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Life changing events. They're so...life changing. I resent them for that. It's not fair. You have a path, and it's a wonderful path and then there's a life changing event and totally fucks up the path. Who's in charge of that? Who can I send my letter of complaint to? What can be done?
When you get dumped, you feel like you've walked through some door into a world that looks exactly like your own but some how, it's slightly askew. Nothing is where you thought you put it. You don't know what to do with yourself at odd times. You follow all your same rituals, but something is missing and at some point in the day, you stop and wait to figure out what comes next because there's an empty space. You hear something important and go to repeat it and then you stop and realize you have no one to repeat it to. I suppose the feeling is the same whichever side of the drama you were on. But it feels more vibrant being the dumpee, I'd say. You haven't prepared yourself for those lost moments. You have no pre-planned ways of filling them. And so your life changes.
I assume the reasonable thing would be to believe that little by little, you find ways to fill those moments, or people to tell those important tidbits to and before you know it you're back on the right side of the door.
At least that's how I hope it works. Right now that door seems to be stuck...like maybe there's a chair under the knob. And I can't find my keys. They're not where I put them.
I've returned to Chuck E. Cheese after a 22 year absence. 22 years...the first 5 or so consisting of my sister and I BEGGING to be taken there but Daddy said the pizza was gross and called it Yuckie Cheese. As if it was EVER about the pizza. So I went back with a friend and her two year old. It was a Friday night and I had worked almost 55 hours that week. All I wanted was to sit and eat and decompress and let them go play. The place is insane, it was packed to the gills of poorly dressed adults and kids with runny noses and glazed eyes. I refuse to believe the place doesn't get lawsuits as frequently as the Archdiocese of Portland.
Big kids were literally walking on smaller kids, kicking them off of gyrating helicopters and stealing their turns on video games. I saw a grown woman sucking her thumb. Sucking her thumb. I saw a woman sobbing in joy at the sight of her suprise birthday cake for her suprise 24th birthday party...at Chuck E. Cheese! My friends would be toast if they did that to me.
But the most disturbing...of the many many disturbing things I witnessed that night...was the man with a gun. He was a tall slender man with his wife, a small group, and his two children, a blond boy of about 7 and a little girl who couldn't be more than 2 or three. He was wearing cowboy boots, tight black jeans, a white turtleneck, and a leather vest that was a size or two too small, and a gun in a holster on his hip. A GUN in a holster on his hip. There was no uniform, no badge, no indication that he should be carrying such a thing. We noticed it when he was tossing his little girl into the air. I just have one question. Who the fuck let this man into Chuck E. Cheese with a gun! How is that allowed?
Granted, you get a stamp on your hand to prove you had a kid with you so you can't leave without a kid (though you could probably just go shopping for one with the most pleasant personality and saunter on out the door with them 'cause, hey, you have a stamp and so do they! They must belong to you! There are a few rules posted about where you can and cannot wear shoes, how many refills you can get of pop, but nothing about bringing weapons into a children's playplace.
So after a 22 year absence, I returned to the place of childhood mystery. The mythical land filled with fun and adventure of epic porportions. The place where the childlike empress sits in the Ivory Tower and beats gophers over the head with a mallot. It's hard to admit it when your parents are right. What the hell is Chuck, anyway? A rat?
This show Greys Anatomy is stupid. What happened to Scrubs? Did Scrubs get cancelled? I hope not. Cause if I'm forced to watch beautiful people cutting other beautiful people open and suspend my disbelief that they just threw on scrubs but then meticulously applied expensive and tastefully dramatic make up, I want them to at least be funny.
So it's been a while since I've written on this thing. Since then, New Orleans has drowned, Houston has secured yes votes for highway improvement ballot measures for the next decade and Kashmir has been swallowed up by the ground. I think someone is trying to tell us something. Not sure what, though. These natural disasters are so hard to read. The 700 Club always seems to think they can translate. I disagree with them on a regular basis. I dislike television programs with numbers in the title.
Today is the end of August. The weather tells me so. It's like 65 degrees outside. This is horseshit, this Oregon Summer. Anyways. I wonder what the White House is like while the President is on vacation. Is it more relaxed and functional since there isn't the constant need to re-explain everything and update the President on how people are finally realizing how idiotic he is through poll numbers? I bet Scott Mclellan stops stuttering all together. Does Condi bother to curl her hair? Does Rumsfield...well, I don't think he even notices. TUMS and Rolaid sales probably go down in the area. 3 syllable words get used again. French fries are openly eaten. Or perhaps not. Where is Rove? Is Rove on vacation too? Or is he still in the mansion with his beady little eyes carefully montoring what everyone says and does? Is that why Bush feels so comfortable taking vacations? Because his pit bull stays behind to guard the junk heap? French fries still have to be stuffed down within the confines of the broom closet adjacent to the China Room? Here's a thought...maybe Rove sends Bush on vacation to throw everyone off so he can finish writing his autobiography of the days when he had the power to send the President on vacation. This is a mystery worthy of Hercule Poirot
I went camping recently and came to the realization that I had perhaps spent too much time in the city. I was siting in a folding chair, having a berry flavored beverage, looking around at the natural wonders, etc. and then reached over and pulled a weed out of the ground. I went camping and tried to weed the forest. How messed up is that? Who does that, I mean really. I have no defense, but to say that they were those really annoying long green stemmed ones with the little yellow flowers on top. They drive me nuts. I guess knowing they were permeating what I considered to be untouched beauty was too much to bear and I had to take action. Or, I'm anal. Hard to decide which.
So I won't be doing that anymore. Camping, I mean.
The northwest is considered by some to be a kind of green thumb Garden of Eden. Today is June 28th and the sky hasn't changed from gray to blue once. Yesterday it rained all day. Apparently, one may not use a lawnmower in the rain. I find this intolerable. What kind of geographical excludism is this? I should sue. Or write a letter. How do people engage in the proper level of lawn care in other wet locals? Especially since rain makes things grow like they've been injected with steroids. How hard can it be in this day and age to give something back to the poor, overfed underexercised northwesterners who don't get to see the sun?
Anyways, I saw some tourists the other day and that cracked me up. Summer time comes and it's time to plan a vacation...where to go, where to go...Oregon! The land of the beaver and the blueberry. I don't know that I've ever seen a beaver actually. No non-football playing beavers anyway. And while you're here, before the water soaks through your hiking boots and makes your socks all moist and uncomfortably stuck to your feet...you should try to walk outside a little bit because things are oh-so-green!
Our area of the country is known for ONE type of cuisine...and that is salmon. If you don't like salmon then your stupid and you will starve.
We're also known for our hypocrisy, as the only state that voted for both Kerry and an amendment to ban gay marriage (and thereby equal rights) forever. What does blue and red make together? Ah yes, we're a purple state.
And we're known for our exceptionally bad basketball team, the Blazers. The team where they get more press from their drug busts than their playing.
We DO have some great bands from here. But they're easier to see in other cities.
That being said, I still don't' know what to do about mowing the grass in the rain.
