Carpooling With Chicks

After my past 3 posts, I need to reassure my readers that I don't need a prescription for Lexipro (just yet).
Okay, this is kind of funny in and of itself: I am becoming certified to teach Pilates. The fact that nobody can find my abs is not going to stop me. I suppose it is my love of the circus, contortionism, and authoritarianism which inspired this decision. The training began in April and will be completed in July. Thus far, it reminds me of most of the classes I've taken which are unaffiliated with a university or non-profit organization. Once they have your money, they do nothing more that market their products to their students...as if we haven't already paid $995 for the classes! Foolishly, I am under the impression when registering that I am actually going to learn what I've set out to learn. I should know better. That "beginner's mind" screws me again...
The endless promotion and marketing of $45 spiral bound books, DVDs, equipment, and more advanced classes takes up a good 30% of the class. The other students, riddled with panic and fear of being tested on the scant amount of material, will buy just about anything, making this a multi-million dollar industry. Call it group-mind, call it Pavlovian response - these people go off like traders on Wall Street every time a new product is mentioned. Today's fervor drove a fellow Pilates student to draft by hand a spreadsheet with everyone's order which she hurriedly delivered to our instructor. He was already on his celly dictating the order to one of the employees in the stockroom at their Costa Mesa HQ. One girl who is a personal trainer was reciting her Visa number to the instructor which I took as a cue to go use the rest room for a while.
I can tell you one name that was not on that spreadsheet. I was the one trying to shut down the shopping spree and suggesting that we get back to the program of learning how to teach Pilates. It goes without saying that I'm not too popular with this crowd.

Because I hate to drive in L.A. and still have to read each line of directions from Google maps when I go anywhere, I decided at the first session back in April to find a carpool buddy. Her name is Connie, and she lives about 8 minutes from me. Nice of me to consider our warming globe, right? This chick couldn't be more twasted and more hazardous to the drivers of L.A. I decided after yesterday's commute in her 1970s Volvo that I would no longer put myself in harm's way like that. It was my third time in the passenger's seat with Connie. Although she's lived in L.A. her whole life, she is still completely unfamiliar with the freeway system. Fine - as a chick, I understand that problem. BUT, if that's the case, you need to stay focused: NO MULTI-TASKING! Don't demonstrate Pilates poses while leaving the steering wheel to spin on its own. And how about leaving the windows up while speeding along at 80 MPH and conversing at the top of your lungs about your ex-fiancee. My blood pressure was climbing fast. I kept trying to use my hands to guide her eyes back to those dashed lines on the asphalt. I refused to make eye-contact, in order to dissuade her from this practice.

On Sunday morning I called her and made up a bogus excuse about how I was running late (due to the baby, of course!) and how I didn't want to make her late. She sounded a little put-off and told me that this was not news that she had anticipated or something equally non-compelling. Look, I did what I had to do. As luck would have it, I was not running late. I never am. When I arrived at the studio, the only other car in the lot was Connie's Volvo. Immediately, I left the lot and parked a block away. I wasted about 15 minutes, making an unnecessary call to Augie so that I could walk into the class appearing to have barely made it in on time. Oh, the tangled web we weave. After class, I'm driving away and see Connie making her way to her car. I thought I had a bit of a running start and could avoid any more possible discomfort about my weaseling out of carpooling with her. Somehow, it must have had something to do with the timing of the stoplights, twasted traffic patterns, or just my dumb luck - but we were driving cockpit-to-cockpit almost the entire way! I would slow down, speed up, stay in the right-most exiting lane - it didn't matter. It was like I had a side car, and neither of us wanted to make eye contact. If I'm not mistaken, I think she was even holding her cellphone up to her ear, just to make herself look more legitimately oblivious. My only pathetic retort was to scratch the side of my face a lot. It was such a chick moment. You guy readers probably don't understand these shenanigans
At some point, maybe I'll grow some girly balls and learn how to tell someone that I'm not going to carpool with them without all of the excuses and uncontrollable urge not to look like a bitch. Something to work up to along with the flat abs.

Birthday Doldrums

Try not to have a birthday on a Monday. It just gives off the wrong vibe.
Today was my 34th birthday. Now it's nighttime, and I can talk about this birthday and compare it with others. It was probably in the 15th percentile. As a new parent, you wind up using the word "percentile" a lot. You'd probably feel pretty dissappointed if a doctor so much as uttered the word 15th percentile around your baby.
But this is different. Birthdays are fucked up for adults.

Me? I am lucky. I have friends who make a fuss over me on my birthday. I've been taken out to dinner twice. I've gotten birthday cards, phone calls, e-mails, checks. If I weren't impossible to please, I might say it was a swell day. I am getting to the point where I like having birthdays behind me. I get nervous thinking about who might not call and how I'm going to handle it. Like I said, birthdays are fucked up for adults and even more so for 34 year old children.

Slab From The Past

I just got back from New Orleans on Monday. Good trip and all that, but I mostly wanted to share this image with you. For those of you who knew my childhood home at 5814 Bellaire Drive, you might remember our 1980s decor, especially this rockin' black and white tile. Well, as you can see ole' 5814 done got razed, and here's what's left. Oh, and there's the famous 17th Street canal behind the slab. While I was out snapping this photo, I met the young guy who had just bought the property. He had lost his home which was in St.Bernard Parish and decided to make a new home for himself here on our old property. It was kind of sweet- he had a wheelbarrow full of dirt and a shovel. He's really rebuilding from the ground up, starting with filling in some massive ditches in the backyard. Hard to believe that my old backyard was like an ocean floor after Katrina.
I remember on a few occasions, snakes, possum, raccoons, alligators, and once a gigantic sea turtle made appearances back there. There were 4 mammoth pecan trees bordering the fence .
If you attended our wedding or hung out with me between 1973 and 2004, then you likely spent some time out in the yard as well as on the black and white dance floor.

Remembering the Beast

Today is May 8, and it is the 64th birthday of my Uncle Beast. This is the first birthday since his recent passing, so I'll have to eat cake all by myself. Oh, and he'd probably want me to scare up some homemade ice-cream to go with it. He left this world last October just before Zev was born. The way I see it, they must have passed each other, as one was entering and the other exiting. My palm reader made an allusion to the idea that Beast and Zev share the same soul. I'd like to think that it's so. I sometimes place their pictures alongside each other and see a similarity in their cherubic faces.
His given name was Stuart, but to me and a few others in the family, he was the Beast. Why was he a Beast? Not sure, because the name was around before I was. He had a voracious appetite and loved to eat- maybe like a Beast would. He liked to wrestle and crack toes- again, maybe like a Beast would...but he was ferociously loving and loyal. So, maybe a Beast could be seen in many different ways.
Beast and I have millions of memories together, but we were mostly bonded by a shared burden: we loved two men that are tough to love- my grandfather, Izzy, and my father(his brother). Not that these two men are unlovable, but they just don't make it easy on anyone. Beast and I were continuously trying to impress my Dad and "earn" his love. With my grandfather, Beast was nurturing. And, Izzy is not the type to accept any kind of tenderness into his life. But Beast pushed on and continued to nurture his widowed father up until the last few months of his life. In fact, Beast kept his own diagnosis a secret from Izzy up until his last weeks here in this world. Izzy still insists that he knew all along. Who knows?
I can picture the two of them doing their grocery shopping together at all of the supermarkets in Margate, Florida: Beast holding Izzy's coupons while Izzy scanned all of the prices on the canned goods, in order to make sure that he was buying each item from the correct store. Izzy doesn't show love, but he did tell me once that he thought Beast was handsome like a movie-star.
Beast and I ate together , traveled overseas together, and gossiped a whole lot. Whenever I needed a pep-talk or someone to vent about my dad with- I knew who to go to.
He was a yo-yo dieter, sometimes bearded and always bespectacled. He wore a unicorn medallion necklace which came from a jewelery store in New Orleans. Beast had seen a lot of the world and was quite familiar with China. In fact, he took me there when I was a student in Acupuncture School. We stayed at a famous hotel near Beijing designed by I.M Pei. I introduced him to the joys of Hawthorne berry candies and salty-sour plums. He took me to have desert at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, just so I could see how fancy the ladies room was. I didn't have to do anything to make him love me, and that's what set him apart from the other men in our family.
Beast cooked, shopped and read trashy mysteries. He and his wife of 41 years, whom we call the Goose, watched their many t.v shows and baseball games together in their little wood paneled den. They read, solved cross-word puzzles and drank wine in their astro-turfed indoor porch. They were truly best friends, even though Beast would get in trouble for leaving a dirty dish here and there.
He and his pancreas(and also his liver) spent a year trying to figure out if they could live with cancer, or not. He sailed through several months strong and beastly , and we were all in denial of his bleak prognosis. I really can't feel cheated that he was taken away. Magical people like Beast appear few times in one's life, and you do whatever you can to share as much as possible with them. If you're smart, you grab every little morsel.
Anyway, Beast, happy birthday wherever you are.

The Family Gun

With so much talk about guns these days, I find myself with a lot of strong opinions (who, me?) about who should and shouldn't have them. Well, speaking of people who shouldn't have them, I thought I'd tell a story about the Brown family gun.
A fairly nondescript .38 revolver was introduced into our home sometime around 1980. I remember getting back from school one day and my mom sitting me and my brother down, in order to show us our new gun. She showed us its six chambers and a box of bullets. Being the pussies that we were and still are, Augie and I were terrified of this new member of the family. I can't remember why we got it, or if my parents were even telling the truth. Thinking back and connecting the dots, it probably had something to do with a briefcase full of cash that my dad was keeping for his incarcerated amigo in Costa Rica, Sandy. We also kindly stashed his Rolls Royce for him, too. There are ostensibly a lot of reasons for owning a handgun in New Orleans and, for whatever reason, we now had one.
So, in the beginning, the gun lived under my parents bed. Made sense - when the burglar showed up, my mom could reach under the bed and simply shoot him.
Augie and I were a bit more careful and nervous when jumping on their bed or having violent pillow fights. Afterwards, we would get on either side of the bed and peer down to make sure it wasn't going to go off on its own. It was kind of like watching a rattlesnake behind glass. We never touched it. Every kid should be such a pussy.
After some time had gone by, the gun moved from its spot under the bed into a super-cool piece of post-modernist furniture that we had in our living room. It's hard to describe this thing, but it was a circular bar with bar stools that swiveled. The cushions on the stools were orange leather - the color and texture of a basketball. The inside of the bar was hollow but had a top piece with compartments which slid open. The gun took up residence in there, next to some jewelery and seashells. I don't quite understand how this made sense, as it was a totally inconvenient place to hide anything that you might need to access quickly. I think we felt more comfortable with it stowed away. There would be no accidental run-ins while trying to locate a lost bedroom slipper, like before. When my friends would come over, we would sit at the bar, remove the piece that covered the entry into the bar's innards, and have a peek . It looked even scarier next to those seashells!
Years later, the gun moved out of our house and onto our sailboat, the S.S. Kiki, without a lot of fanfare. I guess it was getting dusty at the house and not any use at all: we never hunted or went to the shooting range. Like insurance, we made a place for it in our lives, but it really served no purpose. No one knew how to use it with any confidence. And half of the family unit was too scared to even look at it for very long.
This poor gun needed some excitement in its life. I mean, we still had that same box of unused bullets. So, all-aboard and anchors away!
While out at sea in the Gulf of Mexico, the gun made a cameo appearance. Nobody sent me the memo that the gun was now residing aboard our home on the water. As I recall, my mom and a girlfriend of one of the guys who sailed with us were polishing off a bottle of this Hazelnut liqueur called Frangelico. Anyone who knows my mom knows that she likes to tie one on and loves to get there by way of dessert liqueur. I think she's still hooked on one called Cardinal Mendoza, in case you need to get her a gift.
Anywhoo, the drinking buddy that day's name was Buffy. Buffy and my mom, along with the other grown-ups present decided to dust off the old gun and let a few bullets sail through the southern sky. Augie and I were down-below playing Othello when we heard the shots being fired off. Buffy and mom stood at the stern firing away while teetering on the edge of the cockpit and drunkenly swaying in the wind. So that's where the gun went! One was shooting the Brown family .38, and the other had a big assault rifle that belonged to our friend, Don. I can still hear the shells hitting the fiberglass deck.
Therapist after therapist has asked me the same question: "How did that make you feel?"
I was never really shocked by too much of anything that my parents did. The boat was just a particularly twasted venue for them to get their rocks off, especially due to the fact that I couldn't run from them when I was out at sea.
On Kiki, the gun lived in a built-in wooden drawer in the boat's only bedroom. In that drawer was some rose body cream made by a company called Carnation. Don't know why I remember that detail, but I do. The gun took on a bit of a new identity on the boat. It got greasy with fingerprints, it got some scratches, and it even made its way into my mom's purse a few times when we had docked in Mexico.
Over the years, we had a slew of young guys who were possibly employed by my dad to live on the boat, take care of it and sail to different locations. It was obvious that the guys were dealing drugs, but my dad didn't care until they ripped him off, which would inevitably happen.
I imagine the gun became way more useful when we were away and these young coke-heads were running the show
Time went on, and Kiki spent lots of time in Mexico. My parents would take a few month-long trips down there per year. Augie and I stayed behind, in order to go to school.
I'd sometimes inquire about the gun as if it were some slutty cousin of mine. "Where's the gun these days?" Last I heard, pirates stole it off the boat. That very well could be true... Chances are, one of the boat boys took it when they knew my Dad was getting ready to bust them for some ridiculous charge to his AmEx.
Oh, the sweet innocent childhood memories.
So, back to the issue of guns. Our family proved too unstable to make a proper home for a nice little revolver. The combination of 2 pussy kids, one rowdy cognac drinker and one Thor Heyerdahl with a major edge is no place for a sweet little gun.

Raw Food and Pie for Breakfast

Just getting back after 4 days in San Francisco and the surrounding area.
It was a first for many things: my first trip alone with Zev, his first trip aboard a plane, my first time in Santa Cruz. But, San Francisco is a pretty familiar place for me, thanks to Blake.


We have been visiting him there for the past 12 years, and I am always amazed at the things that you can learn when you happen to travel just 400 miles north. It's a different world up there, especially when you're tooling around in a biodiesel-powered Jetta with a chef with new dreadlocks and a herniated disc.
We drove to Capitola, CA on Monday after we had lunch with Blake's mom in Palo Alto. Capitola is a completely pleasant beach town 4 miles south of Santa Cruz. It is the new home to my friends Mimi and Matthew who were formerly residents of the Green Gulch Zen Buddhist monastery/farming community. They spent the last 10 years in and out of monasteries and community houses. Now they've made the bold move into the world of single family dwellings and dual cellphones. They're keeping it real by only allowing technology into their home that is at least 10+ years old. We listened to loads of cassettes. We waited a good 20 minutes to look something up online on their huge, vintage PC. Blake commented on how he liked that they kept the TV screen and computer monitor covered in scarves. I think they only uncover the television/VCR combo if they have a particularly good video to watch. Over dinner, Matthew wondered if we had heard of a certain playboy bunny who recently died in the Bahamas leaving behind a baby worth hundreds of millions. I think he read about it in some news journal. This is what you can attain after dozens of month-long silent retreats. When you re-enter the world of You-Tube and Entertainment Tonight, it takes a Zen warrior to be so distantly plugged in. As always, we had a good time.
Zev loves those two, and I could really get used to having 3 extra friends with me at all times.
Tuesday morning, Matthew and Mimi took off from work, so we could chill and head up to Santa Cruz. We wound up at a bakery for breakfast. Blake and I started our day off with pie - Olallaberry pie, in fact. I used that as a benchmark to describe the rest of our day. Santa Cruz was far more upscale than I had hoped it would be. It seems that very few places along the California coast haven't gone upscale.
We met up with a vegetarian friend later when we got back to S.F. at one of our favorite places that we hate to love - a particularly self-righteous restaurant in the Mission called Cafe Gratitude. It left veganism in the dust years ago. Those vegans might as well be working for Halliburton. These raw foodies run around in a way not too different from those on Crystal Meth. They feel obligated to display their raw abundant energy at every opportunity, shouting out the affirmations on the menu and hugging their favorite hirsute waitress. I find that meat and caffeine gives me all I need, but hats off to them.
Gratitude serves up 100% vegan food which is never heated above 145 degrees. A lot of dehydration is the key, and I'm picking up a dehydrator that I found on CraigsList tomorrow morning in Burbank. The dishes all have names that will make you wince. Blake and I ordered up the "I am Accepting (stir un-fry)" which consists of a rice-like material fashioned from dehydrated parsnips, celery root and pine nuts. We also split a pizza that Gratitude calls "I am Sensational"- delicious, especially if you like Brazil nut parmesan cheese and cashew ricotta. My iced tea had some kind of essential oils in it. I almost got kicked out when I asked for a straw. I can understand people who loathe this place and all it stands for (Blake's girlfriend, for one), but the food is goddamn delicious. Going raw is going to be cooler than going Brazilian. That's my prediction anyway.
And, so it goes.
We talked about books we'd read but more about books we haven't read. We drank excessive amounts of coffee and very little water. We tried to assemble a playpen without reading the directions and realized that Jews can't wing it when it comes to assembling furniture of any kind. We both wore clothing stained with infant vomit, thanks to Zev. We somehow made it through the entire trip with one shower a piece. Showering, much like cooked food is merely an option.

Jamaican Proverbs: A Lesson in Patois

Bisq and I spent our honeymoon in Jamaica back in 2002. In fact, we stayed at an all-inclusive resort that was chosen by a gay travel agent named Jamal with cute dreadlocks and a penchant for rolling his eyes while talking on his wireless head-set. Bisq and I could never tell if the eye-rolling was directed at us.
It came down to a decision between an eco-resort/exotic zoo wonderland in Mexico called Ixpuha Palace and Swept Away in Negril.
Jamaica won for the obvious reasons, but the iguanas wandering the premises at Ixpuha and hot tubs in the suites looked mighty appealing, too. Plus, I loved watching Jamal say ik-shpoo-haa.
Anyway, the honeymoon was a blast. Let me sum it up: We arrived with fake tans and minimal body hair; we left 10 shades paler than we had arrived. We ate loads of a fruit called soursop. It tasted like it was 50% banana and 50% pineapple. I drank Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee smoothies spiked with Tia Maria at least twice a day. Biscuit was still a lush back then and was drinking every girly rum drink that would fit inside of a coconut. The bellboys hooked us up with cheeba immediately. I kept losing my room-key, sunglasses and camera, due to the haze I was in. We played several games of ping-pong each day and were always first in line at the buffets. I'll cut it off there, cuz most of you know what honeymoons are like.
A few keepsakes from the honeymoon remain in my possession 5 years later. In the evenings, the maids at Swept Away left us with a "Thought For the Night" card. It has a typical Jamaican proverb on one side and on the other side, it says "PLEASE ASK YOUR ATTENDANT FOR AN EXPLANATION"
I was high, and that's just the kind of invitation I was looking for.
One card reads, Yuh bawn wen yuh mamma gawn ah mawket! I'm taking the spelling directly from the cards. I wouldn't be able to make this stuff up. I think it means something like, when your mama finally started being a whore, she got pregnant with you??
Another reads, Cow nuh know te use a im tail till it chap aff. This one, I get. If you don't use it you lose it...no, maybe, it means you didn't realize how useful something was until you lost it. In the cow's case, his tail. In your case, maybe your sideburns??
The final one is, See mi an cum lib wid ah 2 difrent ting. I get it.... It's a very appropriate thing to say to your spouse or whomever you live with, especially when you stink up the bathroom. Or maybe when you're walking around the house in some underwear that is 8 sizes too big and the waistband comes up to your nipples...not that I'd know anything about these - just some examples
Well, this has prompted me to look up more Jamaican proverbs because I think they're brilliant, and I'd like Patois to be Zev's second language. I know Spanish is so useful, but
it's just so boring.
Here are some I thought you might like to integrate into your daily banter:
1. Every hoe ha dem stick a bush= to each his own, or there is someone out there for everyone
2. Fire de a Mus Mus tail, him tink a cool breeze= set a rat's tail on fire, and he thinks there's a cool breeze. This can be used to describe someone or something (the system, for example) that is clueless. This characterizes the complacency of the upper class.
3. Every mikkle mek a muckle= a penny saved is a penny earned. This could pass for Yiddish, don't you think? You need the proper inflection, of course.
4. Mi cum here fi drink milk, mi noh cum here fi count cow= a reminder to conduct business in a straightforward manner.

Bust out any of these phrases and you'll definitely impress me. A trip to Jamaica is indeed a cultural experience, and you don't even need to step outside of your gated resort which insures that you'll never meet the people who speak Patois (who aren't scoring your cheeba or cleaning up after you spill jackfruit juice). Just make sure you get the "Thought For the Night" card and find an attendant for an explanation.

QUIZ TIME!
Can you complete these Jamaican proverbs?
The following proverbs are written in a loose combination of standard English and patois in an attempt to reflect the two languages commonly used on the island and out of a dual respect for the fact that this will be read rather than heard and the fact that proverbs themselves are bastions of the oral tradition, having survived orally for over hundreds of years. See if you can fill in the blanks.

1. "One, one coco ____ basket" (Do not expect to achieve success overnight).

2. "Every mikkle ____ a mukkle" (Every little bit counts).

3. "Wat doan ____, will fatten" (Do not waste time worrying over something that does you no real harm. You may even be able to turn it around into something positive).

4. "Chicken merry, _____ dah near" (Be vigilant as danger can be found in unexpected places).

5. "Every dawg has his day and every puss his ___ o'clock" and cock mouth ____ cock. (Do not act as if you are better than others, your day will come).

6. "Wanti, wanti, cyan getti, getti, getti nuh _____" Also "silent rivah run deep" and "No mug no bruk, no coffee nuh dash wey" (Count your blessings and do not take what you have for granted).

7. "Sorry fi mawga dog, mawga dog wi tun round and ____ you" (Sometimes it is those whom we help who are the least grateful).

8. "Duppy know ___ fi frighten" (Bullies know to pick on those least able to defend themselves).

9. "See mi a one thing, come lib with me ________" (To see me is one thing, to live with me, another or as in another popular saying, do not judge a book by its cover).

10. "De olda de clock, de ______ it wine" (The older a person is, the wiser).

11. "When coco ripe, it mus ____" (Actions speak louder than words).

12. "Hog say, 'de first dutty water mi ______, mi wash'." (Seize opportunities as they present themselves).

13. "One eye man king in ______ man country". (No matter how bad it seems things may be, there is always another for whom things are worse).

14. "Fool-fool pickney mek fowl _____ away from him two time" (Never allow yourself to be fooled the same way more than once).

15. "Nuh fatten cockroach fi _____" (Do not waste time doing things for which others will be ungrateful).

16. "Saltfish sit down pon di _______ a wait fi bread and butter" (Lazy people wait for life's blessings to come to them).

17. "Mi old, but mi nuh _____" (Do not underestimate the value of the elderly).

18. "Disobedient pickney _____ rockstone" (Disobedient children will come to a bad end).

19. "Dawg say if him have money him would buy him own ______" (Some people, when they wind up with money, will waste it in unnecessary things).

20. "Talk and ______ your tongue" (Think before you speak).

ANSWERS:
1. full. 2. mek. 3. kill. 4. hawk. 5. four
6. wanti. 7. bite. 8. who. 9. another. 10. faster.
11. bus 12. ketch 13. blind 14. get 15. fowl.
16. counter. 17. cold. 18. nyam. 19. fleas. 20. taste