Celebrities and Rats and Armageddon, Oh My!

I am not a celebrimaniac.  I don't think celebrities are magical, nor gifts from The Universe, and despite appearances, I don't believe that they hold the key to the fountain of youth, though I have my suspicions about Vanessa Williams.  I'm pretty sure that they are a lot like commoners, save for an extraordinary amount of drive to pursue a lifestyle of whimsical proportion. That is to say, they would never leave the house with a head of hair that looks capable of concealing evidence - OK, Erykah Badu might - or holes in the ass of their jeans the size of the whole cheek, and not holes that are stylish with hand-brushed fringe, but holes that are made because the jeans are so old that one's ass has rubbed away the warp and left the stringy, gray/white, weft.  Of course, my hair looks like it could very well be hiding the bloody glove, and I hope it doesn't get much colder in L.A., because the only other pair of jeans I have fit me about ten pounds ago, and I don't mean on the minus side.  But back to celebs.  The main reason I mention that I'm not a celebrimaniac is because I don't want you to think that I'm attacking this enigmatic group.  I merely mention it because I have an unusual fixation with news of their breakdowns and plastic surgery gone awry.

Have you noticed that when celebs go crazy it’s called exhaustion?  But when commoners go nuts we’re just plain nuts? Everyone feels so sorry for the celebrity gone cuckoo (because, you know, they’re so disadvantaged and all) but if the commoner steers a wheel into the sand, no one will touch you with a javelin.  If they do, you had better believe they’ll use it to impale you should you flip the wheel again.

Exhaustion.  I imagine the celebrity strewn across a king-size bed wearing Narciso Rodriguez (next season), her wrist thrown over her forehead ( professionally), while someone spritzes her face with lavender water (organic/fair trade/hand picked/local).  The first thing I’m gonna do when I’m rich and famous is go exhausted and capitalize off of my downward spiral with a book that has floral scented pages.  Commoner nuts is frightening.  Celebrity nuts is nuts with capital potential.

Anyblah.

I especially like to catch up on the latest gossip while at the checkout stand at the grocery store, and often choose the longer line so that I have time to get through all of the pictures of devil-may-care celebrities who take to the beach despite horrifically cellulitic* abdominals and big toe hair.  And I do have at least one rule of thumb: the cheaper the magazine, the better the juice.  Which is why I choose ‘US’ over ‘People.’  Not that I’m going to pay for it, but because they have the best photographs to accompany the articles about celebrities who tried to save a few bucks on a new face by choosing an unlicensed plastic surgeon who has served time.  I know we’re in a recession, but when you’re thinking about having your eyelids sliced open and tucked away in your hairline, this might not be the best occasion to choose a doctor who accepts coupons or counts past cellmates as close friends.

 * Cellulitic is not a real word. But perhaps it should be.

After the celeb is all mangled up and maimed beyond recognition, there’s always a press conference, right?  Because people are going to be suspicious if they suddenly show their face in public looking like an old root vegetable without some sort of explanation.  And they always seem so shocked that their black market doctor from Morocco has disfigured them, and that a whole string of malpractice suits and similar catastrophes quickly begin to emerge from his past.  Did she not notice that his offices were subterraneous, that his assistant smelled like curry and was missing most of his teeth?  And he always serves some meager amount of time, like thirteen months,  so you know he’ll be out again, performing more basement surgeries by the spring of the following year.  I love it when the celebrity, her lips all misshapen and lumpy from substances that are not yet, and never will be approved by the FDA, her eyes as lopsided as the best Picasso, declaims that its been ‘a learning experience’ and how she’s ‘made peace with’ her new face, and then damn, I remember that I forgot to grab a couple of yams and a knob of celery root.

Is it me, or do you also get tickled by stories of pop idols who beat the crap out of people with umbrellas when there hasn’t been a cloud in the Los Angeles sky since 2006.  How did she produce this weapon of choice?  Or even better is the headline announcing the latest who has starved herself to such a degree that her legs look like the Thanksgiving wishbone, and she always wears leggings and flip flops as though she can’t be bothered to conceal her shame.  Oh, I forgot, eating disorders are the new black.

Of course it’s always a bonus when one of them shaves their head on the heli ride to rehab, rather, 'the spa’, or when their teeth fall out from smoking too much crack.  And which billionaire ‘athlete’ (I’m sorry, golf is a pastime, not a sport, I don’t care how good your aim) has rammed his SUV into a tree because he was drunk, getting a blow job, or maybe both, this week?  Hopefully both.  More reading material for next.

My favorite part of the article is finding out how much they have to pay their victims.  And it’s always the best when the sum is undisclosed, because that means it’s in the millions.  Hee hee.  If I was giving a celebrity a blowjob and he rammed into a tree, I would sue for whiplash, and maybe attempted strangulation, depending on the celeb.  Who wouldn’t?  It could be your fifteen minutes of fame, you never know, so take advantage when you get the chance and do Warhol proud.

Given that I love a good train wreck, I could not resist watching Whitney Houston sing this song the other night about a million dollars, because I think that might be all she has left after her ten-year experiment with insanity.  (Some people go to the annual Terlingua, Texas Chili Cook Off when they need some excitement in their lives, Whitney smokes crack for decade-long intervals.  Don’t judge).  But watching Whitney is the easy part of the confession, the worst part is that she was the guest on that show where B-list celebs pair up with professional dancers and compete for something, but I’m not sure what, and I don’t know what it’s called.  I could look it up, but I’m too lazy.  And I’d prefer not to clog my head with the names of shows where turquoise lamé and matching eye shadow go unquestioned.  I've got enough tucked away up there.

Onward.

She potatoed around the stage on her shaky pins, maybe the last of the drugs are still working their way out of her system, and sang this song about having lost a million, or wishing she hadn’t spent a million on crack or something like that.  And I’m not certain, but it looks like she could be pregnant, which can’t be good, because I think crack and crazy stay in your system for, like, ever.  Toward the end of the song, buckets of fake dollar bills were dumped over her wig, and I half expected her to pick one up, roll it into a tube, and stick in her bra for later.  But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about her new voice, and I have to say I really like the way the crack has sort of dragged it around and rasped it up.  When she opened her mouth to belt out some notes, her voice came crawling out like some sewer creature that had spent its life feeding on crumbling concrete and old rat bones.  Which is exactly what I want to sound like when I begin my career as a back alley lounge singer.  Not just any back alley lounge, but the seediest, mold-stricken hole dug into the city's underbelly.  I had written more about this, but I decided to put it in my book.  You’ll see.

Whitney ended her wishful song and hugged her aunt and biggest supporter, Dionne Warwick, who wore a purple velour track suit for the occasion.  Hm.  So I started flickin’ around the boob, you know, since it was on.  All the news channels were a-squawkin’ about how Obama was supposed to cherry pick a bunch of celebrities for some fancy dinner, and I got to thinkin’: wouldn’t it be really cool if he cherry picked some poor people and had dinner with them (I mean, us) instead?  You can just imagine Obama and Michelle in a room full of white trash families and South Central thugs stabbing at a bunch of teensy roasted birds, Y’all ain’t got no ranch dressin’ up in here? and bustin’ caps in people’s asses after taking excessive liberties with an open bar filled with the good booze.

I also discovered this new movie coming out called 2012, and decided to do some research on the net to find out if the world is really gonna blow up this time (I’ll admit, I was a little disappointed after 1999 and 2000).  Now, you know you’re lazy when you get excited about the world coming to an end, because it means that you won’t have to exercise, get a job or pay your credit card bills ever again.  Ah, you laugh, but we shall see who's really worth a damn when your pants are falling apart from filth and your hair is full of mice because all the shampoo in the world has oozed into the sewers.  At least I have a head start.  It'll take no time at all for me to become acclimated to this new Armageddon lifestyle, since I have no job and haven’t paid a credit card bill since June.  It’ll be those of you still on that hamster wheel who will turn to urban warriors like me to protect them, for I can live for weeks on a fistful of sticks and a gallon of water.

So the lesson here, I think, is to think of the celebrity as a sort of barometer for your own mental health, and to cut yourself some slack when you think you’re doing it all wrong.  If Amy Winehouse can get a boob job and put out a new album after terrorizing her way from London to the islands in fetid ballet slippers, and Whitney can delete a deleterious decade with her own million dollar single (though I think the title of her song may be the only part of her revival that is going to see a million), then maybe life for us commoners is not so grim.  I might be wearing shredded jeans today, but tomorrow, who knows, maybe I’ll be whizzing around in a little sports car with new hair and a record deal, rubbing elbows with the black folks in the white house too.  And if that doesn’t work out, there is solace in the fact that there are only two more years left before this lovely, fucked up planet will implode, and then nothing will matter anyway, not your hair piece, your bank account, and certainly not your cellulitic gut.  I don't know about you, but I'm gonna start stockpiling my twigs, just in case.

Pedos y Ajo y Locas, No Mas!

So, I speak Spanish.  Well, some.  OK, kitchen Spanish.  Which means that I can curse you from here to south of the border and feed you when I'm done.  I learned all I know from the busboys at a Mexican restaurant in Oakland*.  Judging by their furtive glances, I don't think la verga is a fruit.

*Oakland, CA: Population 420,183, the 44th largest city in the United States; located east of the San Francisco bay.  Best known as the murder capital of California, yet a fine place to start a family due to the home owner's incentives and kid-friendly restaurants.

Which brings me to two very important Spanish words in my blog today: pedos y ajo (see below for definitions). Today I've decided to boycott pedos y breath de la ajo, (I don’t know how to say ‘breath’ in Spanish. Evidently the busboys thought that this word exceeded my level of competence), but not everywhere. As far as I’m concerned, you can comer frijoles y whole cloves of raw ajo all day, as long as you don’t have plans to go to the gym. Here, this is getting confusing. Why don’t I explain:

It was a fine day, because so many are here in sunny L.A.  Blanche (my white Honda Civic) had been bombed with ficus berries in the night, and her windshield wipers crushed them and spread their sappy seeds across the glass.  I was hoping that the crows would eat them from the hoodgap which had become a sort of trough containing a variety of dead foliage and bugs.  The spiderweb funnels plugged into the corners looked fresh, and I wondered if my engine parts were clogged with a family of black widows.  I closed the vents for good measure.  I imagined one good blast of A/C would launch them right into mi ojos.

Vertical streaks of black dirt had turned Blanche into an urban zebra, and we zigzagged down the side streets toward Gold’s so that we could dream along the queues of mansions at a luxurious pace.  Our favorite pastime.  The avis were out in full whistle, and the gardeners wore floppy, straw hats like miniature sombreros as they pruned and mulched this and that.  I fantasized that one day Blanche and I too would have our own circular driveway and enjoy the privilege of demanding unreasonable things from our hired help.  An assortment of Maserati and Jaguar made wide arcs around us and blasted their fancy horns with European accents.  I’m positive they thought I must be some rudderless housekeeper confused by all the English street signs and paved roads.  Get out of the way!  They shouted.  ¿Comment?  I replied.

~

The gym was balmy with man sweat, and the house music pumped the dust right out of the rafters, little balls of gray jittered around the rubber mats like baby mice.  The chink of metal commingled with a choir of grunts that I doubted were really in response to the amount of weight being lifted.  And tattooed gays, hither and far, molded their sinewy bodies into works of art and sipped pink smoothies with last of the season berries and flax. I was in heaven.

Just to catch up, I've recently enfolded myself within the warm womb of unemployment, and all of the bubbly amenities that I've come to love and require have been sloughed away like scabs at a day spa, including my fifteen-year membership at Gold’s.  I had somehow fooled myself into thinking that I would run miles every day and take step classes in my living room using workout equipment fashioned from old boards and milk crates.  You can imagine the results of that scheme. The only good part about it was that I got to work out in dirty underwear and tank tops so small that my belly protruded from the hem. You see why I need the gym.

‘Hello Gold’s?  I need to come back. Yeah, my ass is spreading faster than gossip about republicans soliciting sex in airport bathrooms.’  That afternoon, over rice cakes and spirulina smoothies, I convinced the manager to give me a pro bono membership, until I got back on my feet, anyway. It wasn’t, though, until I grabbed my ankles that she threw in a half-dozen emergency spinning classes.  The situation was sobering, you understand.  And there staring her in the face was hard proof, or in this case, jiggly.  I appreciate a woman who can recognize the gravity of a situation and apply as rigorous an action as it demands.  I'd like to think that I'd do the same.

Enough of that, on to ajo y pedos.

I pulled on my headphones and mounted the Stepmill, my favorite machine, it’s really like a stairway to nowhere, and I began to climb my way back to my old ass.  Happily.  It felt good and painful, as it should.  Beads of sweat oozed through the pores of my forearms (you know it’s a good sign when your arms sweat, and not just the various crotches of your body), and RuPaul was screeching something about high-heel steppin’ and bitches who betta work [sic].  I could practically feel the calories go up in flames.

A dance class took place in the glass-walled studio before me, rows of queens and fly girls swiveled their sweaty heads and hoofed around to the beat like whores in a peepshow. All was right in my steamy, little, world. And then she climbed on behind me.  You know, Weird Gym Chick.  Layered in multiple sweatshirts, and sodden as a dish rag, she is always there.  You see her there when you arrive, and she’s huffin’ away when you leave, doesn’t matter what time of day.  And she always chooses the same machine.  If there are three identical machines available and you happen to be on ‘hers’, she will perform a series of calisthenics directly behind you so that you’d rather cut your workout short than risk having your achilles tendon sliced, which is something Weird Gym Chick might actually do. You don't want to take the chance.  I had forgotten about her until just then, but was swiftly reminded of how difficult my workout was going to turn.

Hear me out.

Our weird gym chick wears two layers of leg warmers so that her calves are the same thickness of mature elm trees, and a shabby, salt-stained baseball cap, its bill pulled low over her eyebrows. Her knees have been wrapped with dirty ace-bandages, and her sparkly, pink nail polish is chipped down to the cuticle.  Just look at her.  Her large, plastic, bags crinkle loudly over the din of the music as she fishes out too many water bottles and lines them up along the ledge of ‘her’ machine. Their labels have long been peeled away, and the water inside, tap, no doubt, is tinged brown by some sort of elixir she’s added. I don't know, maybe ginseng?

At this point your attention to your own workout competes with the goings on with her bags, wholly bursting with stuff that you wouldn’t think was needed for a quick workout at the gym:  Four pairs of running shorts from what you can see, the silky ones that go really well with striped tube socks; a beach towel, a flat iron and several paperbacks, the kind you find on a turnstile at the dollar store, half-off; a variety of eyeliner pencils, all sharpened down to one-inch nubs, that make a break for it and scatter beneath the treadmills as though they cannot abide one more application; a flip flop, pounded the thickness of veal scallopini, its sole rubbing against the bristles of a toothbrush that you hope she remembers to rinse first before brushing her teeth; a lunch box, a sparkly thing and lengths of dental floss that you fear she probably uses more than the suggested number of times; a wristband, just one, but then there is a whole 'nother bag, two dog bones, and a comb, whose nethermost teeth have been melted together for some reason you will never know.  It’s endless, the amount of crap she has, and you wonder if she is indeed living at the gym, with her perrito, who may very well be in that other bag. You imagine her there, hiding out in the bathroom stalls at night, her feet perched on either side of the toilet seat as the cleaning crew does their final walk through, her teacup something or other wading around in the bowl.

And lo, there she was.

She climbed aboard, fastening a wide, Velcro, belt with one small pocket for her iPod.  Where does one buy such a thing?  The same old bags and dingy water crowded 'her' machine.  She wrapped a measure of paper towels around the rail where her hands gripped.  For fear of germs?  Ironic, given the monsoon of sweat that she was about to douse the machine with, and of course, the toothbrush veritably scrubbing the sole of her dirty shoe.  The pages of her paperback, whose cover possessed a picture of some buff guy with yellow streamers for hair, had bloomed into a permanent fan from being handled too often by clammy hands.  I had a hunch that she read it from cover to cover to cover in continuous revolution.  Though, judging by the jacket, the fantasy could not be that good.

Then she started her climbing, slow, heavy, arduous steps.  I wondered if her cartilage had been ground to nothing with all that exercise.  And I ruled out an eating disorder because she’s really not all that thin.  Not far into her workout, two little lakes began to form around the base of the machine where her copious sweat streamed down the sides and collected on the mats.  And I just knew that she was responsible for the rusted handrails and the corroded chain, its oxidized links visible through the cracks in the moving stairs.  I imagined the night crew prodding her from the machine with the butts of their mops as they worked up a bitter strategy to sop up the mote she's just exuded:  She undoubtedly doubled their work.  That's when she started to breathe.  Heavily.  Big, blustery, ajo scented breaths from deep in her gut where the remnants of her lunch gurgled and churned.  Italian, smelled like, or maybe baba ghanoush.  And the stench of it wafted past me and knocked all the luster from my RuPaul, my workout, and my happiness in general.  All that hard-earned dopamine hurled to shit.

I checked the timer, I was only halfway home.  I conjured images of my new ass (the jiggly one and the taut) and tried to power through.  I tried to suck in quick little gasps of breath through my mouth, but I swore I could taste second-hand baba ghanoush.  So I tried holding my nose and breathing only when necessary, but my heart pounded clean out of my ears.  Evidently it is not wise to hold one’s breath during intense cardio.  And then I heard them.  The pedos.  Some short, some long, a relentless fusillade of them emitted with each thunderous step, and I knew it was not her squeaky shoes, the rubber worn thin from all that wretched climbing.  Before long, the unmistakable effluvium merged with the ajo, and I couldn’t help but wonder what horror I could have committed in my past life to bring on such retribution.  Was I, in fact, Aileen Wuornos?

The queens in the fishbowl pranced and pouted at themselves in the mirror, the white ones, the Asian ones, the ones with no hair.  And I was jealous that the reason I was confined to this blasted machine was because even Granny Clampett could cut a rug with more finesse than me.  Indeed, when I was young, I was last picked in any team sport, double dutch and square dancing.

I slowed my stepping.  No amount of screeching drag queens was going to help me through this hell. And that's when my luck spun on its head.  I looked at the clock.  Eleven fifty-five.  A line of girls with muscley legs and flat stomachs filed past the glass cage where the rhythm-gifted whores shimmied their shoulders to seventies disco tunes. So I followed. And there, in a ventilated room lit with red lights and pulsing with the soul of a diva who belted out the magnitude of her womanly suffering, was the start of a spinning class. So I slipped on a bike and rode my behind off at the back of the pack while Weird Gym Chick plodded along on 'her' machine somewhere out there, immersed in a rerun of the man with the party-favor hair.

Spanish Word Key:

* pedos: farts

* ajo: garlic

* ojos: eyes

* locas: weird gym chicks
* Perrito: really little dog
* La Verga: I'll leave that up to you to find out ;)

Meter, May I?

This is an example of the ambiguity of Los Angeles street signs

I know this is supposed to be a food blog, but I've run out of cash for comestibles, and lack of funds has never abridged my wellspring of words and opinions. The parking situation in Los Angeles has made me actually want to submit a complaint to the city about their dearth of ethics.  I've only refrained because I consider myself a visitor here on a spiritual mission and  I don't want my illumination to be stymied by parking enforcement controversies and ambiguous street signs. I can't exactly ask the buddha to sit tight while I stand in line to deal with bureaucratic issues involving broken meters and meter maids with mustaches as unsightly as their weaves. So I try to ignore the fact that you basically can't park anywhere in L.A. unless you can afford to valet.  Call me country, but I think having to valet your car while you're at your day job or grocery shopping is way too capitalist, even for me who loves that Barney's of New York offers such a fine service. But that was life past, and these days I ride my bike to Trader Joe's. I fear that it may only be a matter of time before I'll have to valet that too.

So here's the deal:

This day I made a list of errands to accomplish and ordered it in a way that would make smart use of my gas, which I suspected was probably no more than a cup, cup and a half at best, given that the orange needle of the gauge sat directly on the middle prong of the 'E'. Probably just enough to take me round to all of my destinations and safely tuck me back into a parking spot where I wouldn't move again until street sweeping in another six days. God willing. I have to note that it is best to do all of your noodling around before 4 PM, whereafter the nine-to-fivers seep in like a bad gas cloud and suck up all the choice spots, leaving you to park a mile away. I do not exaggerate.

Anyway, my errands this day were these: The bank to deposit a nine dollar check for some old clothes that I had sold on consignment, the post office, and the pet store for thirty pounds of kibble. The post office was first on my list. From here I could essentially aim my car and make a big loop to hit all of my marks, and part of this route could be coasted to save a little petrol.

I parked my car in the shade to keep my dog cool, tucked my unemployment voucher into an envelope then licked it shut (there is a reason why you are suffering through these steps, bear with me). I vaunted across the street and ducked into the post office, using my knuckles to push open the portal, greasy with handprints. (I have a mild bit of a germaphobia, which is why I don't take public transportation or live in New York at the moment. But I think it's my next stop, so I had better get therapy or a really big bottle of hand sanitizer). Onward. As the door closed behind me, I saw the reflection of a meter maid in the glass as she zipped up behind my car. I paused. She got out and circled it like a shark closing in on floundering prey. Now, if you've ever seen Blanche, my white, Civic hatch which I rarely find time to wash, you might agree that she does look a little like a dying fish. But she's fast and feisty and doesn't eat too much, and here in Los Angeles, she's my second best friend. I plan to drive her until she begs to be buried. Rub the rabbit's foot that this is no time soon.

I dashed back across the street and noticed the sign overhead: NO PARKING 8 AM TO 10 AM, MONDAY, STREET CLEANING. I checked my cell phone. It was 9:57.

'Excuse me,' I started. 'I'm sorry, I just realized it was Monday. I actually just parked here. I'll move my car right now.'

The meter maid was tall and buxom and a veritable spectrum of autumnal tones from head to toe: Her skin was the same color and smoothness as Nutella. Her ample derriere labored against the seams of her brown, poly, slacks. Her weave was the color of gold bullion, her facial hair coarse and black. She wore heavy, onyx, eyeglasses studded with rhinestones at the edges, and her red nails glinted in the sun as though she had just thrust her hands into the belly of a living creature and pulled out its bloody, slushy guts.

'You did NOT just park here. I was sitting behind you,' her already narrow eyes pressed to slits behind her thick lenses. 'Watching you.'

I was dumbfounded. What could I do? What could I say? She had me by the sack and she knew it. She gripped her trusty ticket machine, just waiting for me to counter her, her fingers poised over the keypad. I was one smart-ass remark away from being dispatched to headquarters, where city workers hovered like greedy vermin, waiting for the next queue of plates to funnel down the fiber-optics line.

I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm unemployed, and this would send me right over the edge.' But inside I fumed. Inside I wanted to tell the ghetto princess to write me a ticket so I could stick it where only the brave would tread. But reminders of my fiscally lean situation poked my sensibility with a sharp stick, and I thought it wise to temper my tongue. A ticket like this would send me right back to the work force, then who would write this blog?

'The next time you park wrong [sic], don't lie to get out of it. You did not just  park your car. You were here for a while! '

I thought about the amount of time it had taken me to lick my envelope and fish around for a dime to purchase three minutes on the meter. My precious dime, gone to waste. It could not have been more than sixteen seconds. Maybe she had cancer, I reasoned, maybe mere seconds were precious things not to be squandered on licking postage stamps in one’s car, or trivial things like unlatching a seatbelt before getting out. Or maybe she loathed her job as much as I had mine before I got laid off, the minutes dragging on like hours and days, grating at her nerves like old nutmeg chunks over a dull rasp. 

She rolled her eyes and walked away because, you know, she had to. Her brassiere bit deep into her sagging back, her thighs pressed together hard and made a dry scraping sound like fine grit sandpaper on a stucco wall.  I wanted to flip her off when she turned away, but there was no telling how many more of them waited in the trees, watched when I thought there was no one there. Meter maids are the invisible wind song, the night hawks, the silent creepers who install themselves in the shadows of broad daylight. Oh, your seconds are their hours, your dimes like worthless doubloons.

I got into my car and careened around the corner, in case she changed her mind. I drove next door to the Bank of America lot, where the parking is free and unmonitored. Where the building of the beauty outlet beside it that sells false eyelashes and real hair provides shade for my dog, and the meter maids circle the block like sharks at the edges of coral reef, waiting for fresh prey.

Autumn Leaves In LOs ANgeLeS

Autumn is here! The leaves have festooned the sidewalks in a patchwork of earth tones like 70's disco-wear. The crows are roosting in the ficus trees, from afar they look like shiny, black apples plugged into the tangled boughs, how macabre.  Mexican gardeners from Hancock Park to Beverly Hills are reseeding the lawns, and the city is perfumed with fresh manure. Even the cockroaches, rusty as dragon's blood and big as jack rabbits, are busy scuttling under lips of pavement to shield themselves from the evening chill. And the sky turns purple a little earlier every day. The handful of stars that can be seen in the Los Angeles ether flicker Helter-skelter, as though this is their last scheduled night to twinkle.

SoCal milieu aside, lets get down to brass tacks.  After all, this is a blog about a budget and I'm here to lead all of those who, like me, must find some way to live on squat. Unemployment is a stone-cold reality check where you discover that real necessities don't include cases of Barbera or baggies of weed. In fact, one must be a fiscal warrior to keep oneself fed.

This day I decided to spend my $15 weekly food allowance on ingredients for peanut butter cookies.  On the walk to Trader Joe’s, I talked myself out of greens and chicken legs as I thought about the nutritional structure of cookies. I was surprised to discover that you’ve actually got all your necessary groups here: protein from peanuts and eggs, carbohydrates from sugar cane and wheat, your vegetable comes from the chlorophyll that the cows eat which in turn gives butter its hue, making it a perfectly acceptable stand-in for salad.  By the time I reached the refrigerated section, I was confident in my argument of cookies vs. soup.

I made a day of it. I cleaned the apartment and banged the dust from my oven mitts. I scoured the internet for the best PBC recipe to reduce the possibility of failure. Lets face it, if I bomb, I’ll be carving bracket fungus from the trees and folding it into one-egg omelets, the eggs hijacked from raven’s nests.

What I found in my search were two attractive recipes whose attributes I mined and commingled to devise a recipe that would produce the most elite PBC, much like Hitler’s madcap eugenicists who tried to cultivate a singular, perfect race. Only I would use vanilla and baking soda instead of people:

1 stick of butter

3/4 cup of brown sugar

1/4 cup of white sugar

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1 1/4 cups organic peanut butter (I like chunky)

1/4 cup unbleached, organic, white flour

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp vanilla

Cream together the butter and sugar till fluffy (if you do it by hand, you'll lose a pound), beat in the PB till even fluffier, then the egg and vanilla. Fold in the flour in thirds. DELICATELY. The trick to a tender biscuit is to avoid over-beating at the flour addition stage. Over-beating works the gluten in the flour (among other things) and makes for more of a puck. Bake @ 350˚ for 5 minutes, spin the pan and bake for another 5. They're done when they seem a little under-baked, and you're terrified to take them out of the oven. They will cool to chewy in the center and crisp at the edges.

I think I ate at least 7 cookies, half in the form of raw dough. I like to live on the edge.

Among my newfound obsession with little-things-appreciation, I've discovered that this abundance of time has coaxed me to become a bit of a fledgling sage. As I spooned little tan nuggets onto a baking sheet, I peeled off petite notes of wisdom and gifted them to my friend Ben* in Berlin with the grace of Buddha.  Speaking of the great sage, I think that if Buddha had been on unemployment, it wouldn't have taken him so blasted long to find enlightenment. I, on the other hand, have merely ten-months to realize max illumination, so I'm burning through lessons like a pyro with a box of flints at the edge of California’s vast underbrush.
           *All names have been changed to protect the innocent.


Onward: Our topic of conversation was hinged on the premise that we all become so attached to our suffering.  I blathered on about being grateful for the simple things in life like, say, not having to shower every day, because, come on, where do I have to go? And finding joy in small things, like how much money I'm saving on bars of soap.  I suggested that he may not be as grateful as he could be for his indoor plumbing, after all, an illuminated person does not have to travel India to realize how spoiled he is. It was so easy and so fulfilling to tell Ben about all the ways he was clogging up his life and failing at the task at hand. With my own hands free to make cookies, my earpiece jammed in my ear, I felt I could go on, I felt I should go on, with detailed admonishments and bulleted instructions on how he should rearrange  his life. Ben was so attentive during my harangue, in fact, he was too attentive. Ben from Berlin had indeed fallen asleep somewhere between my first and second batches of wisdom. And as the oven hissed into the tail end of my speech, the dusk bled over the neon lights and rat infested palm trees, I realized that I have spent my life inextricably married to my suffering, and it's hard to say who has been the more abusive spouse.

I came to Los Angeles to find some things.  My writing life, what I want for my future, my first million dollars earned from my brilliant first screenplay, you know, simple things. Now that I'm an adult, I'm supposed to really focus on this kind of stuff and make somethin' of myself.  Tonight as Ben snoozed, and my admonishments hung in the air alongside the aroma of newly baked cookies, I listed the ambitions that I had planned to labor to fruition during my SoCal experience, now that I had managed to shake off the tedious distractions of friends and fun and sustainable income.  When the list spilled onto the third page, some whose margins were riddled with auxiliary goals siphoned from the main ones, I realized that lifelong I had installed my aspirations right up there with the sputtering stars, and I have no idea what sort of spaceship I was thinking would take me there. It was overwhelming to read through the list, let alone make a plan to accomplish anything on it, especially with my habit of withholding praise. How would I ever see any of it through when the loftiest goals I have these days are making cookies, coming to the page every day to write a little something, and making sure that I don't disintegrate under the weight of loneliness for my friends, the fun I used to have, the income that made it all possible?

Tonight I realized that that list is not really a list of bona fide goals at all. It's a veil to hide  my unwillingness to be kind to myself, to be content with myself, to be satisfied with simple things like the fact that I have life and breath and that I’ve not been made to suffer by the hands of crazy dictators and abusive spouses. That list is a way of making me feel bad about myself, that I have not done more, that I am somehow not enough. I realized tonight that I will probably not accomplish most of the goals on that list, and I'm grateful, because I've been so stressed over its magnitude that I've become paralyzed to the point of being unable to do even the simple things that bring me joy. I've come to L.A., and I've not made a million dollars nor met RuPaul on the red carpet to celebrate my Grammy, but what I have accomplished, and this might pale in comparison to page three, bullet point sixteen, paragraph two on my list, is that I somehow found the strength to realize that being in an abusive relationship is not at all what I am willing to move forward with into my new life, especially when the abuser has been myself, as well as the abusee.  I will admit, this lacks the luster of having six homes sprinkled all over the world and a private jet, but I have a feeling that being nice to myself is going to be a challenging goal all its own. And frankly, what good is a private jet if all I'm going to do with it is beat myself up over Montauk for not having two jets, and maybe a yacht?


Tonight, with a bowl of cookies and ice cream as support, I decided to sit my suffering down and have a heart-to-heart: One of us has gotta go, and since I pay the rent (albeit with government funds), I don’t think it should be me.  Ben was right to fall asleep. Clearly the Buddha was talking to me, not him. Ben is doing just fine. And I have a feeling that I will be too, as long as my goals remain simple and reachable. For, the satisfaction comes from attaining the goal, no matter how small, not the setting of those that will never be realized without a paid staff and an endless supply of money and time and energy. Today my goal is to write this blog, to sit with my newfound illumination, and to focus on one project at a time, even if that project is writing one page, or making one pattern, or giving myself a free day to do nothing at all.  I will be just fine, as long as I can remember to find joy in the little things along the way, like the fact that I have really good friends, even if they do fall asleep when I'm trying to fix their lives.