Passing Time

Not a good day yesterday. Not a good day at all.

Feel like I'm doing twenty to life in a prison cell upon whose walls they – "they!" – are projecting intensely realistic 3-D videos of my house, the store, the afternoon drive to Colton to pick up the kid.

The only place that feels real is the beach. When this part of my life is over and done with – which one way or another it will be – I will owe a special debt of thanks to Milo the dog. Watching him prance and play on the sand keeps me sane. It's my reminder that there is joy in the simple fact of existence.

I am writing my acceptance speech for the Bardo Award ceremonies now! "Nominations for Noblest Life Lived Under Extremely Trying Circumstances: Nelson Mandela For 'Twenty-three Years In a Windowless Cell Fighting Racial Injustice!'"

Applause. Camera cuts to Nelson holding hands with Oprah. She's in purple Dolce and Gabana.

"'John McCain for Five Years In the Bamboo Pit!'"

He's holding hands with Laura Bush.

"The envelope please. And the winner: Patrizia for the Year of Living Dangerously!'"

Cut to Scenes From the Life: our heroine fielding yet another unpleasant phone call from a persistent creditor. "Yes, I know I owe you [insert amount of money that is actually not that huge but is beyond my present capacity to pay]. I have every intention of paying you and I believe I will be in a position to do so in the foreseeable future. Why, no, I can't give you a definite date. Can't you just trust me because I'm beautiful, sensitive and kind and I actually wept when Leo got shot in The Departed – I mean, that poor guy. First he drowns on the Titanic and then fucking Good Will Hunting takes him out –"

Use the time you have now, I keep telling myself. And I've made some progress – particularly on that mountain of papers all of which need to be sorted and filed and kept on record in the event that tax information is suborned at some future date.

But I'm not really thinking linearly right now. Big projects? Website redesign? Redraft of the business plan? Fugeddaboutit. Instead I Google ex-boyfriends and serial killers – no overlap there – and fantasize about projecting myself backwards in time to that exact moment when I made the Bad Choice that culminated in this Bad Present Tense.

String theory and numerous Twilight Zone episodes argue that this is possible. Assuming there was one bad choice.

If life were a piece of music, you could play it over and over again until you get it right. I remember this as the first line of Joyce Johnson's wonderful Kerouac memoir, Minor Characters.

If I didn't make it up, then it is my second favorite opening line on all of literature, my favorite being L.P. Harley from The Go-Between: The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

This, too, shall pass. This too.

My Tri-State Killing Spree With Heavy Dee

Because justpat asked...

When she swaggered for the first time through the doors of the store, she looked familiar. Maybe it was all that Jerry Springer. Maybe my mother forgot to tell me about the time I got kidnapped by a six foot, 290 pound bull dagger with missing front teeth and black leather chaps, and this was the closest I was ever going to come to recovered memories.

"What's the hottest thing you got in this place?" she leered.

Me, baby I wanted to leer back.

"What the fuck you staring at?" she asked. "You a little Dutch boy? Wanna put your finger in a dyke? Heavy Dee don't play that game." She stuck a pretzel in a tiny cup of Blair's Megadeath, sucked it dry and laughed. "You call this hot?" She spat on the floor.

"I have hotter things," I said softly. "Behind the counter."

"Oh, you do, do you?" she said, taking in my breasts in that unfortunate sweater I'd stuck in the washer on the hot-hot-hot cycle even though the garment tag strictly instructed cold-cold-cold. "But see, the way this game is played you do something for Mama then Mama does something for you. Maybe."

Later I learned it was Vacaville where Heavy Dee learned about hot sauce. You can only sleep twenty hours a day for so long.

In its continuing mission to offer rehabilitation and deterrence to the felons of its great state, the California Department of Corrections provides extensive vocational training. Most of the inmates opt for cosmetology or instruction in the manufacture of artificial limbs and dentures. But Heavy Dee was good in the kitchen – she'd copped a double deuce on fraud and attempted murder after she sliced the dick off her girlfriend's baby, floating it so convincingly in a half-opened can of Hormel's chili that the FDA shut the company's canning operations down for ten whole days.

"Little cocksucker wouldn't shut its yap," she told me. "Shutting their yaps is something little cocksuckers gotta learn early. Otherwise they grow up to be politicians or prison guards. I figured Little Larry had better career options as Little Laurie."

tbc...