awfulness of being me.
If you know you’re not going to read those yellowed pages again, why should you keep them? Do people keep enormous ‘libraries’ of books just to remind themselves how much they’ve read? Or because books are too sacred to throw away? I really don’t know the answer. I will still have tons of books that are in good shape, because they’re newer or because they’re big art books made from high quality paper.
But people who meet me now will think I’m some idiot who just reads dictionaries and books about street gangs and mental disorders.
Meanwhile, my mind is now preoccupied with stuff I’ve never thought about in my entire life. Toilet seats! Kitchen cabinets! Media consoles! Wicker porch chairs!
It’s pathetic, these new preoccupations. We even discovered this TV channel where ALL THEY DO is buy houses, knock down walls, and argue about tile! It’s a whole new world, a world I never thought I’d relate to.
And it’s brought me and my husband a new kind of intimacy as we mock those losers who always talk about ‘natural light’ and always, always manage to say the word ‘granite.’
The New House
Here’s me in my house where I’ve lived for nearly forty years. There’s Pico, too. And the fake deer head that was a present from my friend Mark, because we laughed at in in a catalog. I don’t know why I’m scowling or why it looks like I’m packing a dick. I must have had my reasons.
We sold our house! We bought a cheaper house in another seaside community that hasn’t been gentrified yet with cafes that serve eight dollar toast. Venice is ruined, pretty much, by the Google employees and property developers who eat that toast.
So, now we will begin a new era in a new house that isn’t cluttered with forty years of collecting, hoarding, storing and piling things and we will be leaving behind a rich history of tragedy and joy. There are two dogs buried in the back yard. There’s a mural of a mermaid rising from the sea that covers an entire bedroom wall. Max’s girlfriend painted it over three days, after which little Charlie exclaimed: “No, I said I DIDN’T want a mermaid!” I hope I remember to take a picture of her.
Now I’ll get to the point. I’ve never decorated a house, not consciously. I know what I hate in terms of style, but not what I want. I want a light, airy environment that is suitable for a wood frame house built around 1913, with a big front porch and a big yard that needs to be landscaped. I don’t like ‘mid-century modern’ and I don’t like ‘early American’ either. AND we will have a tight budget.
Who wants to help? I need ideas! Decorating websites! Places to buy furniture that aren’t Ikea or one of those awful chain stores. What curtains should I get for all those windows? All tips and advice are welcome! Here is the one thing that I find reassuring about the move – I will have a pink bathtub.
And Now I’m A Fucking Midget
I’m sad to say that Pico is gone, as you might have predicted. Life seemed so miserable for him.
I will blame myself for making the call, because I don’t know how long he would have lasted, despite the chronic pain and cognitive issues.
I miss him terribly but I’m not traumatized, because it seems like I’m already stuck with permanent PTSD that time won’t budge.
However! I am still capable of being dismayed.
I fucked up my back when I had to carry Pico inside from the backyard. He was only 40 pounds but I managed to lift him improperly.
So after whimpering (i.e. screaming) about my back for two weeks, I went to the doctor. The first blow was when she measured my height. I am supposed to be 5′ 6″ but now I measured 5′ 4 1/2″ for a loss of one and a half inches of valuable height!
Fuck me! I can’t believe this, even though I know that age and shitty bones lead to shrinking. What next? A dowager’s hump? I’ll probably go bald and whatever else is available to elderly women. I had to have ex-rays of my back, which revealed a degenerating spine or something that sounded like that. All those years of weightlifting, for nothing.
I’m going to get physical therapy for my back, but for now I have two new prescriptions plus a bottle of Pico’s narcotic pain-killers.
To further drive home the old age thing, my husband and I were talking about TV hosts and we couldn’t remember Larry King’s last name. It was a moment of shared horror as our eyes met and we silently acknowledged that our brains have turned to mush.
Trying to retrieve Larry King’s last name was like gazing into an infinite black hole where a memory bank used to be. I hate Larry King now. I would say He’s dead to me, except now I’ll probably remember him as a symbol of senility, both his and mine.
Dog Dementia
My dog is senile. He is sixteen years old, even though we refused to admit he was getting on.
Living in denial was easy until he lost his mind.
Poor Pico! He is completely nuts. He doesn’t know what he’s doing or where he’s going or what to do when he needs to move backwards or turn around.
He howls for hours. He pants and whines. He often needs help to stand up because his rear legs are so wobbly. He has arthritis and I don’t know what else. The vet advised us that any kind of surgery was out of the question. I like her for not trying to squeeze money out of us.
She’s a wonderful vet even though she’s unsure about penises. My BFF remarked that Pico’s penis is probably the first one she’s seen in years. I think that’s to her credit. She didn’t mind at all when Pico shat on her floor.
I don’t know whether ‘shat’ is a word but I’m using it anyway. My dog has been shitting in the house for more than a week. This ties into my recurring dream that everything is Shit.
This morning, Pico backed himself under a couch and started howling. The more I tried to pull him free, the more he reversed, moving more of his body under the couch and getting stuck. I tried to lift up the couch like mothers can do when their child is underneath a car, but this supermom thing doesn’t seem to work with dogs.
I ran outside and got the drug dealer from the house next to the house next door. He lifted the couch and took a phone call from someone named ‘Josh.’ “I’ll call you in a few minutes, babe” he told Josh.
I am really at a loss here.
Pico still likes his food, even though he forgets where the bowl is. Otherwise, his life seems pretty awful, with all the confusion and anxiety. I personally will not be the one to pull the plug because I’m already permanently traumatized.
Advice, dog owners?
2014 VMA Awards Exegesis
God, what an ordeal. I’m going directly to Beyonce to say: Why did everyone love this performance???
I really think I have never seen such an obnoxious display of self-importance in my whole life. “Welcome to my World?” Who gives a shit about her world! Why can’t she sing a song with a melody? It’s all like a long intro that never turns into an actual song. Since when does spreading your legs in a leotard and shaking your hair around signify feminism? Is everybody crazy? Beyonce is now like a parody of a self-important diva. She fucking LOVES herself. Why does she need us at this point? When she tells the audience ‘I love y’all!’ it is absurdly hollow.
And the fucking husband-and-baby gambit, Jesus Christ. Who else would do that? Just awful.
Okay. Moving on. The rest of the show was about asses, most of them huge. I was actually moved to consult my husband for a male judgement on whose ass was the night’s biggest. His answer was Iggy, which surprised me. Surely Niki Minaj had the evening’s hugest ass, or maybe she just twerked it in our faces more.
The look of dismay on Rita Ora‘s face during the Anaconda dance functions perfectly as a universal statement of repugnance for this tawdry shit. It just can’t get any lower. Racist, sexist, artificial, we now have Miley Cryus as the elder statesman and voice of reason. Please Adele, come back, we need you.
In order of awfulness there was:
Tayler Swift – Tragically delusional, she now thinks she is Britney Spears. Make her die.
Nicki Minaj – Depressingly shameless, she has some nerve to lecture other rappers about artistic integrity.
Sam Smith – Ugh! Stop singing that same fucking song. He’s like Antony Hegarty without the gender intrigue. Hate him. Bring back Boy George if we need a pudgy gay white soul singer!
Maroon 5 – Adam Levine is a disgrace to the Chosen People. He needs to shave and to stop imitating Sting.
Jesse J – Ew, what is the point of her? She’s just a big man with a screechy voice.
Now, here’s what was good:
Iggy Azalea – because I love her and that’s that.
Rita Ora – because she can actually sing.
Usher – because he can dance.
Homeless Jesse – because he is really cute, and I liked his relative composure.
Miley Cyrus – Because she managed to look ‘classy’ by keeping her tongue in her mouth, and stole everyone’s thunder with that homeless shit.
Maybe now people can stop throwing buckets of ice water on themselves and start throwing water at Tayler Swift if at all possible.
$300 Lipstick, Finally!
This is what I’ve been praying for: a red lipstick I don’t want!
What a wonderful surprise from Givenchy, the brand of choice for Kim, Kanye, and many other celebrity luminaries. Allow me to fill you in:
French luxury label Givenchy is launching a $300 lipstick in its signature deep red shade in the Le Rouge line, clad in crocodile skin. Limited to only 3,000 pieces, it will be available at Barneys New York starting October. Otherwise priced at only $36, Givenchy’s limited edition Le Rouge gets its staggering price tag from the crocodile skin it’s encapsulated in, patterned on the black and silver tube.
I only hope to meet one of the 3,000 idiots who buy this crocodile-clad piece of shit. Lucky for me that I shot my wad on the stupid Louboutin nail polish!
Okay. I just wanted to share my relief. Now you can go back to what you were doing. xo