It is my nightly ritual to get into bed at around 1:00 am and read until I’m drowsy enough to sleep. The other night, I put my book down and surveyed my bedroom. I was suddenly overcome with a bittersweet sense of nostalgia for it, if it’s possible to feel nostalgia for the present. My husband walked in and I blurted out, “I’m going to miss this bedroom when I’m dead.” Instead of being pissed off about how morbid I am, he surprised me by laughing and saying, “Well, then you have it better than some people!”

I just love my bedroom! I love our big bed, nicknamed Snuggy if you must know. I love the art on the walls and the heavy velvet curtains from Ikea. I love my antique dresser covered with piles of jewelry and religious shit. I love my thriftshop chinoiserie and crappy velvet chair.

It struck me today that there must be lots of things I’ll miss when I’m dead. And that I should start appreciating them now while I can. I think we should all do this.

I’ll start:

I will miss burgers and fries, Pollo Loco chicken, and chips and salsa. I’ll miss frozen Indian dinners. I’m already starting to miss the first cup of morning coffee after the coffee machine does a little song.

I’ll miss Nicole Wallace on MSNBC. She seems so incredibly nice besides being smart and funny.  I’ll probably miss that SNL guy who does an uncanny  and hilarious imitation of Trump. I’ll miss hearing my favorite songs on the car radio. Obviously I can hear them any time I want to, but everyone knows it’s the surprise that makes it feel like a gift.

I’ll miss getting packages from Sephora. Free shipping and easy returns!

I’ll miss changing my nail polish. It’s relaxing and it makes me feel arty.

I’ll miss my favorite thriftshop, where the octogenarian volunteers start calling our “We’re closing” every five minutes, starting 45 minutes before closing time.

I will miss exchanging pleasantries with strangers, which always makes me feel like a human being. I’ll miss our Christmas Eve parties, which remind  me that I’m lucky to have people I love, who love me back.

I’ll miss the triumph of returning something to Zara even after washing it twice, like I did today with some awful baggy jeans.

Of course I’ll miss my husband but not as much as he’ll miss me (because he’ll have to get into Snuggy alone). And I’ll miss my darling dog, Kora.

That’s about it for now. How about you? I really want to know!

Yesterday, my sister and I visited our favorite jewelry shop, Nobel Jewelry in Santa Monica. From the outside it looks like a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, but inside it is a glittering wonderland of beautifully displayed antique jewels. You can get a chain repaired for a few bucks, or you can purchase an Art Deco diamond engagement ring for $20,000. You can also chat with the owners, Ken and Kia, a pair of charming guys who emigrated from Persia with their family when they were boys.

So my sister had some things that needed repairs, and I wanted to argue about rings, and as we prepared to leave, Ken asked if we wanted to see a diamond he’d just acquired. It was a ring he had to get from the window, a spectacular European cut diamond solitaire. He offered up his jeweler’s loupe so we could appreciate its unique properties.

I asked Ken if I could use the loupe to look at the splinter in my thumb, which has been driving me nuts. I got it from an attack by a potted cactus on my front porch, nearly a month ago. My husband  couldn’t extract it and neither could I. I had gone to my doctor to get it out, and she ended up saying, “I think I got it but maybe not all of it.”

She didn’t get “all of it”, as it was getting swollen and now I could barely use my thumb.

So Ken said, “You have a splinter? Let me see!” He seemed concerned. He looked at it and said, “That must hurt.” He looked through his loupe and exclaimed, “That’s been in there a long time!” Then he announced, “I’ll get it out for you.”

He disappeared into a back room and my sister looked at me with fear and wonder. She asked me if I was really going to proceed with this. Ken came back with some alcohol, a needle nose tweezers and a visor thing with goggles. He bent over my thumb and started to work.

It took a while. It hurt but I trusted him implicitly, such was his confident and gentle manner. While he was at it, a guy came to the shop’s locked iron gate and Ken called out, “I’ll be right with you.” I told him he could stop to let the customer in, but he was lost in his efforts. I told my sister, “Go engage that guy to keep him there! Ask him how his day is going!” But the guy was gone.

Finally, Ken got the splinter. He said triumphantly, “No wonder this hurt.” He lay the splinter on my thumb and told my sister to take a picture with her phone. We both said FUCK! appreciatively; it was a long sharp cactus thingy.

Ken got some antibiotic cream and covered the hole in my thumb. I got a band-aid from my purse and he wrapped it around my thumb. Now Ken and I were bonded forever. We were both elated. He revealed that he was all too familiar with splinters, it was part of his work as a jeweler.

We stood in the glow of our shared trust and gratitude, and I tried to remember a fable about a mouse who gets a splinter out of a lion’s paw. I couldn’t remember how it ended. I hoped the lion didn’t eat the mouse for his trouble.

I shook Ken’s hand with my good one, and wandered out of the store, my faith in humanity kindled like never before and knowing that even if I died from a flesh-eating bacteria, it would make a great story.

Cult objects of desire are always disappointing, with one exception.

Make-up artist Pat McGrath’s lipsticks really are the most wonderful thing in the whole world (right after babies, of course!)

They are everything you ever hoped for in a lipstick, and more. The case is adorable and kind of stupid, with a nice heft and a good confirmatory click. The pigment is unbelievably rich. It glides on like silk underpants. I don’t know, I made that part up. But it is definitely silky, smooth and light as a whisper. I can’t write this kind of crap! What does “light as a whisper” mean? It feels light, okay? Here’s a bunch of literary similes for “light as…”

It is so dope, you won’t resent spending $38 for it. You will THANK IT for only costing $38. Tom Ford lipstick is $54, not that I would ever consider buying it. All his sickening fragrances smell like room-spray, as I’m sure you all know.

I got the MatteTrance color Elson, a deep blue red. If you don’t like a matte formula, there are creamy colors too.

You can order online at Sephora or find it in real life at ‘select’ stores. You can also get it at Pat McGrath’s website, where I borrowed this picture.*

*My husband said it looks just like my bathroom! What greater compliment can a woman ask for?

Saint Clare intervenes to save a child from a wolf. Giovanni di Paolo, 1455

But I do love a botanica. I just found another one in Long Beach, hidden on a side street but filled with a million delights. Shelves that nearly reached the ceiling were stocked with perfumes, oils, cleaning sprays, amulets, religious figurines, herbs, and candles.

I grabbed a bottle of Arazza Todo oil for a friend, and a pretty teenager with blood red hair asked if I needed help. YES, I told her, and asked in a cheery voice: “What do you have if your kid hates you?”

She led me to a candle labeled Santa Clara, and said mothers used it to pray for the well-being of their children.  She added that the shop’s owner sometimes turns on three candles at once, arranged around a bowl of water. I love the idea of turning on a candle! I might have to go back there to buy a “Court” candle that you turn on if you’re in legal trouble. My kid who hates me has threatened a restraining order against me because I can’t stop sending him email.

[Note to you kids who hate mommy on Reddit: fuck off. This isn’t about you.]

Now that I’m home, I’ve turned on my candle and burned a stick of palo santo to cleanse my house of bad vibes. I can’t actually pray, because duh, atheist, but I can speak to the candle in a tone of respect, like I speak to clothes hangers or things I trip over.

It occurs to me that my reactions to my kid breaking up with me are similar to symptoms of PTSD: Irritability, hostility, fear, rumination, insomnia and nightmares. It is traumatic, after all. One minute it’s Where’s the clean towels? and the next minute, Please leave me and my family alone.

In my most morbid moments, I wonder if I’ll get to hold my child again before I die, maybe because of all the biopsies. In calmer moments, I figure that none of this matters. Life is but a dream. You’re here, stuff happens, and then you’re gone, poof. Why agonize about anything?

I have developed a new obsession with silk pajamas, having bought a beautiful pair for $6.99 at Goodwill. Now, I have to look for more, because that’s what happens when you have a shopping disorder.

Today, I was patiently searching a rack at a gigantic thriftshop called Savers, when a woman standing next to me started to cry. I had noticed her earlier, registering that she was very short and looked disadvantaged somehow.

She looked at me and said through her tears, “My brother was killed in Vietnam.”

I tried to compute this, thinking, But that was a million years ago. I managed to say, “Oh no, what year did this happen?”

What a stupid question! I think I was trying to catch her in a lie. Still, she tried to remember. Sixty-something.

I then said, with all my heart, “I’m so sorry. It never gets better, does it?”

She agreed and we started to talk. I asked her brother’s name (Ricky) and showed her my locket where I keep Max’s hair.

She told me she had taken care of her mother for six years and said: “She died in my arms.”

I asked about her kids: One has stage 3 liver cancer and another needs therapy but her insurance won’t cover it.

We talked about how some days are worse and some are better. She confided that she goes to thrift-shops to distract herself from her sadness…I think she said something like, “so I don’t get depression.” I assured her that I do the same.

I told her to remember that she is loved and needed. She asked Max’s name so she could pray for him.

Wherever you go, a person standing next to you may be suffering, and isolated in the bubble of their grief. The act of comforting someone is more gratifying than a million pairs of silk pj’s.  Alleviating someone else’s pain is the best way to soothe your own.

For a little while, because of this encounter, I felt like a valuable human being. I didn’t find any pajamas but I did find a silk nightie for $2.99.

Save

Save

Things may be bad but for once there’s a silver lining and here he is.

This is Mac, who agreed to let me pose with him so I could tell people he’s my boyfriend. He didn’t act all flattered, he was more like Okay, do your thing but hurry up.

When you see a man in an alligator suit with rings on every finger, you know that life is a giant gumball machine with those plastic toy capsules where you want the little bouncy ball but you keep getting a sticky hand or a smiley-face eraser or if luck is really against you, out comes Donald Trump.

But one in a while, you get a dazzling prize.

Behold my new boyfriend and style icon, Mac, who said he found his suit at the National Council Jewish Women’s Thriftshop on Venice and Grandview.

Save

Save

Remember going on field trips when you were a kid? It was a chance to get out the classroom, and it would an adventure. Not always a good one, but a diversion from the routine of school.

Last week I found a Botanica just a few miles away, bit it was like entering another universe.

This was a real, authentic Botanica, not the one in Hollywood that sells candles to hispters. It was dark and dusty, crammed wall-to-wall with weird packets of herbs, oils, religious statues, Santeria supplies, trays of amulets and charms and some shit you didn’t even want to know what it was.

There was a girl behind the counter in full cola uniform and manner. She might have been Filipino, and she didn’t speak much Spanish. She had died blonde hair with long black roots, heavy winged eyeliner, and a tattoo in gang writing down in her cleavage,

Her name was Jenny, and she watched me ogle the stuff behind the counter. I told her I was looking for something to cure a friend’s illness, instead of admitting to being a nosy Jew on a cultural field trip.

She asked me if I believed in “that stuff” and I said “nah,” immediately outing myself by mistake.

We talked for a bit and she told me she had a month old baby. It turned out that her husband was in jail, BUT IT WASN’T HIS FAULT.

Of course it wasn’t his fault! I watch Lock-Up, I’m not an idiot!

She told me his story and I narrowed my eyes like Nancy Grace and asked: “Who threw the first punch?”

It was the Other Guy, not her husband! But somehow the other guy’s wife, a crazy bitch, told the cops that bla bla bla bla.

Poor Jenny! Only twenty-two.  She was watching the counter for her husband’s mother, who owns the shop and gives readings and ‘cleansings’ in a back room.

Jenny revealed that her baby was asleep in the back of the shop. She insisted on showing me the baby girl, who has some stupid name like Kaylee or something.

I cooed at the baby appreciatively. A fat little girl appeared and spoke to Jenny. She seemed to know her way around the store and might have been the innocent husband’s little sister.

The little girl fingered the tiny evil-eye bracelets and Hamsa charms in front of me. I told her that I love Hamsa’s, which actually isn’t true,  but I wanted to engage her in conversation.

“Good for you,” she answered coolly.

What a fat little bitch, I thought to myself.

I am thinking of going back to get the owner to give me a spiritual cleansing in the back room. I am completely serious.

Plus I want to hear more about Jenny and her predicament.

Save

Years ago, I posed in these big black boots, aware that they looked stupid with the dress but probably thinking I was cool anyway.

It was eight years ago and a whole other life.

The boots are in my closet, languishing with all the other shit I’ve wasted money on, always forgetting that I don’t like to get dressed up and I have nowhere to go. Each time I get out my credit card, I’m under a spell where I believe I’m someone else.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’ve worn the boots on two occasions. They cost around 950 bucks (I know!) so that’s $475 per use.

But wait.

Today, I clicked on the Maison Margiela Autumn 2016 collection and discovered that there’s hope for styling my boots after all.

I can wear them with a big upside-down orange coat-blanket thing, cinched at the waist with an uncomfortable belt! I even have the pasty white legs for this look.

Or, there’s this:

Okay, so a silver hooded cape (unless that’s a hat?) over a silver mini-dress  with a nice kangaroo pouch.

It’s good to switch things up, I’m always hearing. Why wear jeans and a t-shirt every day? I’m not getting any younger. Even if I’m just going out for coffee or groceries, there’s no reason not to throw on an upside-down coat and rock my huge boots.

Another idea is to forget about the boots and patiently wait to die so that some girl with size ten feet and an appreciation of offbeat overpriced crap can be the happiest person ever.

Save

Save

Save

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.

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.’