Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb?

We’ve been home for two weeks now and the patina on my copper is turning green. I didn’t think anything was wrong when I woke up this morning. It was really late and I had taken a Benadryl for the third night in a row because I’ve had an itchy throat and what felt like allergies to the smog in the city of broken dreams. And yes, our little magic man has been coughing all week but not the cold and flu-kind-of- cough so please do not judge me for letting him go to school.  It is clearly nasty-bits-in-local-air-supply hacking that has been singing its way through our apartment and not infectious-contagious-shit like Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest thespian interpretation of a regular, middle class lady we can ALL identify with. She really knows how to represent the every woman who can’t afford the money or the time for that $500 blow out and perfect foil color and who cheats on her sexy, Damon-y husband and wears ugly bathrobes JUST LIKE US when she feels a plague coming on.

I woke up late after both Dave and Otto had eaten and dressed feeling like a shlub and a boob and stumbled downstairs covered in confusion and fog. The night before, after watching what amounted to seven hours of season premiere television Dave and I discussed going to a matinee the next morning. This is something we do more often than is normal or healthy because Dave is a movie freak, maker, writer and I love walking out of a movie into the blinding sun before the clock reads noon. That way I haven’t really fucked off too much, I saved ten bucks on a movie ticket, I give other misdirected miscreants a chance to point fingers at the lady wearing dirty pigtails and something half-clean from H&M so they can feel momentary uplifted.

After agreeing we should matinee, we got out the door in less than ten minutes, got Otto to school and then scooted off to see a movie at one of those huge, first class cabin-like theatres with huge chairs and clean carpeting and hipster dudes selling popcorn and expensive ice cream bars. As we wound our way through traffic one asshole after another kept cutting us off or driving like a cement block or pulling out and blocking all three lanes or running stop signs and then flipping us off. I felt like we were in a video game called DOUCHE BAGGERY AND BAD CHOICES. Everywhere we turned some tool out-tooled the next tool.

By the time we turned off of Hollywood Boulevard my blood was boiled and my brow was beaten. Pink Floyd’s “Mother” had just come on the radio and it was all over. Ever building looked grimy, every car looked dented, every sidewalk was freckled with used chewing gum and lost souls and any hope I had of holding in my sadness and frustration crumbled like an animal cracker at the bottom of a diaper bag.

Dave pulled into a parking space and I exploded in a torrent on snotty, unsexy tears, the kind that dudes who barely know you run from with Hussein Bolt speed and a brain’s surgeon’s precision. I wept for the city I no longer love, for a career that never happened, for the friendships that have perished, for the ones that sustain me, for Otto’s future and for the rat I feel like in a race I cannot win.

I wept for Dave’s father who is in a prison of confusion and his mother who can do little else but stand on the edge of the pool and watch her husband sink a little farther into the deep end each day. I slobbered for my family who live 3000 miles and a lifetime away, a group of magical people who came together this summer and saved me a little bit each day. But thanks to Roger Waters and his bucket of perpetual angst I cried because the world can be shitty and the race is long and hard and I was sad and I wanted my mommy.

Dave simply put his hand on my shoulder and let me wail like hyena saying nothing and knowing full well there was nothing he needed to. When the song was over, I wiped my tears with a Starbuck’s recycled napkin, put on my imitation Chloe sunglasses and got out of the car. We walked toward the theatre entrance hand in hand without a word until we reached the door.

I turned to Dave and said, “Men need to masturbate and women need to cry.”

My wonderful masturbating husband bought two tickets, walked me down the hallway into the darkness and sat with me as I watched Drive. And even though I couldn’t have my mommy and I can’t just pick up and move to Boston like I want to, a fast car, a tortured, hot dude and extreme violence cheered this girl up.  

And sure, I feel like I’ve been in Los Angeles too long. But those seats are sweet!

Fantasy Island - Back to School Episode

sniffle, sniffle.

I will say it and yell it and scream it to the mountaintops until someone talks me down with a gin and tonic and a ham and cheese croissant. Our parents had it so much easier back in the day of standard, un-hipster bell-bottoms and Red Dye #2. Back when Andy Gibb was God’s gift to coke whores and Twinkie’s were a sixth food group there were no car seats or baby monitors or forced, creepy play dates or PG-13 movies. Our parents had jobs that paid well enough for them to buy a perfectly suitable house in a great area and send our little, lucky asses to a public school that gave a shit about education and had enough funding to provide P.E. AND art AND music at no extra cost to the parents. Do you see where I am going with this?

Now, it is a race to the middle with parents vying for limited spaces in charters and magnets and oddly expensive private schools that may or may not have their very own uniformed drug cartel roaming the halls at recess and selling small bags of happiness to their own kind. The publics are choking from budget cuts and the teachers are overwhelmed and underpaid with classroom sizes ballooning like Kirstie Alley at a Home Town Buffet. The privates just keep increasing their tuition cap so every parent that can afford to send Little Mikey Likes It to an elite romper room feels good about their choice and bad for the rest.

I, by no means, am taking sides or judging anyone here except myself, a confused and out-of-work mom-o-phobe who sleeps with ear plugs, eats pasta standing up and cries while watching Louie. I am simply spitting my opinion into the wind and waiting for the hardened loogie to come right back at me with an answer and a prayer. I want the best for my kid and for his exceptional friends. I want them to all be together until 12^th grade when they graduate with honors and all hug their parents and go off to Ivy League schools and change the world, like they changed us.

But living in a city like Los Angeles with its massive debt and hilariously absurd housing costs and boxes of identical nose jobs and acres of silicone boobs and barely breathing public schools does not bode well for the fantasy that I am currently playing in my head. The dream of having my son run circles around beautifully kept public athletic fields while expertly playing the Obo to Pythagorean Theorem’s second concerto in E minor without his virginal, angelic eyes every taking in a face lift or a cheek implant is the stuff of movies.

And no, I will never hear the words, “Now playing.”

Target Practice

Really?

Back in the swing of things and the first week of school is packed away like a once worn, moth-ridden sweater. Otto was great, the teachers were tremendous but a weird, dark cloud was ever present over the playground at drop-off. This cloud had no rain droplets or precipitation but rather a muted burnt orange glow that had the faint look like an old bathroom rug rung out and left for dead under the stairs of the windowless basement apartment your weird Uncle Bruce used for canning and skinning. 

Can anyone PLEASE tell me what caused the freak fest, retard riot for the Missoni for Target web crash of 2011? Why did thousands of loony birds line up outside of every Target from here to the Florida pan handle to karate kick each other in their special parts over dishrag-styled socks and zigzag, vomit-colored throws and duvet covers last seen on granny’s nursing home deathbed?

Why did every laptop potato go online at midnight Monday to snatch up the eyesores disguised as faux-designer luggage of the not rich and never famous and why did I secretly want to jump in my car Tuesday morning, drive 40 miles outside of L.A. to possibly find that last, lonely Missoni make-up bag that some Jell-O headed shopaholic tossed behind the Liz Lange maternity display and buy it with a smugness only an out-of-work, C-list pop singer could truly pull off?

The stampede is over. The stores are back to being the humble hub of diaper wipes and wife beater tank shopping and the once overwhelmed website now blinks OUT OF STOCK when you click on anything Missoni, including a wretched ribbon throw pillow that I swear I tried and failed to make in my 7^th grade sewing class.

Now all the moms at school can go back to their regular scheduled programming and forget about buying up the middle-America quickie solution to deep-seeded depression and wine-in-the-box medicating. My only regret is that we all won’t look exactly the same at this month’s Back To School potluck.

First Day of Cool

Otto’s first day of school was so miraculously normal and so wonderfully tepid that I feel like Pre-K is simply another day, another dollar. To have my big, beautiful boy say goodbye in calm tones and wet kisses instead of tears and ankle hugs speaks volumes of the school he is in, the friends that he has made, the boy he has become and the shit I am going to accomplish.

All that said I am a bit pissed off. I mean I wore a fucking blazer and cute flats today instead of the workout spandex camel toe holder pants and the unforgiving Cinnabun head that I usually do. I didn’t workout or even make a plan so my young son could NEED me, and HAVE TO have me by his side to transition and adapt to his new class. I kept my very hectic (huh hum) schedule as open as a hooker’s underwear drawer. And what did I get?

OTTO: Mommy, give me a kiss.

ME: Okay, monkey, have a great day.

Otto plants one on my lips and then sits down with a pal and starts playing with trains while I proceed to talk and loiter and stall with a mom friend while discussing the Missoni for Target typhoon that hit earlier that morning and how I am so unhip I knew nothing of the insanity that has enveloped the muffin tops of Middle America and the heroine hussies of Hollywood.

After deciding that I do not need non-absorbent Missoni bath towels, a Missoni bicycle that screams “douche bag” or a cheap knit Missoni cardigan that will look like a multi-colored dishrag after one washing Otto looks up clearly wondering why I am still in his classroom taking up all the oxygen with my incessant babbling.

Otto: Okay Mommy, you can go now. Okay?

ME: Okay. Yeah. Love you. Wow.

Did I mention he wore a KISS t-shirt, new skater sneakers and skinny jeans? For reals.

Going Back To Cali, I Don't Think So

Ll cool j - going back to cali by dougpark17

Now I know why the French do it. I do not mean long, wet tongue kissing or smoking unfiltered cigarettes with a sexy face or drinking wine with breakfast or avoiding the dreaded curse of a sweatpants rearview, even though all of those traits seem to keep them attractive and cool. No, what I am referring to is the month-long holiday thingy that the French and many other Europeans seem to embrace with tanned, thin arms as a birthright and a way of summer life.

I have just returned from six weeks on the east coast of this lovely country that prides itself on 90-hour workweeks and two-week stresscationing. Six days in a lake house in Wisconsin, twelve days in New Jersey, two days in New Hampshire, thirteen days in Boston, two days barely avoiding Hurricane Irene and one glorious, dream-like week in the Maine woods in a cabin that my great-grandfather and grandfather built by hand in 1940. Approximately twenty-seven days were spent without Internet or decent cell phone reception and one week was off the grid, survival shit that only a bear or a worm farmer could truly survive. I am jetlagged, upside down and as relaxed as a post-coitel street whore on a hot summer day.

I read a 554-page book in less than two weeks and slept in most mornings while a grandparent took Otto and showed him the way of popsicles for breakfast with a public television cartoon chaser. Sure, I had no idea that he sometimes ate a three-course meal and other days went without breakfast at all. Or better yet, if the day was partly cloudy he may have been lucky enough to simply stumble into a box of graham crackers or two squares of high-grade dark, European chocolate and call it a well-balanced beginning.

Within days of arriving into the arms of much-missed family members these food follies meant nothing to the helicopter food freak that I have always been. I was in such an emotional coma from my father-in-law’s condition and my grandfather’s demise and the waves of aged reality that I immediately began plotting our escape from Los Angeles and fantasizing in Technicolor of installing myself in my parents book-infested, jumbled house of memories and sending Otto to the local public school while I read old, dusty diaries and re-wrote my senior thesis without using white-out and someone else’s Cliff Notes.

There is so much to write and so many photos to post and much to discuss and buckets of tears to mop up. But right now all I can do is say I am glad to be back here, back on my blog away from home and glad to be spilling a bit of my overflowing cup. My summer was fantastically sad and tremendously beautiful. I will do my best to tell the stories I need to tell and the ones I hope people want to read.

Now I am off to bed because my body thinks I flew to Hong Kong via Uranus with a layover in Hades and Otto’s first day of school is tomorrow and now I have to grow up and be a carpooling parent of a super star kid who blew his parents away with his poise, his manners, his strength and his travelling willbury abilities these last few months. Otto spelled backwards is Otto. Enough said.