So when I came across these today on the interwebs, I didn’t see a matricidal
Sally Draper at an AA meeting in 1977, I saw THE MOTHER OF ALL LAMINATED PLACEMATS:

Merry Christmas, girls! Yeahyeah, I know they’re three-and-a-half and two, but expert bartending is like being multilingual — best started in Pull-Ups. Besides, just last night, Eliot was helping Daron with a fish batter and piped up, “It looks like beer!” and has taken to an evening glass of tonic water, which she’ll only take stirred, I REST MY GODDAMNED CASE.

(Before getting to work on the laminating, however, I’m gonna have Michael Photoshop a Vodka Tonic into the Tom Collins spot and sub the perfect Vodka Martini — straight, two olives, just enough vermouth to wet the ice — for the Sidecar, ’cause THEN we’ll be talking about “the USUAL.”)

Oh, and Mike? I can’t wait til there’s a bunch of guys over and there’s a Seahawks game on or something equally testoster-oxious, because that’s when the the girls’ll be trying out that awesome-sounding recipe for Daddy’s usual “Pink Lady”. . .

With Eliot, I had few sentimental attachments to her babyhood — it was as though infancy and each stage after was something to be endured and raced through on the way to the next (presumably easier) stage. Baby clothes and toys were packed away, bottles were sanitized and stowed in boxes, the Co-Sleeper folded into its case and stashed unceremoniously in a basement closet — all of it with nary a second thought from me that with them meant the permanent passing of her babyness, that all-too-brief and ephemeral time.

Even her first haircut, which came well before she turned 2, and which I decided on because it was getting a little shaggy and falling in her eyes — zero sentiment whatsoever. Grammy and I made an appointment at Salon Cool, and as we were running out the door, I grabbed Mike’s camera and think I took about 30 seconds of video of the whole affair. When Gail asked if I wanted some of her baby hair, I was so casual about the whole affair I actually said no.

AND THEN I HAD NOLA.

In one sense, the second baby always gets the shaft: no shower or ooh and aah factor, virtually every toy and piece of clothing a hand-me-down, all the obsessive fretting you devoted to Baby Number One fallen by the wayside; as I said of Nola, she was lucky to be wearing a diaper and playing with anything safer than a lighter and Swiss Army knife.

On the other hand, all the experience you’ve gleaned from Child One (see: obsessive fretting) gives you an all-new experience with Baby Two: the time and ease to be in love with her, and the aching knowing that her babyhood will be gone in a near-instant no matter how fiercely you cling to it. I remember telling Nola not to crawl, and then not to walk, wishing her into too-small clothes, hanging on to baby toys for far too long. Hell, when it finally came time to sell it, I even wrote a tear-stained ode to the Co-Sleeper.

So maybe it’s no small wonder I’ve literally refused to let a single person touch a hair on my (now two-year-old) baby’s head. For months now, as Eliot’s been motored off to the salon to have her locks trimmed, Michael and Grammy have been at me to send Nola too, and I’ve responded more like they’re suggesting she go in for genital mutilation, all, “How dare you suggest such a thing! She’s beautiful! She’s perfect just the way she is! THIS CONVERSATION IS SCARRING HER PSYCHE!”

Finally, I caved. But honestly? My cave was more, say, pothole-sized. We were taking Ellie for a haircut anyway, and I was tired of Mike bitching at me about Nola’s fuzzy patches (did you realize baby hair doesn’t grow in all even like a doll’s? Yeah, me either), so I told Gail just to trim the fuzzy stuff — just even out the length, and don’t even THINK about touching her bangs, because I’m growing those out.

(And this time around, I came armed with the video camera, the digital SLR, and the iPhone so I could immediately Facebook the news to Gramma Sue.)

And did I want a cutting of baby (now little-girl) hair? OF COURSE I DID. I wanted Gail to sweep every last blond filament off the floor and delicately tie it into a bag for me to CRY AWAY NOLA’S BABYHOOD INTO LATER.

(Nola did much better than I did. Apart from not being entirely down with the whole shampoo-and-condition, she dug the little car you sit in and all the toys to play with, but FUCK THE DRYER EXPERIENCE. Even with Gail telling her Panda Bear was loving getting his hair dryer on, Nola was all, “TOO HOT! TOO HOT!!” Baby went home air-dried. (And after dinner, Mommy went home with a few more vodka tonics in her than usual.)

Me: So you know how last week we had that talk about how I need to take better care of myself, and part of that was taking at least one night off a week for myself?

Mike: Jesus, do I ever.

Me: Hard to forget, right? What with you just going to a little after-work happy hour with the co-workers, bowling a frame or two. And then you said you’d be home at 7 to help with Ellie’s preschool drawing project, but then you were 15 minutes late. But probably you were late because I asked you to stop and pick up my meds on the way home, which if you hadn’t'a done you’d've been all tied up the next day or two trying to peel me off the ceiling, so sorry I got pissed about you being late.

Mike: Apology accepted.

Me: But then I asked you to help with Ellie’s art project, and in hindsight I did sorta totally lose my shit about whether you were “effectively guiding the girls” by lettin’ em scribble all over the paper.

Mike: Babe. They’re TWO AND THREE. It’s Ellie’s first preschool art project, and the assignment was to color in their handprints, not INTRO TO FIGURE DRAWING. I’m just saying you’re maybe starting to. . . lose a little perspective.

Me: Right. Because I spend all my time with the girls or doing things related to them, and unlike you I don’t have outlets like “happy hour” and “lunch” and “adult conversations” to maintain relative sanity. So by the time you get home I’m like a well-shaken Coke bottle just dying for you to say, “DAMN, I’M THIRSTY!”

Mike: Exactly. I’ve told you plenty of times, I’ll give you every opportunity to have nights to yourself as often as you like — this isn’t a prison sentence, you know. All you need to do is set it up and give me a little notice.

Me: That’s awesome, because I think I’m starting to go a little crazy, and I definitely think I could do something on Wednesday.

Mike: Why, what’s going on Wednesday?

Me: Jillian and I are going out for drinks!

(Beat.)

Mike: Lesbians.

Me: (Rolls eyes and storms away.)

As most people close to me know, I have a verrrry testy relationship with marriage. Some aspects of deeply trouble me: its religious foundations, its patriarchal history of a woman being ceded by one man to another, even — I’ll admit it — its permanence. For me, marriage represents a certain end to a narrative possibility.

On the other hand, there are obvious tax and legal benefits to marriage, and a new study comes out every other week showing it’s good for your health, and Mike and I love each other and live no differently than our married friends — and now that we have two kids and are stuck with each other for the rest of our lives ANYWAY. . .

So in theory, I’m down. But in practice? Haven’t been able to touch that shit with a Vera Wang gown with a 10-foot train. I’m talking one bad track record here, folks. SHITTY! That first guy I told I’d marry? Didn’t do it! Second guy I said the same thing to? LIES! Third guy I took a ring from and gave a yes to? He’s still waiting for me to set a damn date!

Marriage: I’ve got a problem with “follow-through.”

(Not that Michael’s relatives give a good goddamn. They’re making me Mrs. Ortlieb whether my little feminist, God-bashing ass likes it or not.)

So what’s my problem with marriage these days? I’ll you EXACTLY what the problem is: Jenny Sanford and Elizabeth Edwards. And if those two women don’t shut the fuck up already, I am NEVER gonna walk down that damn aisle.

This week has been something of a perfect storm of Sanford/Edwards news, what with word of John Edwards potentially admitting paternity of his mistress’s child, but I’ll start with Jenny Sanford because just when I thought everything that had been said on it had, she went and lost her fucking mind. For those of you living under a rock the past few months, Jenny’s husband, Mark Sanford, South Carolina governor, skipped out on business for four days and was said to be wandering the Appalachian Trail but was instead discovered below the equatorial belt with his Argentinian mistress. He later explained to the AP that he did it because he would die “knowing that I had met my soulmate” — harsh words for his wife of 20 years to hear, no doubt, but what she did next, and what she continues to do, is what baffles me.

Granted, I’ve never been married. And as far as I know, I’ve never been cheated on. But I can certainly imagine the torment, and the grief, and the embarrassment, and the rage. I can imagine feeling horribly unpretty and blaming him for that, and hating the other woman as much as I hated him and then remembering he was the liar. I like to think I’m empathetic enough to place myself in both Elizabeth and Jenny’s politician’s wife pumps and even feel the compounded humiliation that comes with all those years of parading yourself as the “model family,” of having to smile even in the midst of the media feeding frenzy and it’s all because of who he is and the son-of-a-bitch wouldn’t even BE who he is if it weren’t for you.

I can even understand the media envy: that lying, cheating bastard is lead story, top-of-the-fold, giving every anxious microphone and camera his version of events, you at his side with a limp hand in his and a practiced look of unity. And too, you’ve got Barbara and Katie and Diane and that toady Ann Curry all wanting “your side of the story,” when you know that really means the public’s hungry for some blood on the highway and can’t wait to see the woman scorned, but you’ve got a lot of capital invested in this marriage and frankly in his career, so you say your piece — for his political office, and for your own mental health — and that’s the end of it.

Or in theory, that should be the end of it, which is where Jenny and Elizabeth totally go fucking with my head. First, Jenny poses for Vogue and grants an interview in which she expresses relief that she doesn’t have to deal with midlife crises like her husband’s because “I know my legacy is my children. I don’t worry about that.” And this week, Jenny Sanford signed a deal to write a memoir “that ‘will grapple with the universal issue of maintaining integrity and a sense of self during life’s difficult times,’ and would discuss ‘the emotions, confrontations and heartbreak behind the headlines of her story.’”

In other words, she’s pulling an Elizabeth Edwards.

Because we all know the tragic and cautionary tale of Elizabeth and John, and the presidential run that should have never been, and by all appearances, both of them handled the Rielle Hunter affair as gracefully as possible. . . until Elizabeth, who in her own words on the tour for “Resilience,” her memoir, decided to document her response to the affair, thus reopening that wound for an international book tour. I didn’t read “Resilience,” and by all accounts the affair took up only a small fraction of the book, but no reviewer failed to note that Elizabeth used the book to paint John’s mistress as a conniving stalker and John as a naive victim — absurdly one-dimensional stereotypes given Elizabeth’s intelligence, which led more than one critic to snort that perhaps the book should have been titled “Revenge.” Between her career and her values and her poor son and then CANCER, I’d always had a tremendous amount of respect for Elizabeth Edwards, but Liz, “Catty Martyr” doesn’t look good on anyone.

And then there were the interviews! However much of the book was devoted to other issues she may have cared deeply about, NO ONE wanted to discuss anything but the affair, the state of her marriage, and whether Rielle Hunter’s baby was her husband’s. Why she didn’t stipulate beforehand that only a limited number of questions be devoted to the affair, I’ve NO idea, but Elizabeth spent every last interview looking like she’d vastly prefer being in a hospital bed sucking on some chemo to this hell.

But the interview that literally sent me from my couch to my shrink’s? This one with the ladies of The View. She’s visibly uncomfortable from start to finish, and at around two minutes in, Elizabeth Hasselbeck asks her whether John “has he had contact with this woman” (referring to Rielle Hunter) and Elizabeth snaps, “I’m the wrong person to ask about that!”

Because right there is where my heart cracked in half, and I saw the marital hell she was surely living in, and that her decision to write about her husband’s affair and publish it now meant taking that hell on parade. I literally couldn’t fathom what her life must have been like: battling terminal cancer, attempting to reconcile this new phase of her marriage, and honestly not even knowing if he was in contact with his mistress and her child (possibly his child, too) or not.

More than that, I didn’t for one second buy her reasoning for writing about the affair in the book. She told The View gals that her children were reading other people’s versions of their story on the internet every day, so it was important for her to set down her side of things. But as a mother, and particularly as a mother with potentially little time left with your children, isn’t it more important to have those conversations one-on-one with each child instead of with the world? Isn’t it more important that it be a dialogue than an essay? Be honest, Elizabeth: does performing a postmortem on your husband’s affair on a national book tour bring your children more good than harm?

And Jenny Sanford, I’d ask the same of you. I understand your husband might not have a job much longer, and you’ve been out of the workplace for a while, and you might need to start thinking about how to support those four boys. But I’d appeal to your better judgment when it comes to writing about your husband’s affair — just look at what a brief segment in Elizabeth Edwards’ memoir wrought. And you haven’t exactly come out of the gate looking savvy: marching over to Vogue with “midlife crisis” hardly hints that you’re going to treat the father of your children fairly IN HARDCOVER FOREVER. And come on. . . the “universal issue of maintaining integrity and a sense of self during life’s difficult times,” and “the emotions, confrontations and heartbreak behind the headlines of her story”? Cut the publicist’s bullshit.

You know what would make a much BETTER story? The one that comes out AFTER you save your marriage. Or after you ditch it, and get yourself back on your feet, and are able to tell the world how you pulled yourself out of the wreckage. Because that’s a story worth taking pride in; that’s a story you’d want to read to your sons, right?

(I know that’s the one I’d be a whole lot more interested in reading, myself. And not JUST because it makes me that much less terrified of all of marriage’s bogeymen, though Mike might be super-appreciative if that’s the book you wrote too.)

I can’t really say that I knew Celeste, not like everyone else did.

She was an old friend of Michael’s, of Jillian and Kimmay and their gang, and it was just really early on, and years back — the baby shower for Eliot, a night or two after — that I spent any time around her at all and always in a large group, and what I knew most of her then were outlandish, funny stories. And later, when Celeste took up with an unpleasant boyfriend and started alienating friends, what I heard were unkinder critiques. And later still, Celeste discovered Facebook, and cultivated a small number of friendships, of which I happened to be one, and this only in the casual style of a Facebook text-message friendship.

But along the way, while for the rest of us life chugged on with its manageable ups and downs, it was nothing of the sort for Celeste, and only because Celeste herself was not like the rest of us: she was profoundly clinically depressed, with a likely diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, frequently unable to work and bounced between psychiatrists and their varying prescribed psychotropic drug combinations, some of which worked for her and most of which failed to. And even with the tenuous tie of Facebook, she kept her demons to herself: the abusive ex-boyfriends, the destructive family relationships, the job troubles and crippling anxieties shielded behind colorful narratives and the myth of Never-A-Dull-Moment Celeste. . .

I can’t count the times we made plans with her — exclusively to see her, really — only to be left sitting at a bar with everyone but Celeste present, nor all the half-hearted excuses she made for her absences.

But I can say that in the last year, when Celeste made an excuse, it was painfully honest, and it moved me as only someone who’s known that kind of suffering can be moved. Because when Celeste said she was too depressed to leave the house — even just to join a few good friends, even to call to tell us so — it could’ve easily been my own excuse. And that’s when I opened up a vein to her; my own history of depression and anxiety were certainly mild by comparison, but the sadness and isolation were absolutely the same. Celeste and I traded many an email in which I reminded her that a depressive episode was like being planted in a strange culture and eventually forgetting your own: you withdraw from the things you enjoy and the people who love you in a kind of triage to simply do the day-to-day maintenance of yourself, when paradoxically everything and everyone that once nourished you is what you now need most. I encouraged her to come back out, just spend a few hours with friends, just give us a chance — and through all that, Celeste and I had formed a curious sort of friendship.

And we even got her out of the house — just one night, Jillian and Nancy and I, and she looked so like Celeste: beautiful and brazen and big and strong, and at the same time that other side of her, delicate as a tea rose, fragile as a parched leaf spiraling from a January oak. We took one picture of us all that night, and strangely, even smiling, Celeste was cast in shadow.

After then, she faded from Facebook, faded from most everywhere but my text messages, where she’d hint at getting together but never follow through, and I discerned a growing sadness in her, though tea leaves are perhaps simpler to divine than texts. In recent months, it seemed I was the only one I knew in contact with her, which troubled me — was she cutting herself off again? Had there been some fresh catalyst for her anxiety?

And then six weeks ago, I was sitting at home one evening when a text message came in: “I need help.” I repeatedly messaged her back, but she didn’t answer until the next day, when she told me she’d been in a really bad place, terribly lonely after yet another suicide attempt and a requisite stint in a psych ward, that she’d reached out because the night before she’d just felt “so helpless and alone.” And my initial response was deeply empathetic but brief — and she never responded. And as the days went by, I grew more and more troubled: why, of all the people who knew her infinitely better, had she reached out to me? Why had she cut off contact now? And worst of all, if I didn’t quickly do something — anything — what ominous news would my phone’s cheerful text message tone next bring about Celeste?

By the time a week had passed, her words lay on my heart like a stone, and I began to send the occasional text again, asking her to call me, to meet with me, to remind her that I was in that dark room with her — that all she needed to do was reach out. I called, but Celeste had always let my calls go to voicemail, and hadn’t returned a one. Wherever she was now, emotionally, it felt beyond my grasp; perhaps, I thought, I was pressing too hard, and needed to wait for Celeste to reach back out to me.

And then one evening last week it finally came, that happy jingle of the iPhone, the Grim Reaper’s tambourine.

Daron was playing with the girls in the living room while I made some dinner in the kitchen, a standard scene of everyday domesticity, and when I read the text (”Were you a friend of Celeste?”), all I needed to know was distilled in the word “were”. . . It was a new roommate of Celeste texting me from Celeste’s phone — apparently shortly after our last texts, she had left the area, telling no one. The roommate had been boxing up her things and found the phone, and mine was one of very few contacts in it, and she wanted to tell someone besides the family that Celeste had passed on: that she had rented a lakeside cabin for her birthday, and had overdosed.

I fell into a chair, breathless and ruined, and yet stricken by the inevitability of it. Then I called Jillian, who wept inconsolably, and we discussed a strategy to begin disseminating the news and organizing a memorial. And throughout and over the next few days, I stayed in contact with the roommate, who shed much light on Celeste’s state of mind in her final days, on her profound loneliness and despair, her certainty that her family and friends would find no loss in her absence.

And I felt grief, to be sure — that with so many people who truly loved Celeste, she had felt so very alone, and died so very alone — but more than this, I felt such a profound sense of SHAME: that I could know so intimately that black dog of depression, and not have done more to have helped her. What would it have taken for me to have simply shown up at her door one day, and insisted she come out for coffee? What were the right words to text, and why couldn’t I, the fucking writer, have sent them? All the invitations I could have extended that I didn’t, all the simple gifts of time or kindness left unshared, all came back to me now like accusations. Of all the people in her life — people who’d known her for years, people who knew her worlds better — Celeste had chosen to reach out to me, and I had failed her ruinously.

We held a friends’ remembrance service for her this week at the Old Pequliar, a favorite old Ballard haunt of hers for many years, and everyone took a few minutes to offer their favorite memories of Celeste and, given the circumstances, their naked regrets. And it struck me that night how much we believe in the importance of what we say to one another, while the things that go unsaid hold just as much power; had Celeste known how much love was infused in each of those statements about her Tuesday night — and had she told each of us how deeply she was suffering — I’ve no doubt she would’ve been with us at the OP that night, joining us in a round and dropping quarters in the jukebox and setting aside her many cares, if only for an hour or two.

Truly, summer feels over now, the joy of it abruptly ended with Celeste’s passing. I have so many regrets, but in her name, I resolve to be more conscious of telling people when I’m thinking about them, worrying for them, wishing them well. I plan to be more generous with compliments, with giving people my full attention and my time. I want to say everything that matters, and even the little things that might not matter much to me, but might mean a lot to someone else.

I think Celeste would have liked that.

Last week Mike and I finally got OFF our collective asses and decided to spend a little time ON ‘em: a week on the beach, just us and the girls renting a cottage on the rugged, majestic Oregon Coast. It was the perfect getaway: for weeks, I’d envisioned our sun-washed days of building sandcastles and chasing kites, afternoons of children napping while I worked on the novel and Michael made continuous, thwarted advances, and evenings of sunset walks on the sand followed by homemade meals and games and everyone falling exhausted into bed after a full and fantastical day. . .

And then the vacation fairy — with her crooked tiara, meth mouth, and ratty-assed tutu — swiftly descended and cracked me upside the head with her magical fucking sparkle-dust wand, and we’d BARELY LEFT THE HOUSE.

And there were myriad disasters through the week, but really it started because for whatever reason, Michael decided we just had to take my Garmin nuvi. I had a bad feeling about this from the outset, given that a) getting to the Oregon Coast is as complicated as driving to Portland and hanging a right, but specifically because
b) my GPS is a diabolical son-of-a-bitch that will stop at nothing to kill me.

(Oh, speaking of GPS, did you hear that Bob Dylan has been approached by various GPS manufacturers to be the voice of their navigation systems? Can you imagine trying to get around town with that bastard MUMBLING directions at you? What, was there some sort of Most Annoying Celebrity GPS Voice Contest between him, Fran Drescher, and Gilbert Gottfried, and Dylan drew the short straw?)

My Garmin’s voice is British, and I call him Nigel, and he’s just the kind of pompous twat who graduated from Eton, owns Wellies and a family estate in the Cotswolds, has shite teeth, and would rather strand me in a ditch and leave me for dead than see me safely to my destination. Since the first time I affixed him to the dash, Nigel and I have played a dangerous game, one in which I try to outwit his route with one I think is faster or more direct, and he counterplays by trying to drive me into oncoming traffic. I don’t take Nigel’s left? He sends me down a dead-end street. Shimmy past his roundabout? He detours me through the ghetto. I avoid his suggested route? He makes me exit the freeway, then get back on AT THE NEXT RAMP. To say I think it’s a bad idea to take Nigel to the coast is putting it mildly — has he been up watching Hitchcock films? Did his latest software upgrade come bundled with actual video of cars plummeting off Highway 101 cliffs?! I DON’T KNOW.

So off we go, and I’m behind the wheel, figuring we’ll stop about halfway and Michael can take over, probably when we make our requisite Dairy Queen stop so Mike can get that frozen chemical soup he calls a “Heath Bar Blizzard” — but already, Nigel’s got other plans for me. Somewhere around Tacoma, he announces we’ll be taking Washington exit 36. I’m suspicious, and start scrambling to convince Mike that Nigel’s a batshit bitch.

“What’s exit 36? We’ve never taken that before — I bet no one’s ever taken that route before. I bet it’s one of those little highways that turns into a dirt road that turns into a summer park service road that turns into a rutted fire lane that we run out of gas on and they find our bodies on come next spring.”

Mike took a closer look at Nigel’s plan. “No, I can see what he’s doing. Let’s try it.”

“I bet there won’t be anything on that road. I bet there won’t be DAIRY QUEEN.”

“That’s ridiculous — that road’s littered with small towns. What small town doesn’t have a Dairy Queen? Besides, I can’t in good conscience purchase a Heath Bar Blizzard from a clerk that doesn’t have a base level of acne and questionable dental health. It’s GOTTA be a small town Dairy Queen.”

Foiled, I headed west on exit 36, and is it a long-awaited DQ that awaits us beyond the overpass? No, it’s a series of signs welcoming us to the sprawling “Winlock-Vader Industrial Area.”

“Oh, I see you sent us the fucking SCENIC ROUTE, Nigel! Thanks a lot, ya limey bastard!”

“Are you seriously insulting your GPS?”

“You don’t know what he’s really like! Give him a little time, Mike, THEN you’ll see him for the sociopathic bloke he really is!”

I’m pretty sure that’s about when Mike wanted to take the keys away from me, but Nigel was having none of it — by then we’d crossed the Columbia River into Oregon and he was telling me to turn again, this time onto a tiny two-lane highway that would wend us southwest. As soon as I made the turn, I knew that pommy lunatic had finally bested me. . .

First, we were in the mountains in timber country on the kind of corkscrew roads that you wouldn’t dare drive over 40 on but had a mockingly posted speed limit of 55. Second, there were so few other cars on the road that every twenty minutes or so I’d say, “Oooh, look, a car!” and wave as they passed. Third, the terrain was the kind where at any second, a 12-point buck could leap from woods onto the road and a half-second later you’d be wearing your engine block as a belt buckle, SERIOUSLY FUCKING UP your vacation plans.

Lastly? We were in Oregon. If you’ve never been, one of Oregon’s many charms is its insistence in retaining its old highway signs: very vintage and cost-effective, but also a little, shall we say, terse. For example, you’ll be driving along, worrying about being run off the cliff by the next oncoming car twenty minutes from now, when you’ll see a sign in 256-point type that says “ROCKS,” so whatever the hell that means, now you know you’ve got that to worry about. Little further down the road? “TRUCKS.” Couple miles past that? Well what the fuck else, goddamned “SLIDE.”

Now I’m already enough of an anxiety factory to keep Pfizer shareholders rolling in dividends for years, but when you toss in ROCKS, TRUCKS and SLIDE on top of the 250-pound deer I’m surely about to hit like a brick shithouse and the antlers I’m soon gonna be wearing as a halo, I might as well just drive off the cliff digging around in my purse for the Xanax NOW.

And suddenly I realize that psychotic Brit’s finally done it, because right then is when you, Oregon, decide to kick it up a notch, 256-point-style:

“ELK”

Let’s reiterate here: corkscrew mountain road, timber country, driving into the glaring sunset, ROCKS, TRUCKS, SLIDE — but hey, at least I don’t have to worry about a silly 250-pound buck crashing through my windshield, because now Oregon lets me ponder wearing a 1300-POUND ROOSEVELT ELK BULL AS A HOOD ORNAMENT.

I drove the next 20 or so miles with my retinas bulging, my hands white-knuckled, my teeth grinding, and somewhere on the cusp of cardiac arrest, but goddamnit, I was in the BUDDHIST FUCKING MOMENT.

At the next turn, I told Mike in a reasonably measured voice to find a route that was maybe a little less “turny.” “Okay,” he said, “the next time he tells you to go left, just stay on this road.”

And then Nigel announced, “Turn left here,” and I grumble, “Piss off, Nigel,” and didn’t. A moment later, his tone going up an octave, he sighs, “Recalculating. . .”

Mike says, “Is his voice different?” And I’m all, “I told you he was crazy.”

Next crazy-ass backwoods highway turnoff, Nigel’s back at it: “Turn left here.” “Sot off, you old git,” I say, and keep driving. “Recalculating!” he hissed, like Mumsy’d caught him prancing about in her knickers.

“Wow, fuck this guy,” Mike said, unplugging Nigel and tossing him in the glove compartment. “Your GPS has a seriously piss attitude.”

“And don’t even START me on how he’s totally trying to kill me. . .”

“What?”

“Never mind. But he did save you from that DQ double-bypass-in-a-cup. . .”

(Later, we had a week of gorgeous weather, the girls were completely out of control, the cottage only had — SHUDDER — network television and a houseful of tiled floors meant I was so worried about a cracked toddler skull I lived the entire week on one frayed, exposed nerve. Did I write? Yeah, a couple pages. Did I deflect Mike’s ceaseless advances? Pffft — is the Ukrainian not hirsute??!?!)

Oh, also, I took a jillion pretty, pretty pictures.

Twin Rocks OR I from Tracy Glisson on Vimeo.

Twin Rocks OR II from Tracy Glisson on Vimeo.

As any new parent knows, a volume switch on a toy is your best friend, because musical/speaking childrens’ toys are categorically obnoxious and the sole variation in how desperately a toy makes you want to jam an ice pick in your brain is how SCREAMINGLY it wails the alphabet, or “Old MacDonald,” (and Christ, do I pity you poor bastards,) that shiv-me-now Barbie theme.

Unfortunately, a number of toy manufacturers not only neglect to offer this option but seemingly believe your wolf-eared tyke came into the world with the hearing of a geriatric stump; with enough listening, perhaps they soon will!

Which long ago led to my crusade against shrieking toy voice boxes, and my magical antidote: PACKING TAPE. It’s clear (with proper positioning, the kiddies are none the wiser), and you can layer it to achieve your desired volume control. I can’t tell you how many toys I’ve pulled apart and slapped that shit on just to dampen the wail and whine of tinny music, demonic dolls or that insidious Fisher-Price harpy.

So imagine my surprise when Eliot received a Tinker Bell doll that would. not. SHUT THE FUCK UP — and the voice box was impossible to find. . . I mean, it’s a DOLL, right — how hard can a stupid voice box be to find? And I’m looking in her back, all along the legs, all the obvious places, and NOTHING — and it’s this perpetual howl of “FLY WITH ME!!” and “FAIRIES FLY!!” until I pretty much want to send Tink flying into next week, and just as I’ve decided the voice box is internal and there’s no speaker, I do one last body check:

And there you have it: Tink’s box is Tink’s FUCKING BOX. Oh, Walt Disney Corp., you sick, twisted bastards: not only did you make Tinker Bell’s only means of communication THROUGH HER SNATCH, you then forced me to SILENCE IT WITH PACKING TAPE. Way to help me send a gender-positive message to my daughters, assholes.

(Somewhere, I just know Eve Ensler is giving me the disapproving finger wag. . .)

Oh, Google Analytics, do you never cease to amuse?

(PS: Seriously, Mike, all you had to do was come upstairs and ask.)

(PPS: For the record, the only “naked” pics of me are a few topless sunbathing shots taken by assorted boyfriends on assorted foreign beaches. Then again, I’m drunk and stupid often enough that by this point there may well be an entire Flickr set dedicated to “Tracy Glisson naked, drunk and stupid.”)

It was a gorgeous day at Woodland Park Zoo, and by gorgeous I mean cool and overcast and threatening just enough rain today to make it feel like we had the whole damn place to ourselves, and that’s saying an awful lot on a summer day.

Even better? As soon as we walked into the west entrance, one of the peacocks we often see was fully erect. Er, in total bloom, or plume. Whatever, ALL HIS GODDAMN FEATHERS WERE OUT AND HE WAS PRETTY AS ALL HELL.

So I stop the stroller a good ten yards back, tell Eliot to stay right there with Nola and start slowly approaching him with my camera, because if there’s one thing I hate it’s birds, and if there’s one thing I really hate it’s a really BIG bird, and right now this big-ass bird with all his kaleidoscope feathers fanned out looks a whole lot like a pissed-off dog with his hair standing straight up, and I don’t need a new blog post enough to go getting myself chased around the zoo by a peacock with his tit in a wringer.

But just as I get about 10 feet away from him, this boy of about 5 jumps right in front of me, followed by his parents, and then keeps walking toward the bird. And I’m thinking, “Well that’s just not a good idea,” and, “Well this just can’t end well,” and “That poor little boy who can’t help having been born to stupid folk. . .” and the parents are laughing and smiling like it’s the most precious thing they’ve ever seen when BAM!, the peacock PECKS HIM IN THE FACE!!

That’s precisely when I took this super-awesome picture:

Pretty, huh?!

(Yeessss, the boy was fine, just crying and scared, nothing but a PERMANENTLY MARRED PSYCHE and BIRD PHOBIA, little things a few decades on the couch won’t take care of. . .)

But seriously, did these people not grasp the concept of “wild animals?” Did they fail to realize we are at a ZOO? That there’s a reason most of the creatures they paid money to see are behind walls? Or were they suffering from some sort of delusion that unless there’s a pen involved, we’re actually in a fucking Pixar film? Like they stepped away from the lion exhibit and all of a sudden the whole fucking place turned into “Madagascar 2″?

Honestly, y’all are lucky my Mom works at DSHS and some of her coworkers told her I was cute at the company picnic, ’cause you idiot parents ARE driving me to carry a flask on my person and when they finally bust me I’m gonna need all the sweet-on-me DSHS help I can get. . .

So, erm, YEAH. Apparently you noticed (hi, Mom!). And maybe even punished me (sorry, BlogHer ads team!). And I swear I wasn’t even blackout drunk for most of the entirety of a single, solitary day of it.

In fact, during a single month of it, I accomplished an Amazing Goddamned Thing: I wrote a 52,500-word novel using nothing but my bare hands and my vodka-pocked brain. Writing a novel has always been my Everest: the thing I’d plan and sketch out and start but never follow through on, so January was a sleepless, foodless, unhygienic haze of nervousness, euphoria, and something like total disbelief that HOLY FUCKING HELL, I was actually WRITING this bitch!

And at 9:30pm on January 31st, I gave Mike and Daron my word count and made a monster vodka tonic and tried to calm the hell down as they doled out the congratulations. “It’s not really a NOVEL yet,” I insisted. “It’s more just a big, jumbled collection of scenes right now. And everything’s out of order, and I’m sure the tense is all over the map. Really, when you think about it, it’s just a big, blobby blob.”

But it was MY blob, and since I was writing again, Rudy and Steven decided we should start our old writers’ group back up. So I packed up my blob and took it over to Steve’s place and gave everybody the background on the story, and Steve pours us all some wine and tells me to go ahead and read, and I start plodding through the selection of scenes I’ve brought, and all I can think is, “Oh, GAWD,” and “I wrote this trite shit?” and “Well Steven’s gonna HATE that,” and “They’re gonna tear out my liver and serve it up to me in a pâté on a Ritz cracker they are THAT BORED WITH THIS DRIVEL.”

And 90 minutes later I turned the last page and quickly glanced at both of them, and the fact that they were both staring hard at the table was a clear sign to me they were hungrily envisioning pâté-topped Ritz trays (Steve’s were garnished with parsley sprigs), and no one said anything for an eternal fucking MINUTE while I just sat there like a big fucking dummy with my big fucking blob.

Finally, Rudy took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

“Fuck me,” he said. “I gotta follow that? That was phenomenal. That’s a bestseller, Tracy.”

Steve looked at me across the table, shaking his head and smiling at the same time. “It’s gonna sell a million copies,” he said with equal parts pride and disbelief.

And then we worked over the manuscript a bit, and then I didn’t write a SINGLE FUCKING WORD FOR FIVE MONTHS. This is how neurotic I am: most people take outrageous praise and run with it; I take it and run the hell away. . .

A few weeks ago, I was on the back porch shaking out some throw rugs when Eliot came out and asked, “Mama, is that them dirty things you do?”

And I was all, “Oh honey, if only you’d asked me that a couple years earlier, the answer woulda been a WHOLE lot more interesting. . .”

Because the thing is the first draft I’ve written is a roman a clef, based on an experience from a few years back, and even though it’s FICTION and it’s a NOVEL the reality that it’s rooted in FACT means opening myself to scrutiny and judgement — about which I normally couldn’t care less — but this “bestseller,” “million copies” business does tend to give one pause.*

Which is why it was perfect timing for a friend to send me this TED.com video by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love.” I didn’t LOOOOOVE the book, like a zillion other women certainly did, but she has some really meaningful things to say on creativity and the importance of not being attached to its outcome, as well as respecting the difference between one’s “genius” and “genie.”

(Which is important given the other day I spent 15 minutes literally trying to stuff the Diaper Genie back into the bottle, whereas if I had any genius at all, that thing’s ass would be in the air 24-7.)

* (No, that is not shorthand for “Shhh, I was a hooker!” If I finally, FINALLY wrote my damn novel and it was the true story about how I was a secret hooker, my Mom would kill me, and frankly, I can’t take the grief.)