Off to a good start

At 5pm, I shut off the library computers. “Yay, let’s go, 2021!” And as I ran out of the room, my belt loop caught on the door latch, and it swung me around to slam face first into the wall.

Nice touch, 2020.

Annual questionnaire 2020

1. What did you do in 2020 that you’d never done before?  Rescued a rooster impaled clean through with a steel dart. Made Julia Child’s chicken fricassee (whoa). Had a gallery show. Got weird about romance novel covers.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions? The theme was “get the ball rolling”. Let’s check in on how that’s going:

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? My friend's baby 'Meaty' arrived in March! And the world shut down. Coincidence?

4. Did anyone die? Mjolnir. Mike's grandparents are both in the hospital with covid. My cousin died of the virus. And my step-grandfather. And a family friend. And my co-worker’s neighbor. My friend Philip died of a heart attack. My colleague Rick died in a plane crash. An egg-bound chicken died in my arms. My aunt almost died after her son smashed her finger in the car door like a candy cane and it went septic, necessitating an IV of antibiotics for a month. If spotting the Spectre of Death were like spotting shooting stars, it was a meteor shower of a year.

5. What places did you visit? lol

6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020? I’d actually like to keep the masks, thanks. I have a face that would really suit a beard, and this is as close as I’ll get. I'll take the vaccine, though. And a plane ride with my new star-spangled driver’s license.

7. What moments from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory?

Zenny vs. the roofing nail. 

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Gallery show! That is all. I sat at the library door and felt my life drain away for the rest of the year.

9. What was your biggest failure? Being nice to patrons while sitting at the door feeling my life drain away. 

“You must be so glad to have people back inside the library!”

No. 

“MASKS DON’T WORK I HAVE A MEDICAL CONDITION.” 

Ffs.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? I burned my hand pretty badly on a roast beef.

 
11. What was the best thing you bought? We made a point of buying food from small restaurants every Friday to help keep our town alive, and discovered a place nearby that makes fresh calzones and stromboli. Good citizenship and wadded up pizza. This was a win.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Gavin got his driver's license and has been applying to colleges and Apple internships. Leif learned to play piano. Zenny started reading chapter books. Mike worked from home and got all the kids through distance learning without losing his shit. I am not on this achievement list.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled? I always make fun of tv shows where the characters speak to each other from 4 inches away, right up in each others' lunch breath, but HOLY SHIT PEOPLE REALLY DO THIS. They just charge right up like they're going to kiss you or trample you. I want my desk back.

14. What did you get excited about? I broke up half a dozen fights and wrote a bunch of security reports, that’s kind of like being excited.

15. What song will always remind you of 2020? 

Between Volcano Man and My Stick, there has been a lot of terrible singing happening in our house.

This is the song that caught me crying in the car, though. Thanks for the permanent brain connection, radio.

 

 

16. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder?  lol
b) thinner or fatter? This is going to become more a matter of mass distribution as the years go by. My meat is still affixed to it’s assigned portion of my skeleton, mostly.
c) richer or poorer? I think I’m coming out ahead somehow. For now. 

17. What do you wish you’d done more of? I was really wanting to rejoin the figure drawing group this year, just in time for it to be disbanded indefinitely. I need more painting models in my life, my kids are tired of me and have started assigning cats.

19. "So! How's your love life?" 

 

20. What was your favorite TV program?  What we do in the Shadows, Mandalorian, and Atlanta. I tried a few Korean dramas, and of those my favorite was Signal. I am here for the grumpy tired guys with strong codes of honor. And vampires.

21. What was the best book you read?

 

Troubled Blood. I know we're all mad at JK Rowling, but I like her stories. Your heroes will change throughout their lives, but your relationship with a song or a book or a painting is personal. It’s okay. You are a speck of electricity in a meat suit on a rock hurtling through a void around a ball of fire; just like what you like.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, was good, too.

I liked Devolution: a Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, but it felt like a first draft. Write it again with more character development and less “this is going to be a movie with Chris Pratt”, Max.

22. What did you want and get?  I got to keep my job in an age of economic ruin. Also: giant rubber lobster claws.

23. What did you want and NOT get? Oh hey, there is still a MASSIVE ROCK PILE where the back yard should be. I’m going to start trailing gravel around the neighborhood in my pant leg, Shawshank-style, if someone doesn’t get that dumpster situation sorted out.

24. What was your favorite film of this year? Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I also liked Parasite, and The Eurovision Song Contest. 

25. Did you make some new friends this year? lol

26. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Rum strong enough to blow the figgy pudding off the table. Flaming desserts are the only holiday fireworks I fully endorse.

27. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?  “I Bet I’d Look Good in Clown Pants”. Surprise: I do not.

28. What kept you sane? That train somehow stayed on the tracks without any help from its driver. I sat back and looked out the window all year.

29. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy? 
 

Cormoran Strike in absolutely stupid Musketeer pants.

 

30. What political/news issue stirred you the most? There has been a lot of very troubling news this year, and I was as stirred as anyone (the wildfires, protests, and Rick’s plane crash) but the news item that made me laugh was the failed Russian underpants poisoning, solved by calling the assassin and telling him he was in trouble.

31. Who did you miss? Nothing like a plague to make you think about the people you haven’t spoken to in two or sixteen or thirty years, and wonder if you’ll ever see them again. 

 

(Except you, S. You can stay fucked off at this point, I’m not sending any more Christmas cards into the void.)

32. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020. Nah. I’m going to pass on this and learn two things next year, instead. 

Cats and Carnations

It’s back to work tomorrow after a long weekend. Had time to paint for the first time in more than a month. Feels like catching a big breath before hitting a flip turn and swimming back the other way.

It’s cool and blustery. Massive apple bread pudding and meatloaf in the oven. I’d like another week of days like this.

Christmas 2020: the grinchening

Santa had a terrible realization and went skidding into the living room to chug milk and stuff cookies into pockets at 4:47am. Leif came bursting into the bedroom and whisper-yelled “IT’S CHRISTMAS” at 4:59am, causing me to leap 3 inches straight off the bed.

Close call there.

Last week I accidentally destroyed the vacuum, crushing and snapping off the top half of it. 

“I hulk-smashed the vacuum!” I bragged. 

“That is what you get for buying a vacuum from the thrift store,” my family said. No appreciation for my appliance-crushing abilities. 

“Well, I also broke the food processor.” Still no applause. These people.

So I was very happy when my mother gave me a robot vacuum for Christmas. I am gets-excited-about-vacuum-cleaners years old. Oh no.

After the house was destroyed, my mother packed up her overnight bag and went back home to feed her cats, and I chased the kids around with the robot vacuum while they scrambled to get legos out of its path. 

In the afternoon we packed up the leftovers and puff pastry and went over for meat pie and flaming figgy pudding.

Except it turns out that the horrible jet-fuel rum I had gotten in my eyeball the day before and tipped down the kitchen sink had been the flaming pudding rum. I have no idea how that bottle of poison ended up at my house when it usually lives safely at the back of my mother’s liquor shelf collecting dust until we set it on fire, but we must have been trying to light the grill with it or something, because there it was. Gone. 

We had to light the pudding with the good booze, instead, and it barely gave a flicker before burning out. No ring of fire for us this year.

It tasted way better drenched with $60 cognac, though. 

It’s all soup and painting for the rest of the weekend. The rain looks like snow, keeping the neighborhood quiet and off their new hoverboards. Almost feels like Christmas over here or something.

Christmas Eve

(Edited to fix dates - drink to forget, etc)

HO HO I am drinking.

After euthanizing our cat, I went to work and sat at the library door live-streaming a funeral with my co-worker because her neighbor, who worked at the airport, died of the virus over the weekend. 

It was an open-casket zoom meeting. 

It was super weird.

But spending a couple hours with a dead person is a traditional holiday spirit power-move. It could be worse. It HAS been worse. It WILL be worse. So buy the biggest goose you can find and stop being an asshole. 

Absolutely right. Even with a dead cat and a phone funeral, this year doesn't even crack the top 5 Worst Christmases I Would Punch a Ghost to Avoid Revisiting. 

Christmas 2004 2003: father-in-law told Mike he was "pussy whipped" because he didn't make me cook Christmas dinner with a 103 degree fever while staying in the unheated basement with a sick baby.

Christmas 1994: traveled to Vancouver to see my dying grandmother, who then died, and in her absence my mother's 6th grade class wrote "condolence" cards which included ones that said "I don't care that your mother died" and "I'm glad she's dead". 

There were others. Divorced, dumped, pregnant, sick, regifted gifts from the previous year. Most were good, though.

So, you know, basically I can do whatever I want now. Think of your worst christmases. Is fucking up the roast going to top that? PROBABLY NOT.

So what I want to do is bake until everyone is happy. Breakfast took two attempts because of a sausage mishap and I got 140-proof rum in my eyeball while soaking pie cherries, but then I started making gin spritzers and things started going smoothly.

SO FAR:

Eggnog Pie (as yet un-stepped-in).

Apple tart with lychee glaze, because I didn't feel like making apple pie. 

And a terrible selfie with the cat in the wrapping-strewn ruins of my bedroom while the kids watch the Grinch.

There will be roast beef. And Yorkshire pudding. This year was stupid and we can do something about it right now.

This has been your annual reminder to take the holiday by the neck and shake it until joy falls out, folks.

It’s over

He went outside and ran for a couple seconds, chasing a lizard, then sat and watched butterflies, had a pee in the grass, and napped on the couch with us. All the other cats licked his face before he left. 

We’ve all got eyes like boiled eggs. Making soup.

Things I don't want to do

Two people walked up to the library. "Remember me? I was here yesterday taking pictures of everything? Today I brought the director."

The director looked around. "Offices there. Build walls over there. Okay."

"Alright! You've been chosen for filming! You're a police station now."

Thanks? 

So the film crew for the new I Know What You Did Last Summer series is arriving today to scope out the sets they'll need to build to cover up the fact that we are a library and not a police station. I wore my best police station desk clerk outfit, in case they want to offer me a job.

Okay, I don't actually want the job.

Meanwhile, because we have the “day off” on Boxing Day but don’t get paid for it, we have to come in this weekend, instead. What a treat. This means I have one day to finish everything for the holidays. 

And that one day includes euthanizing my son's cat.

Before having to shop for stocking stuffers, my second thoughts add bitterly.

Unless I shop for stocking stuffers first, then kill the cat in the afternoon, say my third thoughts. Third thoughts are assholes. They're the ones that think, "damn, those were good pants" as they're being cut off in the emergency room, or "don't sob too hard or you'll be too ugly to get out of the car when you get to work" while you're crying into your steering wheel.

I am heartsick about Mjolnir. His body is ruined, but his brain is fine. He's still our guy in there. I don't want to do it to him, but it isn't fair to make him suffer another week just to get through Christmas. Death is a terrible house guest to have hanging around at the holidays.

Hate this.

Edited to add: right after getting off the phone with the vet to schedule the euthanasia, we got a call from New York to say that grandma is in the hospital with covid, courtesy of thanksgiving with the cousins. Fuck this year.

eighteen

My first baby is grown.

Gavin is as patient and kind and funny as you could wish for when ordering your hypothetical child. He’s a solidly good person, hard working and unselfconscious. In elementary school, he was the only person who would wear the worm costume for the class play of James and the Giant Peach because it looked like a giant dick, and he killed the audience with his comedic timing. On a robotics trip, he won a novelty giant squid hat and wore it to all the meets for the rest of the season. Nobody bullies him because he’s just the kind of guy who pulls that kind of thing off, and all the elementary kids loitering around the high school can identify him as the “the kid in the cat headphones who knows the WiFi password.” When his robotics team kept forgetting to turn off their robot at night, he put a sensor on it and programmed it to scream when the lights went out. He gets through things with a relaxed humor that attracts like-minded friends, and I love his assortment of gentle nerds and techie surfer boys.

This year the boy earned his driver’s license, applied to colleges, and sat his SAT in a pandemic. His best friend’s parents panicked about the end of the world and moved to Idaho, and the boys conspired to wire the off-grid Big-Brother-proof cabin right back into the digital age in order to play games and trash-talk together every night until they can reunite in college. There is no avoiding the Eye of Sauron with teenagers playing with the palantirs, sorry folks.

He loves cats, he tinkers with computers, he wants to work in AI so he can thwart the Boston Dynamic dogs when they get turned to evil. He sends me cute kitten videos when I'm stuck at the library door, builds sword holders and small furniture with his dad, and would like a full suit of armor, please. Which he would wear. 

He's the best kind of person. He'll support your endeavors, join you in boring chores just to make you feel better, protect lizards from the feet of stomping playground kids, and climb into a highway ditch to save a baby animal.

I love him so much.

Happy Birthday, my grown son!

Droopy

Droopy Cat. Droopity Poopity. The handsome boy. Yeah, I painting the oval crooked, but it’ll trim down.

 

Droopy was supposed to have a dignified name, but the first time Gavin greeted him, he walked in and said, "Awww, he's a droopy cat! Look at that droopy face." And that was that. Sorry, Droopy.

Droopy turns into quicksilver when the front door opens, and right after posing for this picture, someone walked in and he squirted out the door. We spent the next 5 hours looking for him, walking up and down the Christmas-lit streets yelling, "DROOOOPY". This is how we learned that the up-the-road-neighbors have 6 ENORMOUS HOGS in dog kennels on their front porch. This is like having 6 full-grown men pooping in dog kennels on your porch. Not a nice situation for neighbors or pigs. Giving myself permission to stop feeling embarrassed about my badly behaved chicken and the rock pile in the back yard.

(I'll still feel embarrassed, of course, but I have permission not to.)

Droopy came home at bedtime, uneaten by pigs. What a little stinker.

Chiggens

Uninfected, back at the library door. Forever. I’ll be guarding this door in the afterlife, causing people to shiver as they pass through me, mistaking the chill for air conditioning. 

Last week, the library chickens started screaming and I ran outside to see a man on a bicycle trying to stop his unleashed dog as it ran around in a frenzy, chomping up baby chicks to feel them crunch. The dog looked up when I screamed, and the man managed to get hold of its collar. He picked up one of the fluffy bodies and just stared at it, looking horrified and unsure of what to do, with the dog lunging at the end of his arm and one leg still over his bike. I did not help him. I shooed the mama hen to safety with her remaining chicks and went inside to put my head on my desk. It was awful to see. 

Then yesterday, back at home, one of the semi-wild chickens hatched four fresh yellow chicks in the one place we would never look; the actual goddamn chicken coop. 

We do not need more chickens. 

But maybe I needed these ones, a little bit.

Need a new motto

Honolulu is a warren of one-way streets that create little blue pinwheels on your phone every time you miss a turn and force it to map a new route. I knew nobody would want to drive downtown with me to hang my show, but it still hurt my feelings when nobody did.

Opt for adventure, I tell myself. This is an old family motto.

You know you’re having an adventure when you’re not having any fun, myself replies. This is an even older family motto, usually said in a tow truck or while writing a police statement.

Got lost in Chinatown, went the wrong way up a loading dock, drove backwards down a street a short distance, and finally found my way to the correct parking garage without running over anybody. Jackie, my old instructor, arrived at the same time and grabbed some of my paintings to carry upstairs.

The gallery was big and empty. I claimed a spot with good light while the other artists trickled in. Next to their big beautiful wood prints and vibrant canvases, I began feeling self conscious about my shabby little thrift store frames and uneven varnish. Had trouble arranging all the paintings on the wall without having enough arms and eyeballs to back up and see how high they should go. Stepped away and had a moment in the empty bathroom. An encouraging quote was taped next to the toilet paper, which told me that I wasn’t the first artist to hide in the toilet worrying about their garbage artwork. 

Jackie helped bang my paintings up onto the wall for the next hour or so. I signed up for my sitting dates and wandered around, looking at the artwork going up and peeking out the window at the old boarded up buildings.

Bought some bbq sandwiches and went to my mom’s house instead of going home. We toasted with a Guinness, laughed about her neighbor’s terrible but very earnest Christmas decorations, and opened a box of fancy chocolates. Felt a bit better.

And then that evening Jackie’s husband tested positive for the virus, and I have been chased into the bedroom until a) Jackie’s test comes back negative or b) I get tested in three days. 

ADVENTURE. 

41, the picture post

Edited to add the pictures I settled on.

41 hasn’t been much of anything, corporeal-form-wise. I didn’t get softer or firmer, my heart and knees complained about my minor cardio workouts, my cheeks haven’t collapsed completely into my neck yet, thanks to being held up by a mask for most of the year. My worry lines are deeper, my smile lines aren’t. That’s probably no good.

I think I got my aging crisis out of the way in my 20s. I don’t have anything to do now but raise these kids and paint until my arms fall off.

—-

And here is a picture Harris sent of us as teenagers, which got me very sad about everyone from the old Molokai gang scattering to the wind. Maybe in this decade of our middle age we should make a point of traveling a bit and getting coffee together in our various cities, okay?

This is Harris now, btw. He’s a rock star in Portugal.

Yeah, well I’m a gallery artist in Hawaii, so HA. SAME THING. 

At the cool kids’ table

The show is happening. There will be an online tour and purchase options, though thankfully I’m not the person who has to handle any of that. Imagine trying to figure out how to ship a 20lb hand-blown glass sea turtle. Yikes.

The show runs from next week to January 10th at the Downtown Art Center. Which looks like this:

The ‘Mac and Me’ episode of MST3K has gotten a lot of airtime in our house.

I’ll be there in person one day to handle sales/collar international art thieves. We had a zoom meeting last night, and I was the only person who had never been in a real show before, so they were all chatting about liability forms and label formats and I just smiled and sat very still because my questions were like, Do we hang them on... nails? 

When called on to speak I said:

“I'm a librarian.”

“I like to paint."

 

 Yeah, I'm having an adventure.

 

How’s the pandemic going?

We opened the library back up to public rummaging last week, and for the first two days I was very tense and clenched-jawed, watching them finger paint my workspace with germs. Half of them fake the hand sanitizer, the way they bump an empty fist over the donation box when taking .25 paperbacks. By Thursday none of it bothered me anymore. If my job was to let them lick me like puppies I’d probably be resigned to it in 3 days. 

Mjolnir is doing better after a couple of iffy days. I promised him the entire turkey skin if he makes it through Thanksgiving, and he's prepared to hold me to it. That's my good boy.

galleries and grenades

I've been having feelings of sadness and existential futility. The patrons are cranky, the house is full of restless people, and the cat is still dying. He's trotting around well enough right now, but looks to be on track to need a compassionate end just in time for Christmas, which will break Gavin's heart. Then I'll be making payments to have a dead cat until the vet bills are paid off. It's all no good.

Mjolnir smooching up Droopy

So this week my old bronze instructor, who is active in the downtown galleries, posted a call for 15-30 artists to do a popup gallery show, and I sent a message to say I'm in. Opt for adventure, etc. Maybe I could sell enough to pay off the vet bill. But it’s been a few days and she hasn’t replied, so I’m wondering if they’re waiting to see how many cool kids sit at the table before deciding if there’s room for me. The Honolulu art scene is dominated by pop graffiti, abstract textiles, and surf/dolphins - while my art has been described (not unkindly) as, “old stuff my nana would hang in her kitchen”. I'm not on tenterhooks, but I have mixed feelings about this stuff. 

Whatever. 

Please like me.

I went down to the studio (basement), half considering throwing all my old shit into a garbage bag, and found an egg hidden behind my still life drapery. Evidence of a chicken burglar breaking in, looking for paint to snack on. We call these old eggs "grenades", because after a month or two they fill with gas and become incredibly light and fragile. The slightest touch might cause them to pop and fill the area with rotting egg stink. The kids lob these into the gulch behind my mother's house when the wild chickens leave them around her patio, but at our house we have neighbors on all sides. I'd love to lob them at the screaming kids across the street, but there are too many security cameras on our block to get away with it. So I put the grenade carefully on the garage shelf to wait for garbage day. This morning I heard the garbage truck rumbling around the neighborhood and ran out in my pajamas to get the bin to the curb, saw the egg, and gently tried to place it on top of the garbage bags. It rolled off and exploded. Dropped the lid down and ran the bin to the curb in a cloud of rotten egg gas, where of course the garbage truck has still not picked it up. It's just sitting there, oozing stink. If anyone goes jogging by they will drop dead in front of my house. It is not good for our curb appeal.

Bonus content: here is Droopy invalidating the return policy on our new set of dishes.

Edited to add: just after posting this I got the word that I’m in. I get a gallery spot in Honolulu for a month. Take that, crippling self doubt!

books and bodies

The tension in the air is causing molecular vibrations that shimmy everyone's masks down under their fucking noses. Patrons are even more pissed than usual that the library isn’t open for rummaging, as if the pandemic has been cancelled until the election is over.

"Well, WHEN WILL THINGS BE BACK TO NORMAL?"

"I don't know, maybe when the case numbers start going down?" 

"STORES are open!"

"Stores don't share stuff people have been reading on the toilet?" Also, there are bouncers at the doors of every store, and restaurants have blocked the entrances with tables and registers, so it's not exactly a picture of normalcy out there.

I can find you a book to hide in for a while, though. And you don't even have to pull up your mask; I know how to throw a frisbee.

- - -

Driving through town, another homeless man was dead on the sidewalk outside the hardware store. Passersby were nudging him with their toes. Traffic slowed as an ambulance and a police car pulled up. Three EMTs and a police officer got out, walked around the body solemnly, and knelt down to check for a pulse. Suddenly the dead man's arm came up and started slapping them in the face like a garden hose. 

 

It was beautiful. Sorry for laughing so much as I drove by, first responders.