Smarty-Pants Snark and A Couple of Flashbacks

I'm a little bit of a cranky-pants today.

UPDATE -- 10 minutes later. The day just got immeasurably better because "Heartbeat, It's a Lovebeat," by the DeFranco family, featuring Little Tony DeFranco, was just on CBS.  I had to get up and do arm digs, and you know what?  It made me feel better.  What do you mean you don't dance in your office?  I do it all the time.  (I'm just working my way up to doing cartwheels after hours down that long hallway that goes past the Heir Apparent's office. I will do it, too. That is, if I can still get my ass in the air to do a cartwheel at all.)

Makes me think of the Hudson Brothers, another faboo 70's group, who rocked the baddest feathered do's this side of Barry Gibb.

Why don't guys wear their collars out and proud like that anymore? I love those wings!  Trivia: the one in the middle is Kate Hudson's DAD!


Okay, this put a little oxygen into the day and I can go back to work now.

C-Minus. Needs Improvement. Doesn't Meet Her Potential.

If you were to grade my blogging in August, I'd barely pass,  I know.  ME! The girl who always has something to say! And here I am with a paltry nine blog entries in August.  I guess after the projectile emotional vomiting of June and July, I guess it's to be expected. I mean, I did allow myself to fall in love after slamming the door on it for many, many years, it only goes to follow that the end felt more like exsanguination than ending a blip of a relationship.  But once everything was done and my blood was cooling in puddles around me, turning that nice maroony shade, I was fine.  Funny how that happens, iddn it?

Then I spent the end of July and most of August dragging a wheelie suitcase full of dirty laundry around the country (I didn't actually see much of any city, but I did get good look at a whole bunch of airports!), thereby creating a massive case of abandonment syndrome in the Mad Kitty, who now follows me around the apartment like a little dog as if she's afraid I may just change my mind on her.

And man, there has been a lot of death in my life in the last couple of years, hasn't there? Not sure what that's about, just life being life I guess, but just in case, I always stand behind the yellow line, and hold the railing on the stairs, 'cause you just never know.

And then there are the hours I'm spending on this other thing, this slow, sort of sexy unspooling of something that up to now feels sort of unfrantic and deliberate and like a great old-fashioned striptease. Beyond delicious.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the universe isn't personal -- it just keeps on doing what it does, the wheel keeps on spinning, and every now and again, the ball lands in your number.

But back to the poor blogging frequency.  What can I say? I've been busy. Preoccupied. Slightly dis. trac. ted.

I will try to do better.

Summer's End

It's been a tough summer.

I fell a little bit in love at the beginning of the summer, had my heart kinda ripped out and eaten in front of my dying eyes. I decided that the best thing for me was to follow a wise man's advice and put that love on my heart, so when it broke, the love could fall in and fill it. Nourish it.

Mambo stayed around just long enough to prop me up through all that, until I no longer needed his stout and sturdy heart to carry me anymore, and I had to say goodbye to him after nearly 20 years.

My mother died last night. She went to sleep in her own bed, in her own house, and died as quietly as she had lived. I suppose you couldn't ask for more than that, could you?

But still, my mommy died.

And in the middle of it, there is something really, really beautiful happening. I'm feeling superstitious about it, so I won't say any more, just that at this moment, in the midst of the shock of trying to absorb the fact that, holy shit, I'm an orphan -- in the middle of these waves of grief and nausea, there's this one completely clean and good thing. And though it's new, and just-born, it doesn't feel scary or weird. Like the good smell of clean laundry, or your hands after you peel an orange. Know what I'm saying?

Her name was Aiko. I am named after her.

It means "love."

Wordless Wednesday (my first)

Nature vs. Nurture vs. Neighborhood

Had a couple of conversations today that I really enjoyed because sometimes, in the ever-growing blandness that is Brooklyn becoming, it's easy to forget what Brooklyn was and what it still, in some places, is.

First conversation, with a guy I work with, outside our building during a smoke break. Ralph's a street guy, you can tell. Lives in the Bronx, but grew up in Bushwick, in the '70's.

Go ahead, Google "Bushwick August 1977." Bushwick was the ugly face of the riots and looting that took place during the Blackout of '77. Remember "The Bronx is Burning?" That was 1977, when the city was broke and desolate and on the brink of ruin. That's what Ralph grew up in and escaped from.

Now, the whippersnappers who moved here from Jersey six months ago and run around telling people, "I'm from Brooklyn," really oughta pipe the fuck down and listen to the Ralphs and Carloses and Hectors in their neighborhoods. While they're busy getting their rent paid by daddy and pretending they're going to be rock stars, and looking down their noses at the Ralphs and Carloses and Hectors hanging out on the corners, they are Brooklyn. The real deal.

Ralph is a street kid who managed to escape. Lost two brothers to drugs, prison, and finally, AIDS. Can you imagine losing not one, but two members of your immediate family to AIDS, within a span of eight years?

And Ralph was very frank about his oldest brother -- he spent so much time in prison, Ralph hardly knew him, and when he came out, he would do something stupid just to go back in. Institutionalized, is the word they use. Ralph shook his head between puffs of his cigarette.

"Man, I don't know how I got outta there alive."

Then, as I walked up Bushwick Ave from the subway, I saw Carlos, my neighbor from downstairs, walking along with a kid about 13, with a basketball in his hands. Carlos grew up in the neighborhood, over on the South Side. South Side's now full of more of the same, hipster guys in skinny jeans and their overfed 25-year-old suburban girlfriends. (I ask again, what's with all the fat 25-year-old girls?)

When I lived on South 2nd, it was still pretty grim, very much a gang and drug area, but in six short years the neighborhood has become "desirable." Meaning whiter, as landlords jacked up rents on rent-stabilized apartments that these kids are too stupid to go to the Housing Department to look up to see if they're being overcharged. Most of them probably are, and it serves them right. Hey, Dad's paying the rent, who cares what it actually costs, right?

So Carlos gave me a hug and commiserated briefly about his buddy Mambo, may he rest in kitty peace, and introduced me to this kid, who if you saw him walking toward you, most of you would cross the street, or at least clutch your purse a little tighter. But before I could say a word, Carlos starts braggin' on this kid. He's a good student, he listens to his mother, he doesn't get into trouble...he has braces. Carlos pointed out this last with as much pride as the good grades and obeying his mother.

This kid is not related to Carlos, but because he's neighborhood, he kind of is related. It's Brooklyn, man. Carlos told a story of how the kid brought home some not-so-great grades once, and his uncle, one of the guys around the neighborhood, made him go to the teacher and apologize and promise to do better. The kid did it, too.

Can you imagine growing up in a place where getting good grades and wearing braces on your teeth marks you as so special that your entire neighborhood is pulling for you to do better -- to escape? Where you are the hope for people who couldn't or didn't get out?

Can anyone of us, who grew up in even moderately affluent circumstances (my family wasn't rich, and Daddy didn't buy me a car when I was 16, and sometimes we ate bacon, egg and tomato sandwiches toward the end of the week because that's what the grocery budget could handle, and I certainly heard "no, we can't afford it," often enough when I was growing up -- no dance lessons, or scouts, or camp for this girl -- but I certainly never felt like we were poor, either. I guess having lots of brothers and sisters helped, somehow.
We were a tribe, and we were laughing so much around the table that I always thought bacon, egg and tomato sandwiches were a TREAT, for god's sake. Food, no matter what it was, means laughter and family to me. I had a happy childhood. So sue me. Subject for another post.) -- can any of us really imagine what it must be like to have to climb the hills these kids have to climb -- just to get the the playing field that a lot of us started from?

Try to imagine growing up in a neighborhood, in an environment where poverty and violence and crime are the norm, instead of a place where getting good grades and playing sports and going to college are expected. Do you think you would be able to bootstrap your way out of the projects or the ghetto? We'd all like to think we could. The kids who do get out, the ones who get the good grades, and don't get into trouble, and manage to maybe get a scholarship to a state school? I guarantee you they have had to work five times as hard to get that college acceptance letter as we did.

Okay, I've gotten up on a little bit of a soapbox here to direct my own episode of Limousine Pinko Theater, but I guess living in the neighborhood, and having the locals tell each other, "She cool. She neighborhood," and not having the fluffy air mattress of some trust fund to catch me if I fall, having to stretch a paycheck to make ends meet and not always being able to do it, gives me not much patience to sit around on my fat, privileged-by-ghetto-standards ass and whine about how some boy was mean to me. I snapped myself out of that one fairly quickly, mainly because I realized that doing so was wallowing in a luxury I can't afford.

Can any of us, really?

Besides, I'd rather be neighborhood.