see the rock man in the woods?
LET ME BE YOUR BIG NOTHING
Getting high on marijuana and going to yoga class can be fine, but not when the yoga instructor decides to end class with a seated meditation with drishti and says things like, “Blink normally.” OH FUCK THANKS FOR REMINDING ME. (He also at one point said, “there are no bad ideas” and meditation further ruined because THAT’S not true.
There is/was (avoiding spoilers in case you care) a contestant on this current Project Runway who is nonbinary. They are either the sort of person to mention it a whole lot or have been told by the Bravo producers to mention it a whole lot (probably both), and every single time they add a syllable and say “non-bi-a-nary.” I thought it may actually kill me.
Everything is fine in my not-blogging world. That is surprising because things are actually pretty messy, literally. Things are being gathered to set up Aaron in his campus apartment,* so there are boxes containing basic home supplies and flat-pack furniture all over my house. My 100-year-old house has also developed a plumbing issue—a small drain leak that was ruining the first-floor bathroom ceiling. This is the bathroom that we want to remodel anyway, so the walls and ceiling are now demolished while the plumbers figure that out. It looks terrible! And so (AND LO) the bathroom stuff is also strewn all over the dining room, refugees from the post-apocalyptic/horror movie destroyed bathroom. It has a usable toilet still but only if you are okay with the risk of ceiling bits falling on you. The dining room table is also hosting the latest jigsaw puzzle and many jars of small rodent bones that Aaron extracted from owl pellets, sorted into anatomical groups, and cleaned. The two (or three, depending on college calendar) of us eat meals at the kitchen island anyway, but I will not be hosting any dinner parties until bones/bathroom fixtures/apartment items/puzzle pieces are elsewhere.
So. Chaos and mess, which would ordinarily throw me into a tizzy because a “trigger” (as the kids say) for me is stuff being wrong with MY HOME. I’m like Big Bird disassociatedly repeating “my nest…my home” in the hurricane episode (Sesame Street deep cut and rather a traumatic one at that, maybe don’t seek it out). Then we left all the chaos and mess for Vancouver, and I did not have one single panicky moment about it. Wherefore this newfound zen?
*Wait! Fuck zen! Annoyance break! I know a person who, despite knowing nothing about me, likes to say teeny tiny rude things to me. They are so tiny and stupid that I barely notice anymore. Examples include a fake and exaggerated sense of wonderment that I have stayed at the same company my whole professional life and an extended rant on dealing with only children while well aware that I have an only child. The latest one, when I casually mentioned getting Aaron some furniture and essentials for his first apartment, was a “just saying” speech about Kids These Days Aren’t Tough Anymore And Personally I Dug My First College Apartment Mattress Out Of A Grease-Soaked Dumpster etc. A TEDIOUS PERSON but again Zen Mimi floats away on a wave of indifferent self-confidence. She is a leaf in a breeze. A very twisty curly leaf on a very smoky breeze.
JUST LIKE SISTER RAY SAID
Sometimes things happen on a movie or television screen that are so amazing that you can’t quite believe you saw them. Like the way Rambo defeats…the Russian Army (?) in Rambo 3 or the Twilight baseball scene. During the Vancouver trip, after days full of hiking and seafood and accidentally ending up in the open-air fentanyl market (not all the same day!), Aaron and I would sometimes watch weird cable TV at the Airbnb, and this one night it was an episode of Baywatch. My Gen Z child knows nothing of Baywatch and I barely remember it except as a phenomenon. Do you remember there being crime plots on Baywatch? I thought it was just tits and water rescues, but this episode had some woman getting attacked in a beach house, and she runs away from murder guy, makes it out of the house, beach in both directions, more houses behind her, but she runs, terrified, murderer right behind her: INTO. THE. OCEAN. Yup, straight into the ocean, still being chased (it’s a swim chase, now), and being a Baywatch character she is a strong swimmer but so is the murderer, and there’s a confrontation and attempted-drowning-of-each-other and I won’t spoil it for you but what? What what what what what was the endgame, help me please. Are you going to swim to the other side of the world? Who escapes into the ocean? Bitch you are not a fish!
—mimi smartypants is searching for her mainline, couldn’t hit it sideways.