Oh, and the reptile pit. But I think we can just throw the trampoline on top of that.

Monday I put an ad in the "free" section of craigslist; there's been a giant disgusting hot tub in this backyard breeding illness and shame for too long.

On our first date, Randy offered me a glass of wine on his patio before dinner:

"So," he said, "How long have you lived in Arizona?"

"Almost ten years. Hey," I pointed, "Is that a hot tub? Should it be leaning over like that? And hissing?"

"Oh," he laughed. Refilling my glass. "That thing's on its way out. I've just got to get someone to help me haul it away."

I was too refilled to call him out at the time, but even then I had a feeling he was full of shit. I wasn't attracted to him for nothing, after all.

A year or so later, when I officially hung my hat here at the Intractable Bachelor Base Camp, Randy shoved all my furniture in the attic-- the heathen version of carrying the bride over the threshold-- and helped me unload my backpack of keepsakes into the trash.

I looked out the window. "I thought you said you were getting rid of that." The hot tub cover had collapsed into the base and was slowly being eaten by something.

"Huh. I don't remember that." He looked puzzled standing there, shredding my high school graduation program. Drinking the last of the wine. Ah, the timeless, intricate dance of love.

My brother's getting married this November, though, and I went ahead and offered to host the reception here at the house. Being Captain of the Intractable Bachelors, Randy didn't initially understand why a formal party for two hundred people would necessitate the removal of a gaping, web-wrapped cesspool with power jets, but after I calmly laid it out for him-- all the people, the decorating, the food, the music, the pictures, everything that has to be outlined and coordinated-- I think he finally realized we're just not going to have time to worry about some kid falling in the hot tub and dissolving.

Eighteen hours after I begged the craigslist folk to come and take it, the hot tub was gone; all that remains is a cracked concrete slab, eleven million disengaged black widow egg sacks, and twenty subterranean feet of soil that burns a little when you touch it. But it's not like we don't have other issues to take care of. Spiders, for one. We've had seven exterminators in three years, and each one jogged out of here with an impromptu bandage and the phone number for air conditioner repair school. Unless I can convince my sister-in-law to change her colors to Day-Glo Orange and Kevlar, we could have a problem. 
¶ posted by Erin on Thursday, August 30, 2007

  And he will take it to the GRAVE.

Last Friday night was pretty standard issue around here; Randy in Red Shorts quietly ripping articles about, what, the Stucco Fair or used air hockey tables or something out of the newspaper, me in Green Pants on the smushed end of the couch making a Sock Thing. Watching Cheers. Feeling the thrill of being alive. That was 10:18. At 10:19 I felt a little weird and trembly. I stood up at 10:20 and confessed to Randy that something was really wrong with me, that I thought I might have rabies or zombie issues or something. By 10:24 he was blindly ransacking the garage for a scythe or a crossbow when I realized it was a kidney infection and called him off. Sock Thing had already galloped away for cover under something heavy. They're getting smarter, these Sock Things.


I don't know why my urinary tract insists on being an overachiever when it comes to infection. It's not like my organism has a history of efficiency in any other area; I haven't had to clip my nails or shave my legs in six months. If I ever have a baby, I'll be pregnant for four years. "When are you due again?" people will ask. "March 18th, two years ago. Ease up, we're getting there. I'm doing the arms right now and they're hard." Yet my kidneys go from being the Solution to being the Problem faster than Randy can load a .38 in the dark.

So I lied there in bed, feverish, gross, feeling like someone boot-kicked me in the action and then followed it up with a bread knife in my lower back. Every few minutes, the devil whispered in my ear that no, seriously, I really had to pee this time, only every single time he was joking. The demonic urinary prank equivalent of quizzically pointing at my shirt and then punching me in the face when I looked down.

This went on for, oh, six hours. Give or take. When I wasn't making the devil laugh, I was either half-asleep, dreaming about calling Urgent Care for their Saturday hours, or half-awake, trying to figure out if I'd actually called Urgent Care. At about five I was lying there, crazy person contemplative, when the doorbell rang. Randy, father of three, was up and down the hall like a shot. I did what I always do when the doorbell rings: what doorbell? But then I heard the squawk! of a handheld radio and a voice say, "911 call," so I got up, too.

According to the police officer at the door, 911 had received a hangup call from our phone line. Randy's son, Chris, lives in the guest house next door and we share a landline, so Randy The Dad jogs down the sidewalk followed by two cops and his sick, delirious girlfriend and he pounds on Chris' door. Christopher told me later that stumbling to answer the door at five o'clock on a rainy morning-- only to find your dad and the police outside-- is his worst possible way to wake up so far, and that's official.

Chris had not called 911.

"Is there anyone else in there, sir?"

"My girlfriend's here," Chris said, groggy-eyed, "but she's sleeping."

The cops nodded. "Okay, then," they said. "Sorry to bother you."

Which surprised me a little, frankly. Don't get me wrong-- I was 99.9% sure Erin² wasn't lying on Chris' bedroom floor with a new shiny arm sticking out of her neck-- but on Law and Order, when a guy holds his front door ten inches open for the cops and claims his girlfriend's inside asleep, guess what? That's a girl who's got a new shiny arm sticking out of her neck. Every time.

I wasn't going to fuck with the police, though. I was sick and miserable standing in the rain, Erin² was, you know, probably alive, and the devil kept straight-face insisting there was something seriously ridiculous on the front of my tee shirt. It did feverishly occur to me to maybe pull the policewoman aside and ask what time Urgent Care opened, but under the given circumstances it seemed a little inappropriate. Although who knows, she probably would have just told me. And then left.

Chris went back inside (presumably to "clean up", I'm new to first degree), Randy went to the Circle K across the street to get a newspaper, and I got dressed and drove down to Urgent Care to sit in the parking lot for two hours with fire kidneys and the new John Sandford novel. Erin² came over later and we laughed at the incongruity of the whole thing. Well, I laughed a lot because I was on a bunch of Percocet. The potential victim didn't really think it was all that funny. The 911 call remains a mystery. No one can figure out how that happened, exactly.

But someone else was there, lurking in the wings of delirium. Watching. Listening. Trying not to laugh.


And he thinks you can probably figure out this mystery on your own. 
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, August 27, 2007

  My brother was kind of a cryer.

UPDATED BELOW.

I went to my mom's house last night for Sock Monster Attempt The Dos; I wanted to see what kind of difference a sewing machine would make. My mom has offered repeatedly to let me just take her machine home with me, but we're talking about the oldest Singer machine in existence. You have to see this thing, seriously, I think it was hand-forged from one molten piece of iron ore. The instruction book is hand-printed in Old English on animal skins. It weighs four hundred and eleven MILLION POUNDS. I can't bring it home because I don't think the foundation of my house could handle it. It's the Gilbert Grape's mother of sewing machines.

Oh, and also because I don't know how to turn it on. Do you actually turn a sewing machine on? See, I don't even know. My mom knows, though, because like it or not, she used that machine to make every single piece of clothing she or my dad or my brother or I wore from 1973 to 1985. My mom is One with the Singer. I don't even think she bought it, I think she just opened the front door one day and there it was, resplendent in its mammoth-bone carrying case, quietly compressing the porch into the earth.

I think I did okay for my first time. We hefted that thing up on the counter and my mom led me through the twenty-seven microscopic steps involved in threading the needle. Fourteen times.

"Shit!" I said at one point, exasperated. "I'm frayed."

"Oh, no," my mom said, "Don't be scared."

HA HA HA HA HA! Sewing humor. We laughed and laughed.

And we made this. I don't know what happened. The body looks like I stuffed a yam in there, and I don't think I need to tell you what the little flaccid arms look like. I'm hesitant to stitch a face on him because I'm afraid it'll be all disappointed. And that's just what I need: a yam-stuffed sock monster-bunny with penis arms that looks let down.

UPDATE.




I personally think he looks like one of Jabba's chain-choked naked alien dancers, like Oola or Lyn Me. Because of the exorbitant ear situation, not because they were crafted out of socks. I'll be honest, I expected his face to subconsciously record the penis-arm, yam-body angst, but I don't know, he looks pretty oblivious to me. And also a little like he's been eating hair. But that just means he's family.

So! Now I'll scrunch him up in a tiny sock ball and jam him in a manila envelope to mail across the country! If it was a good enough way for my baby brother to go see MeeMaw in 1984, it'll be good enough for this sock thing tomorrow. 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, August 21, 2007

  "You can help by watching. WATCHING."

My parents made it back from Mexico yesterday, relaxed and ecstatic. No one got lost and weepy, no one's eye plopped out of anyone's head, and no one needed an epinephrine shot to the larynx.

"I did eat a jellyfish," my dad admitted, "but not the tentacles."

Fair enough.

I made this sock monster for someone's birthday. Riding the wave of personal sock achievement, I felt pretty good about the end product for all of eleven seconds. Inevitably, though, I had to look at it.


I've been told I should not under any circumstances attempt to give this to anyone. I've been told to wait here until reinforcements arrive bearing a sewing machine, socks that weren't just stripped off a suicidal Grampa, and a roll of duct tape to keep my hands immobile. 
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, August 20, 2007

  And remind me to put my trampoline on craigslist.

Randy and I just got home from Mexico; I dragged him down there because this weekend my parents finally took me up on my seven-year offer to use the condo, and I needed to get there before them to run preemptive reconnaissance on a level I can only compare to the Secret Service.

For the past six months or so, I've been playing this nighttime fall-asleep game with myself called, "Stop, Brain, Stop". The rules are simple: just lie there in the dark and uncontrollably imagine the people you love most in increasingly pitiful situations until your heart feels like you're wringing it out over the bathtub. It usually starts off with something small yet poignant-- I imagine my mom tripping over a curb in front of Target and falling, for example, losing a shoe, scrambling around on the sidewalk for her keys, maybe laughing in her little "doesn't matter" voice. Or my dad. In his starched light blue Oxford shirt, casually walking to his car somewhere, when suddenly a punk kid throws an apple at him out a window and yells something unthinkable. My year-old nephew, Logan, toddling through my family room and knocking his head on the stone hearth, a split second out of my reach. Logan, inexplicably falling out of the attic. Logan, jumping on a five-story trampoline. Continue to stretch plausibility and the consequential heartache-- all the everyday ways in which your mother could potentially lose the sight in her remaining eye, say-- until you finally fall asleep, exhausted and wet-faced.

I don't consider myself a particularly anxious person, and I'm having trouble figuring out where all this is coming from. My powers of vague denial are not easily dissuaded, so for the time being I'm going to chock it all up to a "phase". Deep down I suspect this phase has something to do with my Diet Coke by Red Wine intake equation, but so far I've only been able to deduce that more plus more isn't the solution. That would have a been lucky break, though.

My parents are both intelligent, worldly, healthy people; to think they can't manage a four-hour drive to Puerto Peñasco-- a drive I've been managing since I was twenty-- is pretty insulting, frankly. Whatever, so be it. I spent the better part of last weekend working furiously on a Rocky Point travel guide so primitively detailed, a second-grade Brownie troop from Iowa could swoop in and use it to successfully negotiate Mexican real estate. It began innocuously enough, just a reminder to buy Mexican car insurance and directions to the beach. But at 2:18 one morning, my brain whipped up an image of my mom. What if she was walking on the beach one day and her fake eye suddenly popped out of her head? She'd scour the sand for it, her good eye growing tired and dim, until she was lost on the beach somewhere. Wandering. Eyeless. Shit. So I copy/pasted color pictures and detailed descriptions of the neighboring resorts. I recommended the purchase of an inexpensive-- yet large-- compass.

Then another night I sat bolt upright in bed. Randy murmured a question.

"My dad's allergic to bees, is what!"

How had I forgotten that? My God, the pitfalls! I would never sleep again. The next day, I made my mom promise Dad's EpiPen wasn't expired. Okay. Was it too late to get a space suit? She thought it probably was.

Now the guide had a whole section on emergency contact information I cut from a Rocky Point Times newsletter. "Look for stingrays! Shuffle your feet!" And up-close pictures of local jellyfish species, just in case. "Don't eat one!" I joked, trying to mask my desperation with levity. I wasn't joking, I was making my life harder. Please, oh shit, don't eat a jellyfish.

The whole drive down, I followed my own directions intently, making sure there wasn't room for misinterpretation. When we were unexpectedly stopped and searched at the border, I was stunned. I read aloud to Randy from my guide:

"Crossing the border at Lukeville is a snap. There’s a stop light that will pass you through, and I’d be surprised if there’s a guard paying attention. If by chance you do get stopped, the guard will wave your car to the side and peer in the back. Tell him you’re going to Rocky Point and you’re not bringing anything with you. He’ll then wave you on because he’s really only looking for a reason to charge you an import tax. Again, this won’t happen."

My dad is allergic to bees, for Christ's sake! He wears monogrammed pressed shirts with the sleeves rolled! He is virtually helpless, and I have assured him he will not be stopped at the border! GET ME TO A PHONE.

"Wasn't your dad in the Army?" Randy. Always with the points, that one. Yes, Randy, I get it. Grown man and all. Not a three-year-old. The Army, though. What if back then he'd gotten stung by a bee out in the field somewhere? What if? Oh, close calls, CLOSE CALLS!

Do you see? You see where I am with this? At the condo I left behind two guide addendums for my parents: one outlining permissible restaurants I felt were in reasonable and safe proximity to the condo, the other confirming the presence of jellyfish in the sea. (I took the opportunity to again cast my vote against their consumption.) They called me from the road not too long ago, so excited. I did a quick over the phone edit of the border crossing and made sure they'd picked up insurance. They had.

"I think we're all set!" my mom laughed. "Your dad was convinced he was heading north there for a while, but he wasn't! He was heading south! We're... pretty sure!"

I will not make it to Sunday. Luckily I'm babysitting my nephew on Saturday, so that will distract me. If the actual babysitting doesn't distract me, I'm sure the prep work will; filling my entire house with packing peanuts is probably going to be pretty time consuming. 
¶ posted by Erin on Thursday, August 16, 2007

  I'd even spring for shrimp flavor.

I called her this morning. Sort of sick, pacing the backyard like a terry-robed zombie.

She said she'd "definitely love" to work with me, she's seeing existing projects through and filling the hopper with new ones. I hope she couldn't hear me hopping up and down.

I really wouldn't ever have called if you guys hadn't insisted. If I could, I'd buy you each a Cup-A-Soup cocktail right now. 
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, August 13, 2007

 

It's been three weeks and I haven't heard anything about the interview. Not a word. I know this is when Gary Gnu would cheerfully proclaim that "No g-news is good g-news", but I don't know, I guess I don't get the feeling Gary has his finger on the pulse of the common gnu. I customarily write off an interview after three weeks of silence, but this was a fantastic interview. It was easy and comfortable... I knew what I was talking about and asked the right questions... My best interview suit made it nicely through the exorcism the night before... It seemed like I had it 95% in the bag when I left.

She even gave me an armload of the company's end product-- pretty expensive and non expendable material-- to take with me and read through. For the past few weeks that material's been the Golden Key; who gives $100 worth of potential profit to someone who's not even going to get a call back? But now I'm staring at this dusty pile of stuff on my kitchen counter and I'm wondering. Is there a formal protocol for this? For returning materials lent during an ultimately fruitless interview? Should I be expecting an ominous self-addressed Fed Ex envelope in the mail? Or does the interviewee wrap everything in brown paper and do a business "Ring and Run"? These are rhetorical questions. Obviously I keep this shit forever. Obviously I let it continue to gather dust in my kitchen until my next furious, passive-aggressive cleaning spree and then one day, many years from now, someone will be cleaning out the back closet and wonder aloud why we have a two-hundred-page hardcover book on the history of chicken ranching in the southwest. And I'll snap that I don't know, but unless you can trade it for a bottle of Smirnoff put it down and keep looking for change.

I was in the airport last year, in the ticket line, when the man in front of me asked where I was off to. He was older, attractive, completely unassuming. Ordinarily I jump at the chance to spurn friendly conversation, but this guy gave off nothing but nice vibes so I told him. We started talking about travel, and where he was going, what he did for a living and what I did for a living at the time. As it turns out, he owned a company, a publishing company. He explained the nature of the job, that is was contractual and 95% telecommute, and as he detailed the work itself my brain started pumping twice as hard, all the hidden college pouring out and floating to the surface like oil.

"We're always looking for writers," he said, and he handed me his card. I took that card and put it in my wallet. And promptly sat on it for seven months. I was afraid it was too perfect. Or too serendipitous. I was afraid it might be the best thing that ever happened to me, so obviously I balked. But then finally called. You're caught up from there.

Bottom line, it's impossible for me to let go of this fantasy career that's been gestating in my wallet for almost a year. The interview went so well! I have all this expensive crap on my counter! Wouldn't she at least call to tell me no? I'm trying to rationalize something out of nothing to save this thing I want. Kind of like an unexpected break up, only without all the text messages.

Anyway. I have to stop thinking about it. Clearly it's starting to consume me. I mean, last night I zoned out and ate four chicken Cup-A-Soups. Which, okay, that's par for the course. But last night I made them with merlot. 
¶ posted by Erin on Friday, August 10, 2007

  And deep fried socks.

Man, I love Crown King. But I'm admittedly a little tired of it right now; all the chairs there are always absurdly tiny for some reason, seriously, like the whole town is never expecting anyone older than six. And that wears on an adult-sized person in a strange way, a claustrophobic way. An "I can't make another lighthearted 'doll house' comment without hulking out and throwing that tiny, tiny rocker right through the low, low ceiling" way. And plus we spent way too much time in the car arguing about panthers. We blew right past our monthly panther argument quota, so now we're just sitting here in silence, basically. Waiting for September.

So! My sister Styro has a heart that emits little tufts of kittycat fur when it beats, and she's in the process of rescuing, spaying, taming, fostering, and adopting out another set of street kittens. She does this out of her own home and her own pocket purely because she's 100% amazing, and the ever impressive internet has--as per usual-- ponied up. Go help Styro save the kitties. I have it on good authority she's going to name every single kitty Pierce Brosnan.

I drove past my rental house last week for the first time in about a year. I try my best to stay away from it, frankly, because whenever I get within a hundred yards this giant spinning vortex opens up and sucks fifteen hundred dollars out of my bank account. But the train wreck siren song of the still unresolved bee situation was too much for the masochist in me to resist, so I drove over and peered through the back fence.


And promptly lost my faith in humanity. That much collapsed seating and draped, ripped rayon can only mean one of two things: Either Mary's letting paratroopers land in the backyard-- and she better not be, there's no zoning for that-- or she's hosting a hobo carnival. You know what they serve at the Hobo Carnival, don't you? Giant turkey bones. 
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, August 06, 2007

  Dude, the two-step is a dance. A DANCE.

Road trip cam! Currently bickering about: Lynyrd Skynyrd. Is it "gimme THREE steps" or "gimme TWO steps, mister?" Last time I won this one with BLATANT FACT wrapped around a tack hammer. I really honestly thought that would be the last time. 
¶ posted by Erin on Saturday, August 04, 2007

  Antelopi?

Road trip cam! Currently bickering about: The plural form of "antelope". 
¶ posted by Erin on Saturday, August 04, 2007

  Crown King!

We're going to Crown King for the night! I wore pigtails to celebrate. The hotel website says, "Ask about our 'no pets' policy!" So I asked. Guess what. No pets. Okay then, thanks! 
¶ posted by Erin on Friday, August 03, 2007

  Ooooh, is it like Scrabble? How about UNO, is it like UNO?

Styro sent me a link to this online game called Warfish she's been playing pretty much non-stop, and when she sent me an invite to join a game I accepted within my standard four seconds. She wrote me back and was all, "Awesome!" and I was all, "I know! Okay, how do you play?" Turns out Warfish is all strategy and geography and odds: my personal kryptonite trifecta of failure. I'm sure she's having fun explaining to all of her normal Warfish friends why I keep abandoning territory and trying to do battle with myself. I'm the gaming equivalent of that girl at the office Happy Hour who drinks virgin coladas and corners people about numerology all night: okay, we get it, you couldn't not invite her, but maybe you could've run a little faster.

I was at work today, shitting the Warfish bed and hoping my boss would think I was just fervently working on a nine-color Excel spreadsheet of the Earth (and that for some reason that would be okay) when the new woman in the office next to mine started sneezing and couldn't stop. I have an obsession with sneezes; I have to say "bless you" every single time. It has nothing to do with God or any actual blessing, it's more an obsessive tic. When Randy sneezes he really does it up right, he sneezes like seven or eight times in a row. He sneezes so much at one time you can smell his brain. And I bless each individual sneeze.

(As a converse aside, Randy has never once said "bless you" to me after a sneeze. I sneeze and there's just a gaping uncouth void in the room where a polite response would go. I called him out on it once in front of his kids, trying yet again to throw him under the bad manners bus, and his only response was, "That's true, I never have." So I let it go. There's obviously some issue there and I'll be honest, I don't really need to hear about it. It's been seven years-- I know all the meaningful inside crap I need to know about Randy.)

So this woman starts sneezing, and I start blessing, and then I hear her trying to muffle her sneezes-- trying to keep them inside her head-- but hi, she's obviously still sneezing so I keep blessing. You can't hide a sneeze from me. You didn't suddenly stop sneezing and start kind of spitting. Please. But then it dawns on me that my bless yous are making her uncomfortable for some reason. Maybe because she's new and still a little unsure of her environment? Maybe because I'm screaming down the hall like a four-year-old and it's distracting? Something. So I made a forced decision to quit it. But then like ten minutes later she cleared her throat and I yelled, "BLESS YOU!" again like an OCD psychopath. I guess I had one stored up.

After that she didn't make any noise whatsoever at all. I heard her barely whispering into the phone like she was curled up in a fetal ball under her desk. It occurred to me to go to her office and tell her hey, I heard you drop a paperclip a minute ago, can I help you find it? Like a funny icebreaker, you know? Ha ha, I know how it looks, but I'm not really listening to every little thing you do! But then I thought: what if she'd actually just dropped a paperclip? I'm afraid that's an awkward hole of social weirdness from whose depths I could never hoist myself. I know my limitations. Man, it's a good thing I can fly and see through walls and shit or I might be insecure. 
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, August 01, 2007