I DIDN'T REALIZE YOU WROTE SUCH BLOODY AWFUL POETRY
I'm
feeling supersonic, drinking gin and tonics, and I'm about to eat
Popeye's chicken for dinner. To magnify the disgustingness of that,
our local Popeyes sits attached to the local gas station. Yeah,
right, grose. My poor body. (I just accidentially wrote "my
poop body". That too.)
I
was just reading about Ben Fong-Torres online, who you may know
is a former Rolling Stone journalist and all around renowned interviewer.
I've been seeing his name a lot lately, and I guess I remembered
it either from Rolling Stone or from Almost Famous and I Wikipedia-ed
him to see his credentials, which are impressive. My first instinct
is to want to do a documentary about him (please, no more unfinished
documentaries -- as recently as today I had an inquiry from one
of my interview-subjects asking what the status of one of them is)
and my second is to use him as an example for the list for my son.
The List. There's this list I've got going on in the back of my
head that has not yet been committed to paper, and is all about
what I want for him in life. Ben Fong-Torres has, at least in viewing
from the outside, lived a pretty awesome life. He's gotten to meet
interesting people and travel to interesting places and could write
a book filled with amazing tales of adventure. Recommending this
kind of life is close to the top of what's on The List. I will tell
you more of what's on The List when my synapses are not so juniper
berry-soaked.
===
I
started this entry on Friday night, and I say that to reassure you
that I'm not drinking gin and tonics mid-afternoon on a Tuesday.
Even the old "it's five o'clock somewhere!" doesn't extend
this far. Unless it's spring break, the forth of July, new years,
or a sunny day in Puerto Villarta.
I
went to Los Angeles last week. It was a long drive. We missed the
earthquake by an hour. The baby and I stayed in Burbank with friends,
and I did not drive by our house while I was there. It was a combination
of a) not wanting to be seen by neighbors and the renters, b) not
feeling ready to see it maybe quite yet, and c) oddly, not really
caring. That more than anything proved to me that I'm happy we made
the move. That and driving down my friend's street thinking, "We
used to take walks here. Now we ride a bike by the ocean every day."
No contest.
Then
we drove north to stay with my parents after my mom's surgery, which
was disappointingly unsuccessful but not life threatening, and that
was hot. Not like your neighbor mowing the lawn with no shirt on
hot, but like hundred-degree hot. Although the baby played in the
sprinklers with no clothes on so there was in fact some shirtless
activity.
Now
we are back where the climate is more civilized, and we're thinking
about buying a house. Suddenly we got house lust in the last three
days, and now we have two in our sites and we'll see what happens.
One of them is a foreclosure, which I know nothing about, so I'll
have to learn fast. The only problem is that we're only three months
into our lease and our landlord is also our real estate agent, so
I'm not sure what his incentive is to help us leave his rental,
but hopefully it'll work out.
===
Top
5 things on brain:
1.
Houses. Is the market at the bottom? How do we afford one here?
What if our renters leave and we can't find more and we have two
mortgages and no rental income?
2.
Beans needs to stop jumping on the counter and eating food. Latest
casualty: Betty Crocker muffins. Do you know what it takes to get
me to bake, even from a box? And then he ate them.
3.
Making friends here is just as hard as I thought it would be.
4.
The baby's going to daycare on Friday for the first time ever. He'll
probably be fine, but will I be fine?
5.
Will I actually get work done while he's gone?
Also,
I would just like to say for the record that I hate the fact that
it's easy for ex-boyfriends who you never want to talk to or even
think about again to find you if you have even the slightest web
presence. Thanks, internet. Ugh.
===
This
week the baby is seventeen months old, which is almost a year and
a half. How did it happen? I do not know.
