Been trying to figure out how to steal my grandpa’s dog. His name is “Dog”. He will probably fit under my shirt through airport security.
Our job today was to get grandpa telling stories. Because I have no shame about snooping through everything with my librarian raccoon hands, I got into the junk piles under the tables and found all the old photo albums to go through with him.
Hey, it’s me
My mom
Grandma and grandpa making fun of very serious artists
Great grandpa Casey, who never grew old and died smoking hot
Grandpa covering for me by making the same noise for the camera
The story he told was about the kid in the navy who stood ahead of him alphabetically every time they had to form a line. On the day of their first weekly physical, they lined up bare ass naked in rows while nurses roamed up and down the lines between them. The first needle was the blood draw with the big slurping needle, and the second was the little measles prick. Everybody got through the blood draw okay, but when they went down the rows with the vaccinations, Anderson got his prick on the arm and suddenly went down like a big naked log, WHAM, and just laid there taking up half the floor. Barez turned around slowly with his eyes as round as saucers, “I don’t want what he got!” Every Thursday night, before Friday’s weekly physical and needle jab, that kid tried to get everyone to hop the fence and run away with him, and the rest of them would tell him it would be alright - sure, they were going to use the square needles, but it would only hurt for an hour or two.
Tiny plane took a hard landing on a short runway in Las Vegas. The pilot let out a long exhalation on the overhead and everyone laughed. There was a big animated sign visible from the strip that said “HYDRATION!” Fancy.
Expected to walk out into a blast of heat and melt, but it felt like home. Smelled like home. Picked up a car and drove across Nevada, the only car on an endless road in an hours-long sunset while my mother chatted about the bird life and took pictures out the window, and I felt so happy.
My uncle is a long-haul trucker and drove out from Indiana to meet us at grandpa’s house with his recreational camper. We stayed up late and slept in bunks, boiled water for coffee on the gas stove, and watched the buzzards worry the cottontail rabbits from the window seat.
Reconsidering my position on dirt farming. Sorry, kids.
The rescued murder chicks were finally big enough to re-home, and the very next morning I heard a noise that made me throw my oatmeal bowl aside and run out onto the porch. One of the girls walked by with five freshly baked chicks. She settled into the old coop with the babies and won’t budge. I need a bigger farm.
We don’t even have a rooster
Bought a new sketchbook to travel with. Every time you hold a new sketchbook or journal, you think, This is the one. This will be the book my descendants find in an attic trunk a hundred years after my death; a meaningful documentation of a life, without eraser gouges and torn out pages and phrases like "dick owl" scribbled in the margins without context.
After a week of super stupid confrontations with people who really want to spend their free time fighting with librarians about wearing a mask for 10 minutes, a trip to the scorching desert is looking like a nice relaxing vacation. “It’s called HIPAA! I challenge you to look it up!” Lady, I have a master’s degree in looking shit up, and HIPAA doesn’t mean a fucking thing to mask policy enforcement. Want me to go grab a stack of good books for your kids and bring them out to your car? “No, I want my country back! The managers at Walmart understand, once I educate them!” Ffs. Take the free mask and go find a book about better hobbies you could have.
My grandfather is dying, and the family has been called together to see him while there is still time (weeks, but not months). We lived with my grandparents until I was 8, while my mother went to university. He never tried to be my father, but he was the man I had as a role model, which is probably where I learned to accept a level of misuse in exchange for stability and homemade bread.
I spent hours comparing flight dates and times and
prices, until the numbers on the screen stopped meaning anything. Closed it up and drove to work, chewing on everything and listening to
music. Wondered if I was developing premature dementia. Lately I’ve been forgetting stuff and having momentary confusion about minor things.
Ffs, you're not getting senile. You've had a very compressed year of adult bullshit, and now your grandpa is dying and you're conflicted because you love an old man who punched your mother in front of
you when you were a kid. That is stress, not dementia.
Just then, Pixies started playing.
haha synchronicity oh shit I’m dissociating because my grandpa is dying
So
I did the damn thing and got the trip booked. A week from Monday, I'm hopping a plane and taking my mother to meet her sisters and say goodbye to her
dad; a funny, smart, artistic, banjo-playing professor who was also
kind of a bad father. I probably won't tell him I'm glad my mom kicked him flat that last time.
For over a century, our ancestors lived in the verdant hills of the Hudson Valley. After leaving a trail of arrest records for robbery and a couple of stabbings, the family decided to make their way out West to seek their fortunes as dirt farmers in the Mojave Desert (and spawning the "Anti-Braffet Alliance" in Utah along the way - see page 43). The cemetery in Kingman is full of our bones. Some of them planted by our own relatives, because we were also the grave diggers. And maybe the murderers. Our family still insists the boys were shooting rattlesnakes when cousin Jack got a bullet through the heart by "accident" back in the 70s. Grandpa got as far as Guam, Yap, and Newfoundland before finally getting rounded up and carted back to the scorched homeland in his old age.
It'll be about 115 degrees when we get there. I am not worried about flying into wildfire, because there is nothing living to burn. Except the residents.
I love Arizona deeply, and our years on Black Mesa were among our best. Kingman
itself may be a blast furnace filled with tumbleweeds and scoundrels, but I’m looking
forward to bringing my living bones back for a visit. And if I die of
heatstroke or the Anti-Braffet Alliance takes me out while I’m there,
someone please come dig me up and stuff me in a duffel bag back to Hawaii,
because fuck that place.
You would think, with a shelf full of drying mugs, that I would be getting the hang of this thing.
You would be wrong.
Half the time I can’t center the clay, it just bangs my arms around until I muster all my strength to wrestle it still, and then it torques and smears everywhere.
Who is throwing who here, wheel?
When it does decide to center, the cups are whatever shape they want to be, I don’t have any control over it. Flat things are probably easy, I thought. I will make a plate.
I did not make a plate. I made a frisbee. It was not flat, but it flew anyway.
Cleaned up my mess and painted the cat, racing the setting sun in 45 minutes because I was too lazy to go find a lamp. I’m working out all the problems before ruining the official contest panel.
Problem 1: background needs to be dark enough to contrast the light on the nose.
Problem 2: paint with A LAMP.
I wish I had one of those thin slinky dogs with a face like a horse that went through a playdoh extruder. Or a really handsome goat.
The arm strengthening that comes with pottery inspired me to put on my stretchy pants and do some workout videos, and now I'm playing phone tag with the cardiologist again.
Doubled up the vitamins and iron supplements I’ve been throwing back with my coffee. Made a banana pudding cake for Sunday dinner, reasoning that a protective shell of cholesterol might fortify those arterial valves. Internal armament through saturated fats, a thesis.
The annual Trekell pet portrait contest is on again, and this year Zenny wanted a shot at losing it along with me, so we ordered two panels and have started chasing the cats around to get a good pose. It is going as well as last year.
caterpillar eyes
glamour shot setup
I guess I could paint some chickens. You know who wins these things? Dogs. Paintings of dogs, not dog painters - although a dog who could paint would probably sweep the awards, too. The only dog I know is the chick-snaffler across the street, and if I start hiding in the bushes with a telescopic lens trying to get pictures of their dog, the neighbors will think I’m doing a murder investigation and call the chicken police on me.
I have become the unwilling custodian of the rescued infant-massacre chicks. "I am not the chicken dumping ground!" I said. Except I am, because I have the chicken coop. One of my mother's co-workers with a yard backing the jungle will take them in a few weeks, when they're big enough not to be eaten by the wild pigs. So I have a chicken orphanage in my yard right now, which technically speaking we are not allowed to have. But they are temporary rehab birds, OKAY?
I don't feel like it's okay. They are nice little chickens, though.
During the week, there was a smash and a frenzy of peeping, and the man ran outside in time to see the neighbor's dog dash out of the yard with a chick in its mouth and retreat back into its own yard through the open gate, then into the house through the dog door. Mr. Across the Road came trotting outside to close the gate while Mike was rounding up a terrorized chick that had escaped the attack, and then he hid. An hour later, when he thought the coast was clear, Mr. Across the Road came outside to finish putting away his tools, saw Mike heading across the road calling his name, pretended not to notice him, and hid around the side of the house. Mike waited for him at the gate. When he crept back out, Mr. Across the Road pretended to be surprised. "Hey, neighbor, didn't see you there! Oh man, did the dog get out? Naw, I didn't see any chicks. That's so weird." As if he didn't notice the dead bird chewed up in the living room.
Next time Mr. Across the Road misses the garbage truck on his side of the road and runs outside in his pajamas to roll his garbage bin next to ours, I will helpfully roll it straight back into his driveway.
- - -
Planning a pandemic graduation party is a checklist leading to misadventure: What can we do for fun with a group of teenagers that is outdoors, has lots of space, and includes face protection? We narrowed it down to snorkeling, ax-throwing, paintballs, and tiny race cars. Since teaming up to try to survive in a Hunger Games scenario is more sociable that paddling in circles with your face in the water, the teenagers opted for paintball.
I opted for staying home with Zenny and making tea cups.
As it happens, paintball is also the recreational activity of choice for off-duty marines. The kids were solid canvases of yellow paint and welts by the end of the day, and Leif has decided that being hunted for sport isn't his hobby of choice. I made fresh kaiser rolls and bbq pulled pork for dinner and we watched MASH.
Very important content: my cat laying nude in the window.
A moment later he yawned, fell off, landed on a graduation balloon, and exploded.
I’ve been throwing mugs every evening, partly because it takes at least an hour a day to get good at anything, and partly to stay out of my mother-in-law’s hair. The pottery is accumulating. Still a bit wobbly, but finally getting height. I have a much easier time pulling handles than the boys, which is shocking if you’ve seen how it’s done.
(Not my hands, I’m a lot slower)
Probably because I don't find it counterintuitive to smash them flat afterwards.
Sitting downstairs in the studio, rinsing clay off my aching arms, taking a break in my comfy chair to paint a bit, I felt deeply satisfied.
My mother-in-law is visiting for Gavin’s high school graduation. I got home from work on Friday to find takeout on the table and the boy in the shower after a day at rehearsal. We sat down to wait for him and chat a bit, and when Gavin walked in behind her, I did a double-take and burst out laughing, because apparently the school had decided to hold rehearsal out on the football field for four hours and give all the graduating seniors mask-shaped sunburns just in time for one of the biggest and most photographed events of their lives. I went into the worst kind of sudden hysterical laughter - doubled over, incoherent, banging the table - before struggling to get my shit together and asking, through tears, “so... it was an overdose?” Mother-in-law had been in the middle of describing the circumstances of her friend’s daughter’s death.
And that is why she doesn’t like to talk with me.
But really
It was a good ceremony, even though the pandemic protocols required us to drop off our senior at the gym and wait in our cars to be escorted to the field, so I wasn’t on hand to get in a fight with the principal when she tried to stop Gavin from walking because his jeans weren’t dark enough and his tie had tiny skulls on it. One of the security guards ran next door to his house and lent Gavin a pair of dress pants, which he pulled on right over his jeans because his legs are pool noodles. The principal had to yell at some girls about wearing white sneakers instead of white high-heeled sandals, so the tie slipped by.
Trimming is hard. My bowl lost its grip, flew off the wheel, hit the wall of the basin at high speed like an overconfident 7 year old at a skating rink, and knocked out a chunk of its rim. I bent it back into shape, carved a matching chunk out of the other side of the rim, and now it’s a ramen bowl.
