my mommy bites

My new venture... Full Frontal Mom

2012-02-03T23:32:00.000-08:00

So, this is where I have been and what I have been doing between vacuuming up lice husks and spying on the cracky whore neighbor who got arrested for stealing an iPhone at The Gap. Her shorts were behind her scabby knees and her hair a Crisco runway of bad decisions. Busy, busy, busy.

Hope you like the show and please let me know what you think in the comments here at My Mommy Bites or on my new YouTube channel, Full Frontal Mom. NO, not topless, not yet anyway.

Thanks!

This Made My Day

2012-01-30T13:12:00.000-08:00

Now I want a snowmobile for Christmas and some bigger balls.

Let Go of My Lego

2012-01-28T12:16:00.000-08:00

On the weekends at our house we like to be lazy and sloth-like and watch videos and dream of floating in space. Today, I share with you a movie version of how Saturday always feels around here. And it feels oh so good.

SHIT I LIKE @ Stuff Crush

2012-01-24T17:58:00.000-08:00

SHIT I LIKE

This is shit I like. You may think I am paid to advertise these products. Nope. You may think I am a gross, over-consumer Sometimes but mostly no. You also may think all this shit blows. Maybe. But each item is something I have been given or purchased recently that hides my exhaustion or cleans up my dirty life trail or bubbles my bonnet or helps me bake my balls off. And maybe you may like some of this shit after all.

No more pig eyes, ladies@!

tiny bubbles, huge smiles

Dyson DC 25... sucks so good!

The greasy, 80's yellow of my youth

read it and wipe

Oh, I Love You Suzanne

2012-01-20T13:56:00.000-08:00

For those of you who know me well, you will understand why I love this video with the passion of a tween in Twitter. Having been intimate with the ThighMaster and its Master back in the early 90's I can only say, Hurray! And not to rub it in but I am a proud owner of a signed copy this book of poetry and that warms every part of my little, black heart and my big-ass bookcase. Enjoy my hero Kristen Wiig reading from the poet laureate of the side pony tail.

Good Grief

2012-01-16T11:49:00.000-08:00

In the beginning of the week I felt like we were back into anormal rhythm of cranky carpools and dirty hands when, BOOM, the events overthe holiday break finally hit me. After running into a mom at school who offered her condolences for ourlosses, my eyes filled with tears and I choked up as if I had taken a largebite of a ham sandwich on stale bread and my arms were too short to reach for acold, Mexican Coke to wash it down. At first I thought I was hacking on theexhaust fumes farting out from a $120,000 white Mercedes monolith at the carpool,a sparkly, imposing vehicle that looked like a shiny, Kardashian Maxi-Pad on magwheels.

But as the ferocious feminine product drove away in a cloudof environmental irresponsibility my tears were still there and I realized thatI was simply sad and bluesy, not because someone would actually purchase avehicle that needed to be washed three times a week by a pit crew of cleaningladies but because I was as despondent as a hung-over jazz singer the morningafter a rainy gig at a taco stand.

Having lost my father-in-law and my grandfather in a matterof days made for a very intense crawl through the Christmas break. It was sad,exhausting, surreal and stupefying, much like taking brown acid at a Christianrock concert. Holed up in New Jersey, Dave, Otto and I held my mother-in-law’shand as people came to the house and ate piles of pastrami, Edible Arrangementfruit balls and Shop Rite cookies shaped like Christmas trees and Hanukahmenorahs. The cocktails flowed, the stories giggled and the days were hazy andas happy as could be under the circumstances.

I have tried to write down the details and the feelings anddraw a few pictures of the stops along this journey of death but every time Istart my heart gets tight and I feel like I just swallowed some bad shrimp at aSizzler salad bar. While I was front and center for my father-in-law’s lastmoments, my grandfather was two thousand miles away and nowhere in my emotionalview. I posted obituaries on Facebook and read the wonderful comments andsupportive quips but somehow I cannot seem to write the stories that I reallyneed to write about two men I knew so well.

This week my dreams were filled with images of these twomajestic men and the image of my parent’s slow decline. This macabre admissionleads me to believe that I am starting to absorb all that happened in real timeand real color. Death is as clear as Saran Wrap and as real as rain and now,for the first time in my life, I know what it looks like and feels like andsmells like. It is not a C.S.I. Miami close-up of a hooker’s high heel and ajailed john after a bad night and it is most certainly not a staged car wreckwith well-dressed detectives drinking coffee and eyeballing evidence.

It is a real someone you love who finally stops fighting forbreath and stops being in pain. It is years of a colorful life and crazyexperiences and complicated friendships and ferociously funny family gone in asingle moment of exhalation. It is a tragic and heartbreaking and beautiful andblessed snapshot all wrapped in starched hospital bedding that will be rewashedand reused for someone else you will never meet. It is life’s laundry pile on thedelicate cycle and as it washes and spins and finally stops you realize thatnow, it all has to be tumble-dried and folded and put away for another day.

Circles and Squares

2012-01-10T13:12:00.000-08:00

Do I start from the beginning and go into crazy detail aboutthe last month of our lives over here or do I skip over it and get straight tothe Beyonce bashing? Do people want to know why I have not written a word orspit up a syllable for nearly four weeks or should I simply rattle on about theimmediate concerns of my day?

I will skip to concern #1.

Concern #1 - Why would anyone name their baby after a rareprotruding varicose vein-like condition mainly found in pregnant senior citizens,unwed mothers of triplets and blind circus performers?

Exhibit A: What exactly is Blue Ivy Miller? Me thinks it a cheap,blueberry-flavored beer that will be introduced by Miller High Life at thisyear’s Super Bowl half time show starring Madonna, Madonna’s new baby boyfriendback-up dancer and Beyonce’s baby daddy’s new microbrewer manager named Clyde. Whycan’t celebu-freaks just give birth to a baby and name it a baby-like nameinstead of birthing an industry inside a baby covered in a terrible monikerslathered in product placement juice?

Concern #2 – Who will put away our Christmas decorationsthis year? It is nearly February on my emotional calendar and I have nointention of acknowledging the fact that we missed Christmas this year andnever got to sit around with cocoa and stare longingly at our artificial treefrom CVS that smells like a freshly opened package of Krazy Straws and Lysol.

Concern #3 – Should I worry that I don’t give a hairy ratsrump that we missed a moment of the holiday and that I am frighteninglygrateful to have been able to get on a plane in a moment’s notice and get toDave’s father before the end? Where has my Cringle gone and why do I feel oddlyblessed?

Concern #4 - Since I just spent two hours at my child’sschool listening to a presentation on how to avoid pedophiles and theirup-the-sleeve tricks, will I sleep well tonight or any other night from nowuntil the day Otto races off to college on a full sports scholarship and leaveme in a puddle to suspect every one of his coaches, teachers, neighbors,friends, uncles and stuffed animals of being a pervy, creepy, No Way, Jose kindsof dudes?

Concern #5 – Is No Way, Jose a racist statement and if so,what will replace it in my velveteen vernacular? Oh, I think it’s okay to saythat since I have a brother named Jose who drives a cab.

Concern #6 – Oops.

More Perfectly Hollywood Than A Great Table At Spago

2011-12-13T09:44:00.000-08:00

Since this tinsel town of tinkles has been on my mind as of late, I had to share with you the greatest reason for love/hating this zip code. Please enjoy the show.

Black Is The New BOOM!

2011-12-12T23:12:00.000-08:00

The Black List

Here's to another list that hubby made in a very short time yet a very long year. No, it is not a no-fly list or a FBI MOST WANTED list or even a grocery list. It is the 2011 Black List for most popular Hollywood screenplays and his SUBJECT ZERO, shameless mention yet again, got hurrays and high-fives. I can't help whoring him out and grabbing some love for his brilliant, sick and twisted mind.

He has some great company on the list, including our great pal Kate Angelo for her script SEX TAPE. The title alone had me at dry hump on camera. Say no more and read the list already. Cool hand Luke!

http://www.deadline.com/2011/12/the-black-list-2011-screenplay-roster/

My Hit Man

2011-12-09T16:58:00.000-08:00

This Hollywood life is one of heavy heartbreaks and steep hills. I have written about the good, screamed about the bad and cried about the rest. But once in a while, and lately, more often than not, something great happens and you feel a little more inflated than your usual flat front tire on a bumpy bike path.

Today my super, screenwriter husband got word that his latest script made it onto TWO Hollywood insider lists, two lists that make up the favorite screenplays of 2011 to a group of top executives who make the movies and really matter. If a writer is lucky enough to get handpicked to be on even one of these lists, they are suddenly a racer in a good pole position on the oily track of the Hollywood Grand Prix.

Since only one list was officially announced today I will simply spit up one link and one mention below.

SUBJECT ZERO by David Cohen
Desperate and grieving over his son’s death, a brilliant scientist uses an experimental serum to bring him back to life, with unimaginable consequences.

REPRESENTATION
ICM | Emile Gladstone, Kathleen Remington
Generate | Jeremy Platt
STATUS
Available

My man, in all his hairy glory, wrote a beyond butt-kicking script called SUBJECT ZERO about zombies and family life and insanity. Go to THE HIT LIST if you want to see the above caption and some other cool cats who made the top favorite all-star Hollywood scripts of 2011 list on Tracking Board.

To say I am proud is as gross an understatement as saying a Kardashian wedding is a tasteful affair and a lasting relationship. So, I will only say this.

"Fuck yeah!"

Sybil Disobedience

2011-12-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

I know, I know. My blog design has changed more this past week than Lindsay Lohan's career path in a Jewish calendar year. And the last one looked like a cool magazine spread without advertising or fancy print. But, that hot mess of blogger design would not let you comment properly or view any links or change information or sleep well at night. So, I broke up with its ass and am now back to square one of first grade blog banners. I have been playing around with different settings and looks but always bump into a wall of lame or a parking meter of too complicated. Ahhhhhh, what happened to the old fashioned typewriter and a TV with one remote?

Okay, I am not old but the loopty loops of interface design and HTML make this girl want to crawl back into a time machine and beam back to a day when all I had to worry about was perfectly symmetrical shoulder pads and not getting caught by the cops in my boyfriend's Audi while I performed a Helen Keller handjob in the sub-zero weather. Enough about the innocence of teenhood.

For the next week I will go back to this basic, open-mouth theme that no web designer would ever put their dick in. And yes, most of the web designers I know are chicks and you can finish that thought bubble on your own. Suggest suggestions if you will. Maybe a tacky winter wonderland with a drunk Santa groping and elf? Or a photo of Rudolph and Kim Kardashian bumping red noses and rumps?

My Antique Birthday Roadshow

2011-12-05T16:33:00.000-08:00

I know that not everyone is as birthday centric as I am. Some like a small, mature dinner party, a few friends and a torte. Some will only accept a meager acknowledgement and a stale cupcake. Some lie to their posse and say it’s next month. And some pretend it never happened so the numbers don’t go up.

Not me. I live for my birthday. I embrace it and slather it with frosting and expensive anti-aging creams and then hug it out for at least five days. Strangers are accosted by my birthday announcements everywhere I go and neighbors know it is coming weeks in advance.

Now, with the advent of Facebook I can now bath in the quick, one-line wishes of friends far and wide and feel special while sitting in dirty sweatpants. This only fuels my egotistical nature and makes me want to blow Mark Zuckerberg like the lucky 21^st birthday candle on my 20^th birthday cake.

My husband and my son both know that birthdays have always been and will always be a big shit deal in my house. Whoever’s birthday it may be will have no duties to perform, no food to make, no mess to clean up and a crazy tasty cake to consume before the actual day is done. When the kiddo is asleep there will be a dinner out and/or drinks consumed or a movie viewed or a dance danced.

This morning, instead of sleeping in, I awoke very early and made Otto’s breakfast and put his lunch and snack bags together and then had a yogurt and read trashy celebrity gossip sites in my bathrobe. It was perfection.

Then a hung hard with my two teammates, went on a perfect, L.A. blue-sky hike with Dave and visited Brody’s rock grave at Runyon Canyon, which I kissed and talked to like a crazy lady who lives in the Ralph’s parking lot. I smooch that rock every time we visit, even though it is, no doubt, crusted with dried urine and coated with turd balls from ever mutt imaginable. I do not care. It is Brody’s last resting place. Besides, I may have kissed him once after he ate his own feces. Still not sure…

Moving on. Dave I then drove to our favorite thrift shop, a raggedy store front on a now hipster street filled with dusty dead people casual wear and terrifying throw pillows from the scene of the crime. We were feeling the love and looking around for something cool. After guffawing at the sales lady when she tried to tell me a broken ivory bracelet better suited for KMART catalogue sale was priced at $165, I knew my birthday luck was teetering on the precipice.

And then, my cool-ass, super fly husband, a man with exquisite taste and an eye for the rad and rotten, spotted a funky framed lithograph on the wall next to a cigarette stained Keane knock-off and a horrifying watercolor of a train to nowhere painted by an angry someone using only institutional gray paint and blood.

He pulled the litho off the wall, blew off the layer of mothball powder and mouse droppings and held it up for my birthday gift approval. Other than the film of filth and the nose hair collection collecting the nooks and crannies of the frame I thought it was cool hand Luke and a to-go order of awesome. He went over the disillusioned sales gal who earlier, had tried to sell me the dead elephant tusk for the same price as a three-month gym membership and asked her if she’d go down in price. Without batting a used, fake eyelash she giggled, “Yes!” and we got out of there for $40 and a coating of gross.

When we got home, Dave, of course, felt my present was “special” and Googled the litho, discovering that my new/old $35, 1960 Ben Shahn litho was, in fact, a $300-$400 treasure unframed. But, in its original frame, that we staring at, the total came out to around $500, give or take a buck.

It is now late afternoon and I can say this birthday is rocking the roadhouse. I just had a Mani Pedi and a girl’s lunch with one of my best pal-people ever, my boys are on their way home to help me eat a box of chocolate birthday cupcakes and I got to write a few paragraphs for this here f-bomb parking lot, a gift that keeps on giving in comments and grunts. I am staring at our newest family member, a court jester type fellow writing his own name in ink and clearly enjoying himself. He is my kind of Cohen.

So, the killer birthday marches on. Later tonight, after a shower, a shellacking and our shaman sitter Pickle, my man from La Mancha will take me out for an intimate dinner, drinks and revelry for two and every empty chair in the place will know that I just turned one year older and three times louder.

My New Oprah

2011-12-01T20:50:00.000-08:00

Get More: Music Videos, Free Music Videos

Melvin From The Block

2011-11-11T12:31:00.001-08:00

That means you, shit stain!

Okay, I haven’t had a resident rant in a while. And what I mean by that is my belligerent bitching about some of the clueless fucknuts that live in and around my island that I call home/less.

It’s Friday and I have been sick all week and am so amped up on anger about the Penn State scandal and my head cold that I need and want to focus my filthy fury at someone other than my Ricola cough drop wrappers and the scumbag daisy chain that make up the Penn State administration and their rapist athletic department.

So here goes.

There is a dude who lives on our street who smokes like a crooked chimney and dresses like an unemployed peeping Tom. We have always gotten on quite well with him, even though he is as off as a wig in a windstorm. Over the years he has harmlessly skulked around our sidewalks being as friendly as one can be for a lopsided leprechaun with a twitch. I have always cut him a break despite his social awkwardness and his ability to stalk my friends and knock on our door at the most inappropriate times while partaking in his awful habit of lighting up in my personal space.

For the past twenty-four months this tree frog has stood directly outside my open living room window smoking his filtered camels and talking on his mint green, bejeweled iPhone. Each time he has parked himself within lung shot I have played it cool and simply closed my windows loud enough for him to look at me and quietly enough to not appear like a total C U Next Tuesday.

But last week, my camel back broke when he again stood four feet from my vintage green pear-shaped lamp and my over-sensitive nose hairs and finally told him to stop.

As he inhaled his shit puffs I called out, “Melvin, seriously. You have to stop smoking directly in front of our window. Please!”

Without a word from the lizard lips that have kissed only a pillow, he glared at me and continued puffing away while discussing the uber-important topic of wine tasting at J-Date mixers with his imaginary friend on the other end of his phone.

I sat back down on our new vintage grandma sofa we just acquired, one that I preferred would not smell like an ashtray from Melvin's anal canal and knew that my relationship with this once-genial neighbor had just crossed over into the UNFRIEND department. Two minutes later I moved on to X-Factor on DVR and then transferred my bitterness toward the pop music garbage pail that is that show.

The week went on without incident and I had forgotten all about Smokey Bear’s crappy habits and disregard for anyone but his addiction and his yellowed fingertips until twenty minutes ago. Sitting at my dining room table and begging the universe to clear my sinuses and invite me back to the human race of bathed normality and un-puffy eyeballs, the marvelous Melvin walked past the same window and took a smoke-signal shit right in my mouth.

Looking like a bathroom slipper found under a dumpster I shuffled over to the window and yelled, “Dude, stop smoking in front of my open window. Jesus Christ already. Come on!”

I then dramatically shut the window as my pilling, dirty leggings rolled up around my unshaven calves and my toothpaste-stained nightshirt bellowed from the gust of my Sarah Bernhardt slam and shut.

I showed him, I thought. Who would not take this slice of day-old pie crust seriously?

The troll of tobacco then walked away in his confused and terrifying black Nike nurses shoes without giving me a second look and I again, sat down on the new flowery couch and wished Simon Cowell would wash away the second-hand of bitchy that was all over my face. I then folded my Kilimanjaro laundry pile and forgot he even existed.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode when Melvin takes up cigars and public masturbation and I buy a pellet gun and better reading glasses.

Apply Twice A Day To Infected Area

2011-11-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

Having a four and a half-year old means a lot of things. Your pint-sized roommate is demanding and messy, living like a squatter and never helping out with the rent or the toilet brushing. The kitchen is always swirling with steam, smoke and short order requests. Laundry that was once a molehill is now a mountain that can no easier be scaled than K2 in a snowstorm. And last, but least appealing, is the knowledge that in a short three months you will be inserted into the Cuisinart of school lottery admissions and come out the other end looking like a beautifully julienned carrot or a mangled cucumber nub.

The last few weeks have been gobbled up by this school scariness. Tense tours, piles of applications, blinking websites, breathy conversations and night sweats have taken over my existence and thrown me under the school bus to Nowhere Elementary. Do we go public and give him a wider worldview and try and make a difference and grow a great kid? Or do we go private and watch money we don’t have dwindle into the sewer that’s not even there. Will we be one of the lucky few to have our number picked and embrace a charter where we feel the people around us understand our tortured path? Or will a specialized magnet call Otto’s name and send him on his way?

With all this insanity and finger-biting my writing has been put on hold, my skin resembles that trendy J. Peterman mailbag we ALL coveted in 1994, my farmer’s hair is of all hay bail instead of corn silk and I now have the beginnings of that dreaded fall cold that only accentuates the negatives and buries the positives.

I am an unstable atom in the lab of life. I road rage when walking and I drive in despair. Two days ago I chased down a man at the movies who made the parking ticket attendant blubber uncontrollably after yelling at her about how to behave and when to smile because he didn’t want to pay the full amount he owed. Yesterday, I snapped at an old lady at Starbuck’s after she told a young mom to move her stroller to the other side of the store and leave her baby unattended while she got her coffee. I have cried at the new Winklevoss Twins pistachio commercial because they make me want to barf on their gold buttoned, blue-blazered buffoonery and I have sniffled while watching Otto proudly shower alone or draw a picture of a blimp and a flying saucer.

Last night I wept in the kitchen as my husband made dinner and I retold the story in Otto’s new book about Pele the soccer player and how he was too poor as a boy to own cleats or a soccer ball so he learned to play soccer barefoot while kicking a rice sack stuffed with rags. To make matters worse he was the only one on his team who could even afford a sack. Jesus, this is too much! Then, as Dave continued cooking up an over-priced organic chicken breast for Otto and I became overwhelmed with guilt and shame for being able to afford that simple poultry luxury, I cried some more as I told the following story of one of my father’s famous maxi-meltdowns when I was in high school.

One night after dinner I threw away a plate of rice I couldn’t finish. I had either lost my appetite from having a bungled boyfriend kerfuffle, my pegged Guess jeans were fresh from the dryer and far too tight or I clearly had consumed too may Dexatrim tablets before soccer practice earlier that day. My father walked through the kitchen as I was scraping the grains into the trash and flipped his handlebar mustache like Yosemite Sam with a case of the Mondays. He began yelling at me in such an irrational, desperate manner that I stood speechless and numb not knowing how to feel. Picture Father Guido Sarducci with a touch of Gandhi hollering about starchy side dishes. Then take it down a few inches in height and instead of a priest’s cassock or an adult diaper, picture an L.L. Bean flannel and wide whale corduroys and there you have my little, brown, mad daddy.

He ranted on and on about how he had gone to bed hungry in his childhood and how dare I waste such a precious commodity as overcooked white rice with watered-down chicken gravy and half-chewed broccoli bits. Having never experienced that kind of hunger myself I could not blame him for his anger. He must have seen nothing more than a spoiled brat dressed like Madonna’s special needs cousin who lives under her spiral staircase that leads to the yoga room and been sickened by my cluelessness, entitlement and fashion failures. He may or may not have apologized and I may or may not have been hurt. But regardless, I have never forgotten that moment and the image of my father as a skinny, desperate boy lying in a hammock wanting another cup of rice to fill his aching belly.

That night as I sat at dinner I didn’t realize how fortunate I was to have what I had. I went to top-notch public schools with ample funding for elite sports programs and art and science. I took the expensive and ball-busting Stanley Kaplan SAT course twice and was the only person in history to have their scores go down the second time around. I attended an overpriced, private, liberal arts college without ever thinking about how so many deserving people would never have the chance to do the same. I graduated with a degree and no debt thanks to the sacrifice my parents made and still have no fucking clue what I should do with my life.

I am a daughter of a Brazilian immigrant who came to this country with no money and made it despite a very tall wall of obstacles and a long road of hurdles and hard work. He has always paid his taxes, always crossed his T’s, dotted his I’s and supported public school education and the American dream.

I will not take this opportunity to rage against the machine that has destroyed our public school system and ripped away the funding that would have ensured the future for all our children. I also refuse to jump on my borrowed and broken soap box and remind America that taxes for education should be seen as an invaluable investment in hope and prosperity, not a scam or a hand out or a leg up for people who believe a good education is a birth right not a benefit of good breeding. And I will most certainly not sit here on my IKEA bed linens and tell the world that I am not feeling a bit disgruntled toward the top 1% and the private school ethos that they perpetuate and regurgitate into the bucket of middle class fear that we all keep right next to our Swiffer Sweeper and our Dust Buster in the broom closet on the right hand side.

No, I will only chirp the birdcall that people seem to want to hear, the tweet that really gets the prime time slot in the consciousness of the American mind. Looks like Kim Kardashian flopped forward in love and Bieber blew off the rubber for a rubber ducky.

Occupy My Head or 10 Things That This Noise In My Head Could Be (Circle no more than 10)

2011-10-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

1) The youngest Kardashian just got her horns

2) The last good bra in my underwear draw just gave up on the elastic of it all

3) The 99% is having a case of the Thursdays while the 1% tries to find fulfillment

4) Bitter tastes better than butter but I like butter better

5) Public versus private and the jackass is winning by an ear hair

6) Application should apply to become a four-letter word

7) The things I wished I’d said in that deflated girl-tionship

8) Courtney Stodden’s Baby Alive laugh

9) Hip, hip hurray!

10) The quiet keyboard

Fort Dicks

2011-10-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

There are certain times in one’s life that either force reflection or inspire it. A minor car accident, a random toe injury, a bout of junk food poisoning, a bird shitting on one’s new Rodart bullfighter jacket or an entire weekend of reorganizing and reconfiguring an apartment that has seen more personality changes than Sybil’s slower sister.

Otto turned a very pointy corner this past week that of a little boy graduating from a toddler bed to a big boy bed. After a few too many nights this fall trying my best to read him a book in a spine crushing, pretzel-like fetal position we decided it was time. It had nothing to do with the fact that when we’d check on him late at night his legs would be melting off the side like a soggy Dali sketch of a rubber boy and his gummy bear appendages. No, it was really about his parents and how there legs felt.

We had been looking for months for a twin bed that would not only satisfy our needs for coolness and modernism but also storage and a certain bargaine-esque quality. Some friends insisted on Pottery Barn Kids but my taste for Cape Cod wainscoting, Nantucket Red bedding and thousand-dollar Amex charges deterred me instantly. Some chimed in with having a bed built to order but again, the cost was prohibitive as was the amount of energy it would take for me to form a sentence over the phone to a random carpenter I didn’t even want to meet.

At one point I fantasized about skipping off to one of the local flea markets that have always brought us great funk and serious junk as well as grade-A people watching and freak-following. You arrive early, buy a mediocre breakfast burrito and a lemonade and watch as hoards of rich, Japanese hipster buy pounds of dead people’s dusty, vintage clothes and worn down, middle-aged former groupies haggle over Southwestern belt buckles and decorative Indian saris that they plan to sew into throw pillows and bed skirts in order to lure in the last of the washed up rock stars into their newly decorated tantric sex one-room apartment after meeting them at a Brentwood garden party to benefit the Limp and Lisp Foundation, a group who helps bring awareness to children who replace the "S" sound with the "TH" sound simply because one leg is shorter than the other.

But the thought of spending half the day searching and bargaining for the right bed, and then strapping it to the top of my car in the searing heat, only to return home to spend two hours cleaning it with non-toxic, Clementine Method spray cleaner and an old INXS t-shirt stopped me before I even got on that bus of crazy. I knew that I was a turn-bed kind of lady and my only answer was IKEA.

Because we are cool, yet lazy and cheap parents, we decided on the full size pine bunk bed that can accommodate a sleepover, a tired parent, a massive menagerie of stuffed animals and become a fort anytime Otto wants to be alone with his thoughts. This way we do not have to return to the scene of the Swedish crime, a monolith of merchandizing that no doubt was the true inspiration for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy and buy him another bed made out of brittle baby trees and Nordic design sweat until he reaches pre-puberty, which at that time he will insist on a California King waterbed and a separate entrance.

The bed is amazing, Otto’s reaction was priceless and our place looks like Apartment Therapy 101. But because of that Goddamn wooden sleeping porch that now towers over Otto and his critter kingdom, we spent three days digging in, cleaning out and cursing quietly. But I have to admit it inspired me to tackle all the design issues I had with our place and forced me to face the linen closet and the corner of our bedroom that housed forty scripts and a bowl, yes I said BOWL, of baseballs hats that have caused me months of agitation and aggravation. I know that all boys love forts and bunk beds that turn into cotton caves but do they all have to love baseball hats? Can’t we please bring back the headband? They take up so much less room and soak up sweat as well as sexy looks. I still want to bone Bjorn Borg. Love that 40.

Rocky Mountain Horror

2011-10-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

My pal, my confidant and my sounding board Kris went and got all married this past weekend and my family was lucky enough to be invited to the very small, very awesome wedding. Dave spent two days making his balls to the basket homemade meat lasagna for the wedding dinner, which is second on the list of favorite things I love to put in my mouth.

24 hours passed and that sauce cooked down into a paste of perfection while I watched Dave make his own pasta dough and roll out sheets on our hand-me-down dining room table built for too bad. Our place smelled like a Russian bathhouse that served Sloppy Joes and hang jobs and that alone made my smile a few yards wider.

On Friday afternoon we over-packed the car and drove up into the mountains to our favorite little town where Kris and Sven’s wedding was to take place. This gem of cabin craziness is a place we have vacation many, many times with our friends Francois and Kate, two love lumps that introduced us to this paradise more than ten years ago.

After a crazy four hours in horrendous traffic we arrived at the rehearsal dinner at the local Mexican joint and toasted the bride and groom and giggled over bottled beer and old photos of the groom as the front man for Rammstein’s taller cousin.

We then drove out to the rental house where we were staying and where the ceremony would take place the next day. As Dave put Otto to bed a few of us helped set the table and hide the rental owner’s knick-knack collection that one might find at a funeral home fire sale. Why do people who own rental vacation homes feel the need to boldly decorate using only dusty, plastic flower arrangements and gold leaf candle holders found at the bottom of the blow out sale bin at Tuesday Morning? Riddle me that, homeowner!

By midnight everyone was done for the night and we crawled into the lower bunk bed while Otto slept above us. At two a.m. Dave and I awoke to a sound no human should ever make or hear. It was as if Harvey Fierstein ate Brenda Vaccaro and then farted out Tara Reid while trying to tune a sitar made out of chalkboard fragments and fingernails clippings.

My usually beautiful sounding Otto coughed and cried and cackled as we both jumped up and held him while checking his vitals and his breathing and praying to the gods of OH SHIT that we knew where the closest hospital was. As Dave listened to Otto’s chest and checked to see if he had any blockages I Googled local hospitals only to find the nearest one forty-five minutes down the mountain in the middle of meth country. While GOOGLE gave us exact directions YELP gave us a low down on what the hospital was like.

“DO NOT GO TO THIS HOSITAL AT ALL COSTS!”

“FILTHY CONDITIONS, IGNORED FOR 13 HOURS. ALMOST DIED.”

“THEY LET ME PASS A GALLSTONE WITHOUT PAIN MEDICATION. BLACKED OUT NAKED.”

“HELP, I’M STILL TRAPPED UNDER A GUERNEY WEARING NOTHING BUT A DIRTY BACKLESS HOSPITAL GOWN AND THE GLUE I HUFFED FOR BREAKFAST!”

"GREAT CHINESE/ARMENIAN TACO STAND NEXT DOOR!"

Knowing that the area in question was home to more meth labs, dog-fighters and spray paint sniffers than most areas of California we wanted to avoid the local emergency room at all costs. Since Otto seemed to do better sitting up and didn’t have a fever we knew that he didn’t need an ambulance. But my motherly gut, the one filled with enchilada sauce and a ball of scared told me we needed to get him down the mountain and close to help if anything changed.

In less than five minutes we had the car packed and were racing down the mountain like fugitives fleeing from those dirty pigs. I drove the car because I get motion sickness in a broken hot tub and every other moving vehicle and I was as sober as a saint and fueled on fear. As I tried not to think of the worst-case scenario Otto continued to cough like a seal, weep like a willow and break my heart. Suddenly on the fifteenth, hairpin turn he began barfing into a CVS bag Dave found under the seat and continued until all manner of Mexican was out of his system. Then, as if on cue, he fell fast asleep peaceful and calm and exhausted.

Every few minutes I asked Dave to feel his chest until finally we were half way into our two and half hour drive and all seemed all right. Dave fell asleep holding Otto’s hand while I did my best to stay awake by slapping myself in the face, swigging lukewarm iced tea and listening to upbeat 80’s music that I knew had been written by a handful of one-hit wonders while on badly dressed cocaine binges.

It was the longest drive of my life. Every signpost seemed to say the same thing and solidify the fact that I was driving like mad but getting nowhere. All along the freeway towns sat up asleep in my eye line and mini-malls refused to admit defeat. With all the lights that dotted our path I knew we were back in uncivilized civilization and hospitals were near if necessary.

By 4:30 a.m. the landmarks were starting to sing a familiar song and my heart relaxed a bit knowing we were minutes from everything we knew. In a panic I took the wrong exit off the freeway but wound my way down side streets into the home stretch, a term I never saw as endearing or calming until then. I pulled the car up, unloaded the bags, ran upstairs and made up the sofa bed in Otto’s room and took a real breath for the first time in five hours. He was still asleep when Dave laid him down in his bed and I fell down next to him. His breathing was better, his cough had quieted a bit and we all collapsed into quiet.

(He would be diagnosed with The Croup the next morning and be healthy by Tuesday but how was I to know that in the dead of night on the top of Mount Far Away?)

Lying on that old, ripped pullout bed we cannot seem to get rid of I was sad that we would miss the wedding and bummed that Otto would miss out on his ring bearer duties. But I knew we had done the right thing for Otto as well as Kris. Who wants a barfing, coughing sicko and a frantic mother at their destination AWESOME wedding? And who wants to make the wrong decision in case the worst happened?

I was still awake staring at Otto’s chest going up and down when suddenly someone seemed to give me permission to think about something other than Otto’s well being and my paralyzing fear. I began to drift into a foggy sleep smelling like old Jack in the Box wrappers and terror and as exhaustion enveloped my withered brain I wondered why we still lived in the same apartment where Dave proposed all those years ago. Is it sentimentality? Is it mental-molasses? Is it laziness or is it just habit?

And then I remembered that six blocks away stands one of the best hospitals in the country, the same hospital where celebrities overdose, Boob Jobs R’ Us has its own wing and where little, wonderful Otto was born.

I think we’ll stick around this hood until he’s eighteen. Then I can move to the mountains and not worry so much.

To My Friends

2011-10-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

Just thinking of Boston and my summer and my friends and well, I love you, Steph, Chrissy, Heather and the east. And how cool are The Faces and Ronnie Lane and that guitar? Ladies, please!!!!

Get Your Money For Nothing And Your Chicks For Free

2011-10-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

I was minding my own business, Googling and gathering information about kindergarten applications and being organized and on top of it when my eyes spotted this little factoid on one of the websites for what is considered one of the BETTER schools in the L.A. area.

"Here at the BLANKITY BLANK SCHOOL FOR THE BLANK the elementary school tuition is $26,120."

THIS IS FOR KINDERGARTEN, for Christ's sake!!!!!!!!!

Now that hurricane-like gust of wind in my sails has now diminished to a silent but deadly toddler fart and my enthusiasm and focus is at an all-time low I will drink a cup of green tea, eat a twice-rejected stick of string cheese and cry in the shower.

The Voice In My Head

2011-10-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

There is a voice that creeps in more often than not and I like it as much as curdled milk shakes and Kardashian nuptials news coverage. The inside cranial shrieking started long before motherhood and always came in the form of mini-tantrums and lack of patience pity parties. Note: I am a blast at an endless red light as well as in the back of a long, winding public bathroom line at Target and the DMV on a Tuesday morn.

The voice becomes louder and sweatier when I cannot find something I need. CUE 1983 ad of sound blowing hair back and picture me but less hip and more angry. For instance, if something is in a “safe place” which is a place I stupidly frequent often, and I need it immediately but cannot find it I will become unglued and half-cracked. My brain always tells me that I will remember the location of said item but when the fateful moment comes I have a better chance of finding a four-leaf clover AND a pot of gold inside the asshole of the littlest Keibler elf than unearthing the item in question. Be it the torn vinyl checkbook or my cheap, lucky silver ring or the twice-washed garage door opener or my overbearing and loud car keys, I am batting in the low 100’s.

Yet the real singing telegram in my cabeza grande occurs when I simply forget to do something simple yet important. Did I sign Otto up for school lunches? Did I pay that overdue medical bill that is chipping away at my mental stability? Did I put a tampon in and if so, did I put two in by mistake? Did I return that email to that person whose name escapes me and who always gives me shit as if they have a memory like an elephant and never make mistakes? Did I book all the school tours for kindergarten next fall? Where is my school list binder notebook filled with EVERY urgent tidbit of information that a good mother needs on her at all times during this very cutthroat application season for the snotty Kindergarten rat race? Am I a good mother or have I melted into the bad column because I cannot find the fucking notebook anywhere? Why do I think I am on top of it and then keep setting off the new alarm at friend’s house instead of putting in the code and not brain-farting a basic command? Why do I now question my house envy? Why have I gone all the way to the other side of the Jones’ keeping up scale by thinking that I want to live in a yurt and subsist on Table Water crackers and tap water instead of constantly searching for the next meal and bottled water and a fancy side dish that was just featured in Bon Appetite and provides roughage as well as Vitamin D? Is kale really food? Are my undies really clean or only half-clean? Where are my fucking ear buds? Where am I?

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

2011-09-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-21T13:39:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-17T14:22:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-12T23:07:00.000-07:00

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.

If I were a rich man, ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.

2011-08-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

We are a few days shy of the three week mark of Operation East Coast and I still feel like I am in a fog and unsure of where I slept last night. The quiet of New Jersey nights is, and will always be, as foreign to me as ketchup on a hot dog. The Cicadas chirp and the crickets sing while I lie in bed and wonder when the L.A. car alarms will whisper sweet swear words into my left ear.

There are no young drunks stumbling past our bedroom window wearing their ironic hipster best while pontificating on life’s little trials and love’s tragic tribulations. There are no trash trucks backing up to the beep that launched a thousand cries or homeless trannies fighting in the alley over who gets the striped tube top and who has to sleep on the newly rescued yoga mat that could easily double for a used pantiliner.

No, here in the land my man calls home, all is quiet on their eastern front and everyone has a big back yard that smells as good as it sounds. My parent’s house in Massachusetts, though different in set up and convenience, is about the same in calm and quietness. Nights are filled with tranquil times and intensely solid sleep and days are shady and reflective.

If this trip were a coin, one side would be as shiny as a sterling silver dollar fresh off the truck from QVC’s One-Day Commemorative Coin Extravaganza. Without a scratch or a smudge the coin would show the love I have felt during sparkling visits with my immediate family and my oldest friends and the joy I have felt reconnecting with the different branches of my funky and tangled family tree; cousins, aunts, uncles and pals all touchstones along my cobblestone street. A lake house in Wisconsin, my high school home in Massachusetts, my college BFF and her New Hampshire heaven house and a pub in White Plains, New York all witnessed the loopy love I have barfed up these last few weeks.

The other side of the coin is tarnished with the sadness and heartache of life’s fragility and death’s inevitability. Since arriving in New Jersey the trip has taken a tough turn and become a lesson in patience and gratitude and the customary cliché of putting it all in perspective. Sitting on the sidelines of a shitty, unfair playing field I have had to helplessly watch my husband stare into the vacant eyes of a father no longer there while his mother holds onto a hand no longer able and a love no longer loving.

Take a moment out of your day and appreciate your good health and the mundane moments of murky happiness. Then lean over and kiss the one closet to you, even if they are being a grade-A asshole. Then pour yourself a top-shelf, two-fingered cocktail and pray to whatever god you choose to strike you dead when your time comes, that your last moments on this ever-muddled earth will indeed be pristine, and perfectly painless.

But do not forget to hoard the expired painkillers and mini-bar nips. Just in case your god didn’t get your text.

old

2011-08-08T21:31:00.000-07:00

1 having lived for a long time ; no longer young:the old man lay propped up on cushions
made or built long ago:the old quarter of the town
possessed or used for a long time:he gave his old clothes away
having the characteristics or showing the signs of age:marble now so old that it has turned gray and chipped
informal boring or tiresome, especially as a result of repetition or overfamiliarity:I wish she‘d shut up — it’s getting old
2 [attributive] belonging only or chiefly to the past; former or previous:valuation under the old rating system was inexact
used to refer to the first of two or more similar things:I was going to try to get my old job back
dating from far back; long-established or known:we greet each other like old friendsI get sick of the same old routine
(of a form of a language) as used in former or earliest times.
3 [in combination] of a specified age:he was fourteen years olda seven-month-old baby
[as nounin combination] a person or animal of the age specified:a nineteen-year-old

The last few weeks have been a major parenthesis in my writing but not my life. Soon after I jotted down the first chapter of my high school reunion weekend (the sequel is on its way) we were about to leave for my cousin’s Wisconsin wedding when Dave got a frantic call that his dad was in very bad shape. Instead of boating on a green algae-filled lake in the middle of cow country and drinking excessive amounts of local beer to beat a heat index most often used in dirty Russian bath houses and toasting a bride and her groom and singing rounds with all the women in my bossy and bodacious and magnificent family, my husband had to rush home to New Jersey and take over. His elderly father had suddenly taken a dark and cloudy turn into old age and after a week long hospitalization and a few scary days my lovely man and his amazingly strong mother were put in the unbearable position of finding a permanent nursing home for a father and a husband and a grandfather named Lee.

At the exact time, as if planned by some cosmic asshole shit stain on the underwear of life, my grandfather Edwin, who was to be the patriarch of the wedding celebrations and the center of all things lake-y and vacation-y was hospitalized within a day of my father-in-law and given much the same dismal chances. These two men, who only met once at my wedding in 1993, battled back and forth with similar relief-filled ups and crucial, throat-closing downs. Every time I called Dave he would tell me the latest update of his father’s condition and it was as if he were reading from my grandfather’s hospital chart while wearing horn-rimmed, 3-D glasses.

Old age, dementia, infection and decline are words most often found inside yogurt-stained AARP articles at your local library or highlighted in green neon font during commercial breaks from NCIS and Antiques Roadshow. But when those words are suddenly up your ass and refer to two men that you have loved to pieces and laughed with uncontrollably, it all smells a bit too real and far too stinky.

These two bastions of badass are still fighting the good fight and responding with verve some days while barely being present on others. But how can I be truly surprised by their will to live and the desire to go on? How can I even question the reasons they are both still punching their pillows and pinching the nurses into their nineties? These are two amazing men of Teflon moral fiber and cement-filled conviction, two dapper dudes who crawled and scratched and swam though extreme poverty and the Depression and the all-too-celebrated silent film era only to jump shoeless over every obstacle while never even being handed a hat or a hello.

It seems as though today’s forest doesn’t grow trees like that anymore. Our crappy saplings are too glued to their iPhones and their ADD apps to do anything other than step into a fifteen-minutes-of-fame puddle wearing nothing more than a loner pair of $600 platform Louboutins and a collagen scowl. These cookie-cut Christmas trees cannot possibly stop for one minute to wonder where the paper from their US Weekly really comes from and how many trees had to die in order to publish a Kardashian wedding edition with a Nick Lachey/Vanessa Minillo insert.

I truly hope the entitled armies of reality TV hopefuls and TMZ Wanna-Be's realize some day that without the stories of an era gone by and the dinosaur that is the book and the shade from the tallest trees and the bravest, brawniest branches there will be no place to get cool and no place for the wicked to rest.

High School Crush-Part I

2011-07-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

The past five days have been like a fuzzy, lopsided dream, the kind where you wake up sideways on the bed with a drool puddle under your right temple and lingering questions about your choice in low thread count sheets and large grandma undies. I just spent a long weekend at my high school reunion in Palo Alto, which consisted of buckets of binge laughter, high-end tequila sipping and touchstone rubbing. The story is not as simple as a typical reunion night of familiar faces and nubby nametags. It’s about being moved from the power of the past and the possibilities of future friendships and fresh cocktails.

Palo Alto, California is my hometown, the place that informed my human laugh track, from my very first steps to my very first words. My father was a professor at Stanford and with that position came an idyllic life of tall, green trees, public school perfection and a melting pot of magic. From pre-school through the first year of high school I lived a grand life of unsupervised, outdoor antics, reckless bike riding, spontaneous sports and crazy boy crushing. When I turned fifteen my parents had the brutal task of telling me that my dad had gotten a new job in New England and we would be moving to a place I saw as a mysterious land of pilgrims, prostitutes and prison.

My life would soon go from solo, slow dancing to Journey B sides wearing 501’s and checkered Vans to being wrapped in wooly winter coats and an itchy blanket of tears. While I did my best to adapt to the Boston ethos of girls tiptoeing in white pumps with tube socks and boys groping in Sergio Valente jeans and velour sweaters, my heart ached for the California sun and the girls and boys of my youth. For the remainder of high school I spent all my summers and spring vacations with my best friends from California and racked up monumental, one-sided phone bills trying desperately to live my interrupted high school life through a princess telephone cord and a fading Polaroid of good times and bad hair.

Cut to the 25^th reunion of a class I didn’t even graduate with and poof, the time machine went sideways. Nothing could have prepared me for the three-day onslaught of wistful, wonderful wack-jobbery and down home shit fits of belly laughs. To start with, I had a hotel room BY MYSELF for three days and nights and no responsibilities other than eating Westin pillow mints for breakfast, showering lying down, brushing my teeth with hotel shampoo and drinking booze from the bathroom water glasses that tasted like Pine Sol and twinkled with vending machine ice.

From the moment I walked into the lobby it was on like Donky Kong. My friend Francesca, the killer cruise director, had it all right and no wrong. She and her equally awesome roommate Bronwyn, best friends who took me under their hot wings and allowed me to fly wing woman in their flight path, made sure that our rooms were next to each other so not a second was wasted on room to room walking or elevator riding. They stocked their room with fancy tequila and chocolate almonds and drove the ship of fools like Captain Hook on great crack. Within minutes of arriving I was outside in a pool of chlorine and corporate urine surrounded by a group of ladies I have not spent time with since Reagan was a bumper sticker and lopsided perms were a first class ticket to heavy petting and handy J’s.

Kathy began the party by spilling white wine on the pool deck and giving out the best updates on names I hadn’t heard since Spicoli ordered the pizza and Mr. Hand gave it away. By 5 p.m. we had all received a text from Asa saying that the keg party would commence at 9 p.m. at his house. A joke it was not and by 9:02 p.m. we were driving down the main street of my youth singing “White Lines” like Grandmaster Flash’s left testicle in a vice. Fireman Dan, our designated one-way driver, took every turn like a racecar rookie and sang every note with the conviction of a Catholic choirboy. Each turn of the wheel and rev of the engine brought back a familiar place, a different bike route and a better view. By 9:45 p.m. we were playing quarters and guffawing to AC/DC while sliding down memory lane. By midnight the furniture had been rearranged and the keg was two times lighter. By 2:30 a.m. the host was hurling upstairs and by 2:31 a.m. the wife of the hurler was understandably punting the throngs of post teens out of her lovely, beer-soaked home and wondering how to get the smell of regurgitated Budweiser out of a once crisp Brooke’s Brothers button-down.

The next day consisted of greasy food, a sweaty workout and a nap that would soon fold into another round of rapture. At 5:31 p.m. Bronwyn, Francesca, Kathy, Zena, Brenda and I were in room 554 as I held tight to my 80’s iPod, leatherette leggings and fresh glass of Mexican madness. By 6:00 p.m. we were channeling the Madonna better known for rubber bracelets, not man-boy boning. And then finally at 6:45 we were walking into the reunion and into a trance I’ve waited 25 years to fall into.

La la, la la la la la. I said la la.

2011-07-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

It seems everything I do or buy or embrace is just a wee bit late to a party I wasn’t invited to. Take shoes, for instance. I bought UGGS three years after they became a fashion foot pas and now feel like Britney Spears on a Starbucks bender every time I slip my hooves into my gray fuzzy cave shoes. Then there are the electronics. We just bought a flat screen last Christmas after gazing at a wiggly, greenish Sony Trinitron for far too many years which caused headaches, nausea and undeveloped anger. Moving on to information. I just subscribed to News of the World and bang, they pulled the magic carpet right out from under me and closed the hackers down. Where or where will I get my illegal and questionable celebrity gossip? Boo to the hoo.

But the most recent and delightfully ridiculous tardy item on my why-didn’t-I-do- this-sooner list has to be my new membership to the local YMCA. How could I have gone through years of Hollywood ladder crawling and four years of meltdown motherhood without even knowing there was a YMCA that has four floors of fuck yeah and ten miles of awesome. Swim lessons, karate classes, FREE BABYSITTING, treadmills, yoga classes, a boxing room, FREE BABYSITTING, racquetball courts, FREE BABYSITTING and FREE BABYSITTING?

So far I have run approximately forty eight miles while Otto has learned to float on his back, kick and hold his breath and play nice with a bunch of strangers without as much as a peep of displeasure or terror. The members are a village of people all shapes sizes and colors who seem to have no interest in posturing or peacocking all over the Elliptical machines. There is no elitism, no fashion parade of pretension, no Hardtail contests and any bullshit or judgment. The Y is simply a melting pot of cool and casual and all colors of Benetton.

While so many gold-splattered specimens have private gyms in their homes or some shiny exercise equipment in their guesthouse or a Thighmaster in the trunk of their ’94 BMW I now have the cop, the Indian, the police officer and the gay biker dude in ass-less chaps. And I can get myself clean; I can have a good meal. I can do whatever I feel.

Queen Bed Fighting

2011-07-17T22:05:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago I awoke around 1 a.m. to the feeling that a small rodent was giving me a deep tissue facial. I opened my crusty, unhappy eyes and saw Otto standing over me caressing my chin with one hand and drawing finger circles on the tip of my nose with the other. He said he had a bad dream and I let him crawl into bed with me, a very uncommon occurrence in this desert wasteland of the un-family bed. Dave was on location working and not snoring all over on his side of the bed so I figured no harm in co-cuddling with a smaller, quieter male. Otto hopped into bed with me and I closed my eyes and prayed that we would both pass out and sleep like two kittens in a cardboard box.

No sooner had my REM sleep enveloped me like a stained pashmina, than Otto’s right foot landed square on my face. He was fast asleep but thrashing and kicking as if I were the bad guy karate opponent wearing evil yellow pants in one of a number of Bruce Lee films. Still asleep, I managed to sit up and build a puffy pillow divider between the two of us and truly thought this Berlin bed wall would cushion the many blows punching in my general direction.

But even with the huge, Bed, Bath and Beyond, 20% off coupon-ed, feathered mountain separating us, I could feel every flip, turn and right hook that his little body threw my way. His kung fu sleeping continued every ten to fifteen minutes until three a.m. when at last, my patience had dried up and my badgered bitch took over. I scooped up the sleeping little Kwai Chang Caine into my numb and bruised arms and put him back in bed where he remained for the rest of the night as peaceful and calm as an American cheese sandwich on a paper plate.

I kissed his forehead, brushed his hair out of his eyes and whispered softly into his ear, “Do as the great minds in history have always done. Sleep late and sleep alone.”

Misty Mountain Hopping

2011-07-11T22:10:00.000-07:00

My lucky family and I just spent the last week up in the mountains with some amazingly awesome friends and boy, oh girl! Nothing like a little bourbon and a few breaths of fresh air to make me realize that I have been living in the crusty carb of a dirty Graphix bong for the past nineteen years. Driving home from the beautiful, snow-covered peaks of Mammoth Mountain and twisting down into the Los Angeles basin was like diving headfirst into a clogged Arco Station toilet bowl without a swim cap or a prayer.

As the mountain views disappeared behind us and the temperatures sky-rocketed from the heavenly 70’s to the brutal three-digits of Hades at Christmas, the trees along the highway changed from a luscious, vibrant, erect green to a limp, sweaty, angry brown. It was as if the palms trees had given up all hope of that white sand, postcard existence they had been promised and decided to take up smoking unfiltered Pall Malls packed with recycled soot to help pass their filthy time away.

Los Angeles is often the victim of my unending ridicule, the morning-after hair to my one-night stand and the too-toned Elliptical butt of my off-colored jokes. I often complain about living in a place where a small, two-bedroom house resembling a soggy, discarded refrigerator box costs over a million dollars and every asshole that farts drives a leased, black Range Rover that runs on MTV catchphrases and Twitter bombs. More than once I have commented that the local locals and their local air are as thick and unappealing as a German Chocolate cake left on the hood of a car after a summer knife fight.

But after all the guffaws and all the giggling I am still standing in L.A. proper after many years of one-sided traffic jokes and C-list snickering, doing my biting best to give L.A. a horrendously hard time as I punch her in her freeway underpass and take her Prada wallet.

No one held an unlicensed gun to my head and made me stay and inhale brown breezes all these many moons. No one forced me to stand still and cough up smoggy bits of melted dreams and crinkled fame while trying my hardest to love the spray-tanned, crystal-encrusted, tramp-stamped dirty girl Los Angeles has become since enveloping me in her wedding-ready arms all those years ago.

So, I suppose La La and I are officially still an item but that doesn’t change the fact that it is extremely difficult to make this lopsided relationship work after a five-day fantasy tryst with a set of all natural, magnificently mammalian, perfectly proportioned, pointy-peaked mountains instead of the misshapen silicone sisters I call my local canyons.

Fake ones may look good to some but baby, I love me some real melons. And Mammoth? You are all cantaloupe, all the time.

Happy Birthday, America!!!!

2011-07-04T08:31:00.000-07:00

Since I am a rock whore, a slut for boys in 501's and a throw back to all that happened in my teenage years here's to another birthday wish for our country of crazy!

Penny For My Thoughts

2011-06-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

I live in a town that loves money as much as a burning bottom loves Preparation H. The currency around here is front, center and sideways and all of the Rodeo driving and celebri-sightings seem to fuel the fire that those Benjamins built. $600 sloppy haircuts, $2000 wrinkled handbags, $50,000 drug-sprinkled private schools and $3,000,000 houses that look like a Kabul Koo Koo Roo.

When I arrived in L.A. many crescent moons ago my mind was littered with gold bathtub wishes and Hammer Time dreams. Within minutes of landing at LAX I knew I would be on my way to rich and famous. Maybe I would hit it bug after being discovered walking down Sunset Boulevard carrying a baby backpack filled with laundry quarters and a tattered deck of positive affirmation playing cards. If that didn’t happen then surely I would be plucked out of obscurity by a kind and gentle pimp who loved me for my personality and political conviction or at least coddled by a C-list television extra that just wanted to be friends.

Rusty, my extra in shining denim, would flag me down with his one good arm and tell me that I was the most beautiful person he’d talked to that day. Since he lived under the bus stop bench outside the only local DMV to have a working toilet and a water fountain, I would understandably agree with him and shake his non-working arm while thanking him for his compliment. He would then write down my number on his thigh with a dull golf pencil he’d saved from high school and promise to call his agent on my behalf as soon as he found a dime and his other sneaker.

Rusty would then skitter off toward a taco truck that smelled like farts and garlic salt while singing “One” from A Chorus Line, leaving me to wonder if my life was indeed about to change forever.

In my twisted fantasy Rusty made that fateful call at a sticky payphone on Cahuenga and Melrose and procured for me a part-time extra job on Blossom. In my lucky reality, my first boss in Los Angeles, who was a failed writer and a bi-polar positive personal assistant to a slew of celebrities, called her agent and set up a meeting for me. His name was Jerry and when he opened his lips a mouthful of yellow piano keys sang back at you in cracked high notes and flat C’s. He signed me out of pity, boredom and senility and by the grace of godlessness I booked my first and only audition under his aged and angry tutelage.

You can read about that fateful audition HERE but the reason I am writing today is as follows. Last month I took a leap of lazy and bowed out of the actor’s union for good. I then called my one remaining agent and told him I quit the bitch of the business and planned on writing more four-lettered poems and finger-painted book proposals. Going on random calls for toxic pain medication, frozen pizza pockets and ill-fitting wash and wear jeggings amounted to hours of wasted time and laborious actor eavesdropping.

A few weeks passed and just when I began to feel like all those awkward and insignificant credits on my resume were just a series of bad dreams I opened the mailbox and found a residual check worth less than the envelope it travelled in.

The first check I ever received for my first gig, Sinatra, the mini-series, bought me the now defunct union card, a new sundress, a pair of John Fluevog creepers and a healthy ego. The last check brought me down.

It Takes Cars 2 To Tango

2011-06-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

All parents of smallish children will know that this past weekend was the opening of Cars 2, the Pixar sequel about a red racecar with a heart of oil and a refreshingly blue collar BFF. We have been waiting for months and months and moons to see this movie and have ogled all the billboards up and down the Los Angeles boulevards of broken dreams. Every time we drove past a hooker in a tube top slumming her hand-me-down hips while blocking our view of the bus stop poster, Otto would cry out, “Cars 2!”

I would then yell, “Yahoo, it opens June 24!”

Otto would yodel in response, “Is that tomorrow?”

This went on for what seemed a lifetime until the day finally came. Saturday we met a bunch of Otto’s school pals at a local theatre where you can buy your seats on line and not have to stand around punching strangers in their diaper bags for a better spot in line while begging your child to hold his urine flow until you get past the ticket takers dressed like street performing cymbal monkeys and plop down in cushy seats that cost $14.50 for a matinee.

The movie was fun, everything went perfectly and all the kids in our corral were absolute angels, behaving as if Frauline Maria had slapped them with a few music lessons, a one-hour Miss Manners tutorial and tightened their Lederhosen just before the previews began. I was so impressed and proud and happy to see Otto and his peeps completely transfixed by boxes of popcorn, a plethora of talking sports cars and a communal box of Red Vines. But as quickly as my high was flying I began to suspect all was too good to be true. Sure enough, there was a warring tribe of pygmies directly behind us who began their quick jog into maniacal mayhem.

Apparently, two brave but dimly lit moms decided to take six scrappy, squirmy kids to see a loud, frenetic and often adult-referenced film without a back-up team or a set of bicycle locks. Within twenty minutes the kids behind us began to kick seats, crush popcorn kernels into our headrests and complain. One little girl decided that grabbing Otto’s friend’s shoulders every few minutes was a great time killer and another chose the path of least comfortable by launching herself over the back of my seat and onto my head. This particular stunt left little Lily Lemon drop squished between my cup holder and my right arm still clutching to the Coke her mom so brilliantly bought her and giving her mother a grand mal seizure.

Needless to say the Broken Brady bunch ended up leaving before the end of the movie, most likely because the moms were either too embarrassed to look us in the eyes or too afraid that one of their many charges had soiled themselves just before Mater saved Lightening McQueen’s life.

“Is that a melted Milk Did in your back pocket or did you just poop yourself, Penelope?”

Oddly enough, I never got irritated or enraged or injured. In fact, I felt nothing but pride for our gaggle of venerable Von Trapp’s as well a river of sympathy for the two mommies who tried.

When you have a child and you are doing your wobbly best to successfully engineer public outings with said child, a fuzzy coating of understanding suddenly envelops your DNA helix, like putting a wool blazer on a salad spinner. Every parent you see wrestling with sticky sippy cups or broken stroller locks or tantrum-riddled tikes makes you melt in the middle and feel their pain. We have all been through it and all survived. But when you live in the village and someone else’s shit is raining down on their twisted, thatched roof and some of the turd nuggets happen to land on your weatherproofed windowsill be cool like Fonzi, take a deep breath and hand the perturbed parent a wet wipe, a shot of tequila and a DVD of The Sound of Music. It may be the village of the damned but damn it, if it isn’t the best place on earth.

Tattoo Who?

2011-06-23T12:03:00.000-07:00

The dreams I dream are often very clear and very intense and sometimes stay with me throughout the morning after. But as quickly as they come into my head they dissipate into the Los Angeles smog as I replace them with my daily mental to-do list which includes NOT driving with my middle finger perched above the steering wheel and purchasing environmentally friendly toilet paper that does not chafe the innocent anuses of my family members. I try my practical best not to read too deeply into any dream I have whether it be good, bad or ugly. Sometimes, for a brief moment I can feel myself getting attached to a certain possible meaning of a dream and passively analyzing the contents and the hidden agenda that my sleepy brain was clearly trying to tell me in bright colors and bumpy Braille.

Did running naked across that lumpy desert moonscape while being chased by an angry school cafeteria lady mean I should start eating more oatmeal with flaxseed? Does the candy apple red Ford Fiero on that cloud above my house represent success and power and my new love for Lady Gaga or does it mean that Aunt Flow will be coming for her monthly visit a bit earlier and a lot faster this month? Did those jangling noises reverberating from the closet last night tell me that wearing costume jewelry every day will help make my book materialize before my eyes and the script will finish itself? Or was it a simple Morse Code message that I really should try a little harder to accessorize and appear more feminine and put together instead of looking like a lazy, out-of-work gym teacher without a car or a bus pass or an iron?

Last month I had a very clear, very specific dream that I got a tattoo. It wasn’t just any tattoo. It was my son’s name written in his own handwriting along with a doodle of his choice. The dream felt so real that when I woke up the next morning I immediately got out of bed and stood naked in front of the full length mirror to see if I matched the Art To Touch Your Heart wall at Otto’s school.

My skin was still as virginal as the day I first went to third base but the tattoo craving had sprouted in my mind. A few nights later I had the dream again and a week later, yet again.

My past relationships with tattoos have been complicated and crooked. My sister was once married to a very famous, very talented tattoo artist whose artwork can be seen on the pelvic bones and butt cheeks of some of the richest and most famous Hollywood has-beens of the 80’s and 90’s. During their rocky and roadie marriage, a storm front of a relationship that produced one wonderful kid and a handful of terribly tacky tattoos, the ex-brother-in-law was always trying to get the needle into me, an expression he thought would sell it harder but only made me run farther and faster.

Since their despicable divorce and his apparent disinterest in wearing anything other than tie-dyed pajama bottoms, food-stained truck stop t-shirts and being a father to my most extraordinary nephew I have had a serious prejudice against permanent ink on skin. Let me clarify, permanent ink on MY skin. Not only could I not see myself embracing an art form beloved by the biggest asshole I knew, I could never think of any one object that I wanted displayed on my body for the remainder of my loopy life.

That was until the dreams started coming and the lines started drawing. The more I thought about having Otto’s name on my body the happier I became. I wanted to have more than just a lopsided, smirking, c-section scar to remind me of my marvelous monkey. I wanted a tat, man!

But being the over-cautious, over-thinking girl that I am, I made myself a deal that I would wait at least six months before performing Hari-kari on my un-dented dermas. Doing anything drastic, crazy or irreversible has never been in my DNA and I was not about to start with the impulsive, throw-caution-to-the-wind insanity in these early summer days of 2011.

But on our last day in Hawaii, as Dave, Otto and I puttered around Kona killing time before our horrendous, sleep-disturbing red eye flight, I suddenly found myself in a tattoo studio on Main Street telling the girl at the counter to give me Otto’s John Hancock of my right forearm. Ten minutes and ten dollars later I had a cleaned up version of my beautiful boy’s signature in raised ink and I felt indelible, invincible and alive.

His masterpiece is my medicine.

Am I crazy? Have I finally lost the last the marbles in my well-worn leather bag? Or is this a lesson in living life and listening to the universe no matter what songs it is singing and how strange the notes may be? Who am I to ignore the noise and drown out the funk?

Okay, to be honest, it is a Henna Tattoo and it didn’t hurt and it will slowly fade and disappear in a few weeks but I truly feel that this is a rehearsal dinner for the way- out wedding I really want. I plan on researching tattoo artists on both coasts and hope to have the best and the brightest batch of letters by the end of the year, or at least by the end of the summer of 2011. That’s six months, right?

P.S. Any and all advice is more than welcome on tattoo artists, fonts, ink colors and overall insanity. Please help me help myself!

Lady Gaga's Lego's

2011-06-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

I am looking around my apartment trying to re-acclimate after a wonderful vacation and all I see is clutter. Puzzles are bursting from their boxes. Matchbox cars are peering at me with scuffed headlights and scratched fenders. Two crates of Lego’s sit in the corner mocking me with their perturbed primary colored eyes that seem more a bad acid trip than a sun-filled sensory exercise.

I jump on Apartment Therapy to get some ideas on how to reshuffle, reorganize and redesign my life to FINALLY be all it can be. And all I end up with is a face full of perfectly poised photos of some annoyingly hip vagina who lives in the trendiest hillside enclave of east Los Angeles and who spent a year of her childless, fashionable, late sleeping early thirties remodeling a one bedroom cottage that is now her Pims Cup-sipping, Rodarte pantaloons-wearing, Poul Kjaerholm-sitting lifestyle.

Can’t they tell me how to get the red out of a saggy baggy 1934 apartment that has been overrun by Chinese-made chotckies and lifeless second hand treasure trash? Can they please write an article on what to do when your two small closets fight over twenty years of clothing, purses, suitcases, crap linens and a sad collection of Chuck Taylors better suited for a meth clinic reception area than a dark wasteland of foot memories? Is there a quick fix for the post vacation blues caused by severe cabinet envy and fresh towel dreams? Do they have a quickie remedy for what to do when Rubbermaid storage containers and mismatched sippy cups have overtaken your life?

Okay Apartment Therapy, you tell me how to make a home office out of an empty running shoe box and a small corner of an even smaller dining room and I will tell the world that you are the second coming of Lady Gaga of the lounge chair set! Please! Inspire me! Teach me! Fix me!

Sincerely,

The Buried Biter

Free Lemonade!

2011-06-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life throws you a super juicy lemon fresh from a tree and you have to grab it and squeeze it until the juice runs down your leg and into a pitcher. Then you add sugar and water and love and voila! Lemonade is made. Really good lemonade, the kind that makes your eyes roll back in your head and your tongue quiver from the perfect ratio of the sweet and tart and the yum and the oh.

Well, the lemonade we just drank was epic, better than the state fair varietal and sweeter than the first time I tried powdered Country Time as a small, pre-packaged child of the 70’s. And the name of the lemon was Hawaii and the size of the glass was the big island. Five marvelous, glorious days on the beach in a house at a fancy hotel, surrounded by cabana boys and great friends while filling up on frothy drinks make a girl change her latitude and wake up right.

We were blessed to be invited along for a last minute trip and damn if we didn’t jump into the air and pull that fruit off its branches. I left my computer at home, never checked my phone, seldom glanced at a television and just ogled the sunset, the splashing waves, the lava rock and the gift that these generous friends handed us wrapped in a banana leaf just when we needed it most.

So next time I complain that the universe has clogged ears and a waxy build-up as monumental as a Boulder boulder, I will close my eyes, take a breath and conjure up the view from our back porch and shitsticks, if it won’t just straighten my spine and make me smile.

Dotty and Otto as seen from our porch...

See ya!

2011-06-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

So, this girl is taking a technology break for a bit. I will try my hand at relaxing, writing longhand and sleeping in a pile of my own drool. This means no interweb, no Facebook, no email and no blogg-o-blabbing. Can I do it? Will I survive my self-imposed hiatus?

And why am I doing this in the first place? I think I want to get back to my roots and feel like what it felt like to be a realio, trulio cave girl??? Oh wait, that is impossible. I just got waxed...

The good, the bad and the ugly of technological advances

2011-06-08T09:56:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't want to party with this girl?

Vagina Vs. Penis

2011-06-07T16:51:00.000-07:00

Do I really need to say more than this was clearly my husband's idea? It would never have occurred to me to take training wheels off of a four year-old's bicycle for the simple fact that I have a vagina and vaginas, by nature, are slightly cautious creatures. The penis on the other hand, is a wild animal that takes more chances and looks for trouble and loves a good wipeout and a good jump into the abyss.

I am not being sexist. It's just that my vagina doesn't like Sunday emergency room visits and daredevilry as much as the two penises that I co-habitate with. These dudes are cr-cr-crazy! But I am so shit-tickled and proud! Did I mention that this is Otto's first time sans training wheels for reals? That's just how he rolls...

Stuff Crush Friday - Stuff That I Love: Summer Edition

2011-06-03T10:05:00.000-07:00

This STUFF CRUSH list was intended for last Friday, to help you all celebrate Memorial Day Weekend. But, Memorial Day has come and gone just as my Friday Stuff Crush post did.

You see, last Friday morning the S.C. list drizzled out of my brain, flew through my fingers, jumped onto the Blogger site and disappeared like a ferocious fart in the wind. Blogger lost my entire post but shockingly enough I only stayed mad for three minutes. That is a record in the hotheaded Mommy Bites arena. I have been known to chew on furious fumes for weeks on end after getting flipped off in traffic, punched in the face by a birthday balloon or stubbing my big toe right after a $20 pedicure.

With no time to rewrite the post I chose to stay happy and make the weekend a family/friends hang time spectacular instead of angry at computer time. And it was a great decision and a great weekend.

So, here it is. Summer stuff that no one can possibly live without or stupid crap that Dotty deems important and the rest of the world thinks is shit. Either way, everybody wins. Or, loses. Or doesn’t care. You get my dog paddle.

Nabisco Lilly Pulitzer Animal Crackers - $1.29

These tasty treats will make even the dumpiest day feel like a 5-star Saturday in an above ground pool. When I ate these little treats in the toy aisle of Target they made me feel fresh, pink and independently wealthy. Throw them in your beach bag and be the envy of all the dirty seagulls and beer-swilling barbarians at your local public beach. And live the dream...

Michael Graves Drawer Organizer - $9.99

If going to the beach or going outdoors is not something in your agoraphobic wheelhouse then try reorganizing that everything drawer that may or may not house Jimmy Hoffa’s now useless remains. This little drawer unit separates the haves from the have nots in your desk, make-up or utility drawer and gives your scrambled brain a break. I love being able to see where the Scotch Tape and my rusty collection of pre-college push pins live instead of tearing the house apart every time I need to stick something somewhere. This is serious summer therapy under ten bucks!

The Hunger Games Trilogy - $32.47

If you want to be cool, be culturally relevant and go for a crazy-ass ride read this amazing series by the same author that refuses to have her picture in print. Since the film is being made RIGHT NOW make sure to read the book at the pool and have everyone around you ruin the plot before you get to the end.

“Hey have you gotten to the part where Katniss blanks and then blanks blank?”

Fill in the blanks and buy these books, people!!!!!!

Lululemon workout Gear – Pricey but worth it

Since I am an avid hike and a recent runner I have fallen in love with the Lululemon of it all. And I am here to tell you if you workout at all do yourself a favor and splurge on one or two pieces of this truly awesome line. It helps you stay cool while looking hot and makes you run a little farther and a little faster.

3 Must-See Movies
Netflix - $3.99

If you are holed up in a Malibu mansion or stuck in your crappy living room all summer and want to pretend you went somewhere else, Netflix these three fabulous, frenzy-making films and thank me in the comments section. I am still blown away by all three and cannot stop wanting to see them again for the first time. Do it and like it!

Together - Swedish comedy starring the dude from The Dragon Tattoo movies

I Am Love starring Tilda Swinton

The Secret in Their Eyes - Argentina's 2010 Oscar Winning thriller

Driving Home From School… A One-Act Play

2011-06-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

OTTO: Hey Mommy, look! Two yellow school buses!

ME: How awesome! You want to write a joke about it?

OTTO: Yes!

ME: What did one school bus say to the other school bus?

OTTO: Hey asshole!

Okay, so my terrible plan brutally backfired. I thought using one little bad word to garner a smile would be a harmless emergency use of profanity and then quickly forgotten. But how very, very, very wrong I was. I explained AGAIN how Mommy made a huge, colossal mistake the other day by using the A-word and to NEVER again use it.

I had to give him this speech while choking on a pupu platter of embarrassment, guilt, shame and laughter. Sure, I almost drove into a tree and maybe there we tears running down my cheeks at each and every red light. But he never suspected a thing and seemed to get my drift that asshole was a word that would be forever retired in his circle.

FOREVER!!!! 4-ever! Fo-eva! Get it? I think he got it.

But how can a boy who draws like THIS

say THIS?

How?

My Twisted Tree of Life

2011-06-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

The other day I told Otto a joke on the fly hoping to make him laugh and cheer up after a truly despondent reaction he had after a good pal hurt his feelings . Here is the joke.

What did one butt say to the other butt?

Hey asshole.

It worked.

Is this any worse than placating Precious Pee-Wee with a sugary treat or a new toy gun or a body dysmorphic Barbie when he or she is in ruins and a sack full of hugs is not cutting the mustard? I have no idea but I do know this.

It sure felt good to get a smile on his face after so many frowns. And asshole IS a funny word. Well, there are funnier I suppose. I could have said balloon knot or frosted back door brownie or pooped pucker or fudgy fingerprint but I didn’t. I said asshole and it did the trick. He was crushed and I panicked and I knew that saying a word that was absolutely off limits would crack that sad crust that had formed all over him. Oh, and when I just said crack there was no pun intended. Really.

What would you do if your little chipped gemstone needed some gluing back together but nothing was working? Would you reach into your funny bone bag and pull out an R-rated retort?

Dirty jokes were the wallpaper of my childhood and some of the best memories I have are PG-13, if not NC-17. Where I grew up all the neighborhood kids would climb up a tall tree we called the Dicky Dick Tree and take turns telling jokes that would always induce spectacular spit takes and near fatal falls. I learned to appreciate the art of writing a joke and telling a joke at a very early age. With that skill came an invaluable ability to laugh in the face of adversity and mock those who were most cruel and unusual in their peer punishing. It no wonder it still works wonders today.

Of course, I am not advocating or advertising the use of foul language as a standard family activity or an after school pass time to be enjoyed by every first grader, everyday. In fact, I feel that these little potty mouth petit fours are for emergency use only, much like a fire extinguisher filled with cotton candy or a handgun made of stale Twinkies.

Not to say the profanity parade does not exist in our world of washed-out mouths and squeaky-clean conversations. When researching preschool for Otto someone told me about a private elementary school here in Los Angeles that insists on having the children be able to use any bad words they choose to help express themselves. The rumor is that little Jaden Caden Haden Azul can run red Rover right over with a truckload of f-bombs while sprinkling the jungle gym with shits, dicks and craps.

That is ridiculous. Not only to I NOT need to pay someone else $25,000 to let my kid scream cocksucker while playing tether ball, I certain do not need my child coming home and telling me to go fuck myself when I ask him to wash his little hands before dinner.

I know where to draw the line. I’m just not sure whether to use a poop-colored pen or a penis-shaped pencil to draw it.

What about you?

I'm Gonna Wash That Girl Right Outta My Hair

2011-05-26T13:13:00.000-07:00

One summer day on Cape Cod I had a flash of brilliant inspiration to change my appearance and change my humdrum high school life. The thought process was as follows. If I cut off my long, naturally wavy tresses and embraced hair gels and mousses and permanent pouting, I could move to New York and be a famous model. Since my hair was the color of a drowned Hudson River rat, my height barely brushed 5’5” and every photo taken of me seemed to resemble a cross between an over-medicated mental patient and Jimmy Durante after a bad fall, a modeling career was not the most practical or realistic goal. But I didn’t care.

I would never again have to use the Pythagorean theorem or a telephone or my left hand during a front seat, high school hand job. I really thought that. Really. Without taking a bong hit or lapping up a few drops of blotter acid or suffering a terrible head injury in a sloppy sailing accident. Me, a model, in New York, modeling and mugging and making out with Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy, giving both of them much more of me than my rosy-palmed love in a Pinto.

My closet would be overflowing with stonewashed, Marilyn zip-up GUESS jeans and scrunchy ankle socks that my ripped, Republican, money-managing boyfriend would use as cum towels. My downtown loft would pulsate with parties in honor of artists who only painted 16 inch obelisks in neon colors and androgynous Nagel look-a-likes drinking Chivas and Chrystal Light and the two pretty members of The Bangles and decorative bowls of Quaaludes and mescaline that were often mistaken for Mike and Ike’s and Jujubes. The world would be my fabulous, fuzzy clam.

I found a random salon in a small beach town near Hyannis and put all my trust and money into the hands of a frustrated, fidgety stylist who cut hair to pay off his addiction to TAB, Dextatrim and life-sized posters of The Smith’s. Sitting in his chair, overlooking a cloudy, overcast beach, Boy George of his own jungle hacked off the last of my virginal, untreated strands and welcomed me into the world of dyeing too much and trying too hard.

Exhibit A

After showing him a photo (see exhibit A) of what I wanted to look like he lopped off the left side of my hair leaving a scant two inches and permed the other a pubic bush kinky, hoping to match the 1983 GUESS model I so admired and mooned over. I never stopped to think about what my blank canvas really looked like without a carpet of curls and if this flaccid version of Vidal Sassoon could actually improve upon my natural gifts of average.

After Alberto Alfonso Gilberto was done trimming, treating and teasing I stood up and looked in the floor to ceiling mirror that had been quietly lying to me through its glaring, reflective teeth all afternoon. Standing there was not the Cosmo Cover Girl I had expected or an ESPRIT catalogue high-kicker or any of the united colors of Benetton. No, what I saw before me was a poop-colored, lopsided kitchen mop being held up by a pair of hunched over shoulders, one of which carried a Ton Sur Ton tote filled with regret.

The knowledge that I would never be a fashion icon was as immediate as getting food poisoning at a 24-hour Chinese restaurant that serves day-old fish tacos and an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. I paid my bill in cash, tried my Molly Ringwrong to look happy about my new crooked crew cut and slinked out into the gray day fairly certain of a need to scream, “Four!” on the golf course of life.

The following year, after the mangled mess grew into a shoulder length shame, I started highlighting my hat head, once again trying my best to fit a drab brown peg into a hairy round hole. The more I colored it caramel, the more it demanded dolce de leche and now, after years of switch-ups and new swatches I am a prisoner of my own ponytails.

My mop top never quite recovered from the onslaught of chemical dependency and poor decision-making and I am still fighting an uphill battle of bad hair days, sub par blow-drying, delicious-smelling, bank-breaking deep conditioners and feisty follicle ineptitude. Add to that a few new rebellious and insidious grays sprouting up like weeds at a waterfront wedding and I truly feel like I should never have started a war I could never win.

Whether I like it or not the colorist and the chemicals are here to stay. Sure, I could embrace the white whiskers that now number in the tens around my temples but I am not the girl who looks good in Santa’s second favorite color. I will never be a confident, cotton-top, Eileen Fisher model wrapped in a coffee-colored, oversized, jersey dress, looking like a sultry Q-Tip while coyly gazing into a camera lens as if it were my magnified make-up mirror in my Hamptons master suite.

Was my natural hair color really that bad or could a dull, dirt brown of youth have been enough to satisfy my fashion phobia? When I opened up that Glamour magazine and tore out the photo of the white blond model who had it all together in her pegged jeans and ankle boots all those years ago I instantly fell for the oldest advertising trick in the book.

“Buy our product and be enough!”

While supposedly selling jeans to a massive population of designer-desperate teenagers, the world of fashion forward shoved me into a bottomless pit of massive makeovers and radical redo’s. I dyed and I tried but am still just me, a sometimes disheveled, sometimes delighted mother of one who no longer wants her face or her frame in a magazine but only her words and her warts.

And Mr. Marciano, I am finally enough.

3 Posts in 1: Exercise, Spoonful of Sugar and Modern Moving

2011-05-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

Oh, Dave! I love where you put the wet bar!

To recover from the last months of drama and depletion Dave and I started exercising again like Mad Max in search of the bald dude’s gasoline can. He is all P90X and I am all hiking in the canyon and running WITHOUT HIM. Last summer we embarked on a joint exercise program of P90X and within a few weeks I wanted to strangle him with a green exercise band and lock him in the DVR player in his sweaty gym shorts. There are some things that couples are not meant to do together, especially in a small living room that doubles as a play room/office/TV room/gym/sexy time stadium while a tiny, sassy child begs you to play monster with him and your husband tells you to lift you leg higher. You get the picture. I just couldn’t do it.

The separate but equal workouts are really working out. Even with Otto sick all last weekend (see below side note*) and this last Thursday night as well, we were still able to fit in our sweaty ball time and get along swimmingly without aid of a lewd hand gesture interpreter or a second helping of karate kicks to the throat.

*Side note: Thursday poor Otto was up ALL NIGHT, like baby American Style of common complaints and mystery pains and I was worried and wrecked the next day while Dave felt great. Fucker can go on no sleep, an eight ball of espresso beans and a power bar and look and feel like a 1993 Drakkar Noir chest model the next morning. I secretly hate him for that AND the smell of sub par rape fantasy spritz that is now swirling in my muddled memory ducts.

Anyway, after Otto finally crashed at 6 a.m. Friday morning, school was a, No Way, Jose and a trip to the doc was a, Hell Yeah! Turns out Otto had a mild ear infection and a teeny fever and yes, still had the planet Neptune sitting on his face. I mean, really. Two weekends in a row and my little man was under some kind of weather pattern and still he rocked it like Stevie Wonder at a shooting range. His temperament and ability to adapt to any situation baffles my brain and makes me bow to his badass self. He was spectacularly understanding and fully slathered in homemade baked goods and hugs and overall good cheer.

So, that meant a lot of extended educational TV watching and home improvement, Dotty Dave Style. We got down and dirty and rearranged, cleaned and fixed up the place old school OCD style. Okay, I know I seem to do that rearrange-due-to-depression-thing a lot around here. It helps when I need a change and I realize that no dead ancestor just burped up and bequeathed a billion dollars to me for that five bedroom that everyone tells us we just have to have! But I am here to say that getting control of your environment, no matter how sick of it you are, absolutely aids in fixing a case of the sads or the mads or even the mediocre glads.

And sure enough, it delivered the goodies. We took all our crazy, eclectic furnishings we’ve collected over the last twenty years, pushed them around in circles, put them against different walls in opposite corners, repainted a cool armoire and created a shoe closet, framed tons of photos of Otto Man and put up all his Dali-inspired artwork, vacuumed up the last of the cat and dog hair (silently crying and heart breaking) and started to feel we may have finally figured out our backwards living room.

Okay, maybe that is a bit of a stretch but living in an apartment with only one downstairs closet that is 18” wide in the middle of one living room wall and a front door that takes up four feet of the only other good wall space in which to put a sofa, one can understand how ridiculous our 1934 surrealist, socialist apartment truly is. I have said it before but whomever paid to have this wacko shack built to these specs owned nothing more than a love seat and a standing ashtray filled with cheap cigarette butts, two pairs of dusty Gabardine pants, a wrinkled, button down shirt that was stored in a kitchen cabinet for safe keeping and a pair of size seven men’s dress shoes that doubled as poorly polished bedside tables.

In order to end this exercise/Otto mend/DIY rant I have to give credit where credit is due. I feel that the reasons I have embarked on getting back to spreading some love around our apartment are as follows. One, the dark cloud of sadness has truly begun to float away after the loss of our four legged loves, Brody and Joey. Two, the unexpected blocks of weekend time that were tossed in our laps twice in one calendar week helped us get serious and sudsy in our spring-cleaning pursuits. And three, my new found love and inappropriate crush on the design blog, APARTMENT THERAPY has turned me into a shuffle and shift junkie. It is as if this little gem of home design and Peeping Tomery was made just for me, a girl who loves both voyeurism and interior design but is too inherently lazy and too frugal to fork over the fitties for my British Elle Décor porno mags.

Am I cured? I have no idea. Just check out MY NEW FAV BLOG and maybe you too, will be inspired to rid your medicine cabinet of its collection of rancid, mid 90’s Mac Spice lip-liners and expired medications the color of tea-stained teeth. Maybe you will feel an urge to frame all your Chipotle lunch receipts and hang them in a monochrome tableau above your new CB2 side table. Or perhaps you will launch into fabulous by rolling your guest towels into large terry cloth penises and proudly displaying them in hanging baskets next to your new whimsical toothpaste dispenser made of stolen copper wire. But best of all, may you find the strength and honesty to burn anything in your underwear drawer that whimpers “NOT TONIGHT” or predates your husband, your children or your questionable college graduation.

Dirty Is As Dirty Does

2011-05-17T11:13:00.000-07:00

Otto has been through a lot this past six months. Yet even with the terrible loss of his dog, a missed birthday, the heart-wrenching decline and death of his cat and a red face asteroid that refused to scoot off to another galaxy, his spirit and overall cheerfulness pours over the lip of his gorgeous glass like a delicious, frothy pint of Guinness. He has the uncanny ability to express his frustration and anger and sadness toward the many injustices he has experienced as of late but recovers within moments, as if he truly knows that life is full of trials and that his are small in comparison to most.

I marvel at the daily skip in his step and the way he looks around his world with curiosity and wonder and kindness. I wish I could bottle it and drink it thrice daily. I wish I didn’t continually turn my head in a Linda Blair, full-circle and notice what is wrong with my helpless hair or my listing living room or my lint-covered life instead of seeing only the good like my stone cold, cool son. I wish for him that that positivity stays with him for a lifetime and carries him through the rough patches that will most definitely be itchier than a facial fungus and more intense than an Internet break-up.

But the trait that I know will truly help him most when he needs it is his ability to see the funny. He has already established himself to be a great audience in all things silly and has spent much of his youth honing his comedy chops, which are two, thick slabs of meat seasoned with lots of fart jokes and coated with absurdist sauce.

I love a dirty joke and made a living at it on stage at a time in my varied life. Back when I was barely a beansprout I laughed until I cried at all the disgusting imagery painted on my brain by the older kids in my neighborhood. The funnier someone was, the more cache they brought to the table and everyone knew the filthier the joke, the more fabulous the friend.

So this is where I lie conflicted and confused. Otto loves knock, knock jokes and bodily function debauchery and silly word combinations. Who doesn’t? No harm no foul, right? But when the jokes suddenly go from sweet and goofy to boobies and buttholes what is a mother to do? I have noticed with his friends that the age of four brings with it a more body conscious kiddo. They are potty-trained and independent and curious and all too cognitive about the differences between girls and boys.

They are also suddenly clever enough to get the joke, write the joke and open at the Improv on a Tuesday night. I don’t want to squelch my child’s inner Andy Kaufman or step on his Andrew Dice Clay doppelganger by not allowing boobs to be punchlines or boogers to be sound bytes. Okay, maybe we can skip Dice Clay and move on to Sam Kinison or Louie C.K.?

Whatever or whoever the case may be I am trying my alternative comedy best to find a middle ground and keep the funny without throwing away the hilarity in the dirty bathwater.

So this week I will replace my old mantra, “Dirty is funny and four letters are better than three!” with my new mantra, “Helen Keller jokes are bad and there is nothing wrong with good, clean fun!”

Problem is, will he high-five me or heckle me? Only time will tell.

Skin Deep and Scaly Underneath

2011-05-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago Otto got what we thought was a tiny spider bite on his perfect, flower petal cheek. First, it looked like a small, red pinprick, something your average voodoo doll might suffer from on a slow day at the office. Then it slowly evolved into a tween-like pimple and made me think of our future footsteps alongside the puberty patrol. I pictured our house, the one we don’t live in, bombarded by tubes of Benzoil Peroxide and bad attitudes and a teenage combination-skin skater who wants nothing to do with his parents and everything to do with naked cheerleaders and fifty-minute showers.

A week went by and one morning we noticed it had suddenly developed from a freshman’s worst nightmare to a red moon-like planet looking for a solar system to love. Coincidentally, Otto had woken up with a nasty unfiltered smoker’s cough that day so Dave took him into the doctor just to make sure there was no whooping in his windpipe. After assuring Dave that the cough was nothing serious, the doctor on call took a look at the scaly, pink ping-pong ball and declared it to be, indeed, an infected spider bite. A week of twice daily slathering of cortisone cream and antibacterial ointment were prescribed and used diligently.

Ten days later Mars’ ugly stepsister morphed into a solar eclipse of even uglier and I took Otto back to the doctor wearing ski gloves and a poncho made of a deep-seated fear of interstellar space travel. This time the doctor decided that Otto had a fungal infection on his cheek, much like the fungus I received ten years earlier from THE hippest bikini waxer in Los Angeles. Yes, all those childless years ago I had a perfectly cylindrical life form growing on my Brazilian stretch of beach because Svetlana chose NOT to disinfect her carafe of hot wax strips. Gross.

So, here I was feeling so sorry for Otto and staring down at his chunky cheek asteroid and remembering my trip to a snotty, all-star dermatologist who looked at my crotch fungus with the disdain only an angry vice principle could possible have toward a cunning and vodka-soaked girl half his age. Said vice principal may have accused me of drinking on a school field trip but could never prove it and hated me like he hated an empty glass of Scotch. Guilty as charged but never caught! Ha!

When the dermatologist was done judging me from the other side of a rubber glove and a sneer, I crawled home wearing scuffed wedge loafers the size of a step ladder and a generous helping of prescription strength anti-fungal cream. After naming my new roommate Fungina I spent the next fourteen days under a tattered knock-off Hopi blanket, speaking to my new vag-mate in soft whispers until she finally faded into obscurity during the next lunar cycle.

By tangential point is that Otto’s pediatrician gave the same diagnosis to Otto’s face friend as the demonic dermatologist gave to my below the belt beach party and that made me realize that I would never tell Otto that story, especially while his high school girlfriend ate dinner with us as we giggled out old family tales of whoa. I know my limits. I’ll just tell the interweb.

Back to the story already… We left the doc’s office with a firm diagnosis, two sugarless lollipops, ten-dollar co-pay and a toy airplane and skipped right over to CVS with instructions to buy Lotrimin. Or was it Lamasil? Shit! I forgot to write down the exact L-word needed in this situation and when I got to the funky ointment section the L’s criss-crossed in my bad brains and PRFFF! I had no idea what to do. I grabbed both packages, generic of course, because I am as frugal and I am fungal, and asked the pharmacist which one to use on face filth. She pleaded the fifth and told me to call my doctor.

As the phone rang and Otto begged for a twenty-dollar baby doll that looked like Vern Troyer after a four-hour bath, I looked down at both items in my hands and suddenly realized that these two creams were very different. The Lamisil AT stated that it was specifically for ringworm, a common fungus in young school children, Meth dealers and out of work actors. The other cream, Lotrimin, had a grotesque, grinning infectious mascot on the package, a cross between Gollum and puddle of barf and prided itself in print as THE number one, jock itch cream.

The nurse answered the phone before I could hang up so I thought it only polite to ask her which cream to use, even though I clearly knew the answer after reading the boxes in my hands. It was physically impossible for Otto’s franks and beans to be anywhere near his face, unless they were teaching him contortionism in karate and there had not been any contact with an athlete or an athletic supporter in the days leading up to the blemish. So Lamisil it was.

While the nurse put me on hold, Otto and I argued about why I would not be buying him the bloated baby doll he wanted and if I were to buy him a doll, which I would, it would be one of the dolls I was deprived of as a small child, such as a Betsy Wetsy

“Doctor says to use the Lotrimin, honey. Lotrimin.”

I thanked her, hung up the phone and went to put back one of the creams when my eyes once again, fell on the package that I was told to keep. NO! It could not be!

LOTRIMIN: FOR JOCK ITCH

My small, lovely, precious child’s chubby cheek is no better than A Rod’s sweaty, chafed, lower level romper room! No wonder I subconsciously misplaced the L’s in my mind. I must have known the moment I spotted the cream that screamed, “Crotch Rot!” that I would be rubbing jock itch cream all over my baby before breakfast and before bedtime for two whole weeks!

Two days in and the funk is slowly fading and I am as relieved as an itch being scratched. But every time I apply the cream I cannot get out of my scarred and scabby mind the image of a stinky, sweaty, triangular testicle shield at the bottom of a germy gym bag, somehow snuggling up to Otto’s cheekbone without me knowing about it. And then I try and be as positive as possible. Maybe he’ll be a dancer. They don’t sweat, right?

I told you it was a Hallmark holiday

2011-05-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

Still milking my weekend of worship, I give you a little look at how all mother's matter, no matter who they are!

The horror, the horror...

2011-05-09T21:13:00.000-07:00

MY MAN'S MOVIE

Today was going to be a post-Mom’s Day post about my amazing Mother’s Day weekend of relaxing and hanging out solo and with friends and husbandly awesomeness and my child’s brilliant and yummy everything and the general tremendousness of all the above. Really, it was.

There was a plan to wax on and off about Dave doing everything around and in and out of the house and Otto being as good as gold bullion bicuspids and making me a crazy cute Mother’s Day card out of princess stickers (boy playing with princesses… alert the media) and yellow magic marker (my favorite color) and playing with his friends and the dads while I ate a fancy, no-kids-brunch at a hipster restaurant with some gal pals as a flock of paparazzi chased down a PREGNANT CELEBRITY who looked as pleased as a punch to the face.

Nope, my little self-centered catch-up has changed from discussing the Hallmark Me Day weekend that I fully embraced and took advantage of, to the cool Hand Luke news that came across the wiggly wires today. My husband, my perfect ball-chaining, beer-drinking, bread-baking, homemade pasta-making, heart-stopping spouse had a really good day today in a town that prides itself on weeks and months and years of the bad shit. These long stretches of rough riding are often held together by spit, dirty Chuck Taylor shoelaces and someone else’s semen, inevitably leaving their victims barely alive or audible under a moth-eaten blanket of misplaced potential and forgotten fortune.

His badass self wrote a badass script called NO ONE LIVES and the literary creature is crawling out of its black lagoon and getting itself made! Can I get a shit yeah? It was announced in Variety today along side a photo of its hottie star, the other Cool Hand Luke and its scary-making director. READ IT HERE if you want a little horror in your show today.

And on a personal note, Dave, you are my hardcore, horror hero and the whiplashed wind beneath my crooked wings! Congratulations on a busty, bodacious bright green light!

On this Mother's Day, don't forget to...

2011-05-08T18:45:00.000-07:00

by showing her your love with ink

and make her think

she taught you well.

Katy Perry, Even On Heavy Days

2011-05-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

It has been two weeks of our small child on spring break which makes for very little blogging and blabbing. Now that the baby calf is back in the barn and I am now riding side-saddle into sanity, the blithering can begin again and blithering it is.

During some nighttime/adult time one evening last week, Dave and I watched Katy Perry, the newly minted pop princess, married to the newly minted NOT Dudley Moore, debut her new single “E.T.” on American Idol. As some of you have pointed out in the comments section, I am of severely lame in my Idolatry and happily subscribe to a lowbrow love of the reality rhinoceros American Idol and have since the first day it aired. I have been to four live tapings, gold medal for lameness, one as recent as last month, second gold in lame and love this season above all others! So what? Why do I watch?

I cannot keep my eyes off of J. Lo’s perfectly positioned hairpieces or her silky, stiletto-loving legs or her creamy, caramelized skin or her pillow mint smile. It’s like looking into a magic mirror in someone else’s en suite bathroom only to see a creature that I will NEVER look anything like. Not even remotely, on my best day, in my wildest dreams with a team of dreamologists slathering me with pixie dust and fairy farts. Uncle.

After I have been bewitched and ego-beaten by P. Diddy’s former fluffer and my eyeballs are sufficiently scorched from the sexy sun that Jenny From The Block emits from her perfect Puerto Rican pores, my eyes crawl a few inches to the left where I see a ravaged rock star I want to wrap in a bath towel and dry off with my desperate kisses. I cannot help it, people. Steven Tyler may look like a twice-licked fruit roll-up at the bottom of a beach bag but my heart belongs to his Rock ’n’ Roll and his collection of mecklaces (man necklaces) calls to my sweet emotions!

The point I am trying to make here is about Katy Perry’s visit to the Idol stage last week and I have gotten way off point. Forgive me for my star-fucking stuttering. I clearly digressed.

Anyway, Katy Perry, Katy Perry, yes Katy Perry. Her song “E.T.” is a duet with Kanye West who, on the show, was wearing what looked like a fur vest he had stolen from The Clan of the Cave Bear storage unit without having it dry-cleaned or combed or even killed. The performance and the costumes and the dancing was really lame, in my humble, un-famous, un-cool and un-employed opinion and I was more than happy to share my thoughts with Dave who sat next to me on our Idol-watching sofa.

“These lyrics suck ass,” I said with highbrow professionalism and poise.

“They are pretty ridiculous,” Dave replied, leaving me validated and vindicated until his mouth barfed up this gem.

“The lyrics are nonsense based on the fact that someone cannot be supernatural AND extraterrestrial. It’s impossible unless they are a space ghost and everyone knows space ghosts do not exist.”

At this point I gazed at the man I married all those years ago and started to wonder if indeed, he really did attend any school dances or if he simply stayed home with his geek squad pals Dungeoning and Dragoning until dawn. The jury is still out.

Back to Katy, I know. In her uber-Idolness, all I could think of while I watched the duet of overdone was how the California Gurl was dressed like a super plus tampon from the planet Menses while channeling Jon Anderson’s comeback with the band YES for the 1984 “90125” tour. No, I am sure you have no idea what the hell I am talking about or care to remember what Jon Anderson or anyone else in the band looked like in 1984. So, let me paint you an off the shoulder picture.

I am not proud to say I witnessed firsthand Yes’s Lakeland, Florida tour stop on April 18, 1984 while on spring break with my best friend, LIZA. The two of us teens and one hundred other idiots who bothered to show up, were forced to watched as the YES stomp around on stage in metallic platforms and shoulder-padded space suits while playing "Roundabout", the trippy, dippy ditty Jon Anderson penned in 1971 while drinking brown blotter acid from a Krazy Straw. Epic it was not.

Side Note: I cannot find any photos of this or any other concert in which the members of YES have on their confusing and soul-crushing spaceman unitards and high heels. Conspiracy, yes! Disappointing, hell yes! But I have provided a video for your viewing pleasure that shows the band later that year looking alarmingly like the members of Banana Rama and The Go-Go’s after an all-girls slumber party sponsored by Capezio and Corey Feldman's clothing line for Men's Warehouse.

Being a witness to a once super successful band playing to an empty arena dressed like a collection of broken space heaters while desperately holding on to their careers with the death grip of a drunk and ill-equipped rock climber was one of the most depressing moments of my life. It is on my shittiest shit list right below getting my period all over my desk chair in 8^th grade social studies AND laughing so hard I farted in front of Klaus*, my first middle school, super crush.

*Yes, Klaus and I are Facebook friends and if he reads this I will bury my head in shame once again and then crawl right into my time machine, travel back to the summer of 1982 and change that fart to a burp with no one being the wiser.

To make a long story even longer, a few days ago I walked into H&M to buy cheap, chic and Euro-fabulous kids clothes for Otto when I hear Katy Perry’s "E.T." come over the very loud, very disconcerting sound system. Before I can form a bitchy judgment Judy in my left-brain, a young woman behind me starts singing every word. She is loving it, owning it and chirping it like she is Katy’s left boob and she is there to put on a show. As hard as I tried to say terrible things with my inside voice while recalling that Klingon Kotex ensemble that Katy danced in, I realized that the song was super catchy, ultra hooky and as sing-able as an Oscar Meyer melody.

Maybe the song sucked live and maybe I should break up with Kanye for good, but the tune really rocks out with its pad out through speakers. I was damn wrong and Katy is damn right. Thank God she is the pop star and I am other lady. Space ghosts or not, what have I been singing non-stop for the past thirty-six hours? Only the parts I know really well.

Kiss me, ki-ki-kiss me 

Infect me with your love and 

Fill me with your poison  

Take me, ta-ta-take me 

Wanna be a victim 

Ready for abduction 

Boy, you're an alien 

Your touch so foreign 

It's supernatural 

Extraterrestrial  

Your so supersonic 

Wanna feel your powers 

Stun me with your lasers 

Your kiss is cosmic 

Every move is magic

eHow About That? The Biter Gets Quoted!

2011-04-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

I am very excited and I am sure you are wondering why. Is it the fact that for the first time in seven years I am rocking all three layers of my layer cake? Oh, what is that you ask? That lovely state of deliciousness is reached when a lady like me has the dumb luck and schedule skills to have her mismatched and mangled roots done, her bikini wax clear for landing AND a fancy red, French whore pedicure all done within a few days of each other.

Yes, I am completely ready for a bake sale but no, that is not why I am so happy. Okay, maybe a little bit. But really, I am happy because I was recently interviewed for an article called, "Baby Product Musts" for eHow.com and asked what my feelings were about baby stuff as a mom and blogger and well, I told them.

If you want your baby to never be awakened by a drunk neighbor or a howling siren or a cackling coyote, get a monitor with different sound settings and enjoy the ride.
— Dorothea Coelho

And I have to say it smells like lilacs and looks like lollipops. A wonderful, fancy pants writer named Malina Saval, author of the fantastic and fascinating The Secret Lives of Teenage Boys, asked me questions and wanted MY opinions on things and I got to answer her with real words and half sentences and grunts. That, my friends, is a real interview in cool, quotable article land, a place I love to ride my bicycle through and may even picnic one day.

Click HERE to read about what kind of worthless crap NOT to get as a new mother and what is an absolute necessity when bringing home baby for the first time. It makes me almost want to have another one just so I can register for the five basics of birthing and ogle at a shiny new breast pump as I cry into my organic cotton burp cloth at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday. Almost.

Malina's Book

Great Breast Pump Action

What I Look And Feel Like Fully Groomed

A happy Easter for everyone but the bunny

2011-04-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

The victim

The Culprit

Stuff Crush FRIDAY- stuff that dotty loves

2011-04-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

Mi and Mo Photography - A priceless, $100 mini-session special!

Seriously?

Since Otto was born we have been lucky enough to know and love one of the best photographers in Los Angeles. Kara and her sister Kiki took their insane shutterbug skills and have turned it into a great business that gives photo-phobic folk amazing memories and heart-stopping happiness. And lucky for my L.A. peeps, Mi and Mo Photography is having an awesome Mother's Day special.

Go to Mi and Mo Photography at I Heart Mi and Mo and see what matinee idol makers these gals really are and do not hesitate to check out their BLOG as well. The photos make me want to get divorced, re-engaged and re-married to Dave just so I can have wedding photos taken by these gals. My photos were shot by a drunk, lecherous sock-puppet who forget to get a family photo and used only the frosty/cheesy lens when shooting my close-ups. Yes, I looked like a Sears Portrait Studio mannequin stuck in a snow storm. And my dress had shoulder pads. I'm sorry.

Seriously.

The Best Flourless Chocolate Cake - Cost of ingredients = A buck fitty, maybe?

I made two of these bad boys for Passover and I cannot tell you how fantastically delicious they tasted. Everyone who ate a piece made a big O face, the kind that makes you think that something oh so bad/good is going on under the Passover table. Oh Elijah, oh!

On top of the ridiculous chocolate show-off aspect, these were hands down the easiest, no-sweat, home run-baking I have ever done. You can thank me in the comments section when everyone at your Easter table makes those closed door sexy sounds after the ham has been devoured and the cake is front and center.

Flourless Chocolate Cake
4 ounces fine-quality bittersweet chocolate (not unsweetened)
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder plus additional for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 375°F and butter an 8-inch round baking pan. Line bottom with a round of wax paper and butter paper.
Chop chocolate into small pieces. In a double boiler or metal bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water melt chocolate with butter, stirring, until smooth. Remove top of double boiler or bowl from heat and whisk sugar into chocolate mixture. Add eggs and whisk well. Sift 1/2 cup cocoa powder over chocolate mixture and whisk until just combined. Pour batter into pan and bake in middle of oven 25 minutes, or until top has formed a thin crust. Cool cake in pan on a rack 5 minutes and invert onto a serving plate.

I chose to dust it with both cocoa powder AND powdered sugar but you can choose none, one or both. Serve with sorbet, fancy ice cream or whipped cream.

With cocoa powder

With powdered sugar

Dean and Deluca Chicken Pot Pies - $22 for 2

My best friend from college, Mary Jo Awesome, sent these to us a few days ago, along with a box of Dean and Deluca Cupcakes, hoping to stop some of sad running down our faces. I know. So thoughtful and so yummy. Nothing says, "Buck up!" like a flaky crust filled with comforting, gooey goodness.

You can order the mini pot pies HERE and be that snotty, cool, freezer section mom you always wanted to be. These little pies will help you give Tyson Chicken Nuggets and Van de Camp's Fishsticks the huge frozen finger! And, Otto loves loves loves them and all the organic ingredients inside.

Goodbye Joey, Hello Joy

2011-04-20T08:34:00.000-07:00

I want to write a long, rambling in-memoriam book report about our cat Joey but I have as much energy and creativity in my body as a thrice-cooked piece of penne. How can I properly describe his loud, craggy howlings or his insatiable and manic appetite or his rotund twenty-three pound purrs back in the day?

Sure, he beat up a coyote not four years ago and won a fight with a pit bull by inserting and losing a claw in the dumbfounded dog’s nose and he refused to clean himself for a better part of eleven years and he chose to use the living room as a litter box on every other national holiday. Oh, and let’s not forget that his teeth were as long and sharp as a passive-aggressive trophy wife’s and he pooped nuggets the size of tennis balls and he drooled when you scratched his chin and he nibbled on your hand when he patted his backside with breath as toxic and tumultuous as a city dump.

But of all the ticks and traits that this magnificently complex character carried, his best and brightest had to be his absolutely love and adoration and affection for Otto. The minute that baby blob came into this house Joey From New Jersey loved him and licked him like a can of stinky, syrupy Fancy Feast.

Yesterday, I had to go to the vet without Dave and put Joey to sleep. Thankfully, my lovely friend and neighbor Amy drove me and held my hand so I wasn’t completely alone in the worst of water-logged moments. But, I still wept like a widow and snotted like a sinus infection and as Joey began his rapid and terrifying free fall into death, I kept apologizing and petting and shrieking that I was doing the wrong thing and that I had indeed taken away Otto’s best bud and furry friend.

Pure Love

Otto in his badass way is holding up far better than us, even though we are circling the wagons and soldiering on. He talks about him constantly and tells us how he is in his heart and in heaven with Brody. He carries around the above photo of the two of them together and it is ball breaking and heart-crushing and enough to make a mother melt into molasses.

As I have written far too often as of late, this last year has been a stinky collection of twelve, shit-stained months in one way or another. Add to that the impending death of yet another critter who has been with us for nineteen years and that only made these last weeks that much harder.

But Dave said something to me that has stuck with me and given me reason to pause and I paraphrase it here because my memory for dialogue is a three and a half, at best.

“Let’s take Joey’s death as the last of many negatives and turn this fucker around. No more saying or thinking or even whispering that this has been the worst year ever. No more bummed and no more bruised and no more battered. For our crazy fucking cat and our awesome fucking kid, the best begins now.”

Joey From New Jersey Cohen

1992-2011

In Honor Of Joey From New Jersey

2011-04-18T14:47:00.000-07:00

Happy Pussover

Attention Deficit Disorder

2011-04-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

Every time I pick up the New York Sunday Times or I click on CNN or I listen to NPR or I turn on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric (never happens... that's bed time and the me no likey perky) I hear a muted collection of vowels smashed together in my eardrum, forming sounds that resemble the dull cries of an old-fashioned, hand-cranked ice cream maker with too much rock salt. Then, I try my crusty college best to grasp the information the words are spooning into my clogged ears about the deficit and the financial meltdown and the world of shit that our world is in.

But my bungled, battered and bent mommy brain is too crowded with grocery lists and To-Do items and extreme exhaustion and imaginary fantasy vacation moments and irrelevant TMZ tidbits and future phantom pains and uneaten doughnuts to understand what the hell happened and what in Jeez Louise's name will the powers in power do about this sloppy seconds mess we're in.

And then a little nugget of knowledge gets tossed into my dumb dumb drain and I learn a thing or two without using the four precious braincells I have left after childbirth, child-proofing and child-rearing.

Here is a video produced by one of best friend's from college and my former partner in comedy crime, Mike. He is one of those assholes who used to read history books FOR FUN! Oh and now, NOW he produces videos for MoveOn.org just to rub it in my face that he reads more and wears nicer, more expensive smarty pants than me. Screw him!

For the record, this is not a democratic thing or a Republican thing. These are the Cliff Notes to the great American novel WTF Just Happened To Our Economy, Our Public School Funding, Our Children's Future, thing. And believe me, Cliff Notes were the third most important part of my high school experience just behind my collection of pegged Guess Jeans and my nearly professional application of hand jobs for history homework.

I look at this video not from a partisan point of view but as a citizen of the world who needs a simple breakdown of the breakdown that the bad guys bought. So, please take a moment to enjoy the skew.

Mope On A Rope

2011-04-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

How do I convey a blood-curdling scream mixed with a bellowing laugh and the sound of a spirit cracking around the edges? I could post a YouTube video of some asshole jumping off a roof into an empty swimming pool and breaking both femurs while claiming that he thought it would be funny and that his best friend Duane made him do it. Or, I could just tell you how our weekend began using my craggy words and my frosting-stained fingers.

To begin with, the cat is miraculously still meowing. After accepting the fact that I thought the end was near and writing a post in his honor and crying into his matted neck fur, the little fucker sprung back to half-life. He clearly read the post while I was out on Friday and disliking the content and the implications, he resurfaced by giving me a furry, four-fingered salute and a mouth full of mildewed meows.

While I sat amazed but still fearful that Joey would collapse Spaghetti Western style in front of Otto over the weekend and traumatize him for life, the way my father did by faking his own death in front of me once a month to teach me how to react in emergency situations, I got a very upset, late afternoon call from my husband. He had just been to the doctor after a night with a painful forearm. After describing his symptoms, the doctor told him to come in immediately and that, my dear friends, is never a good sign.

He spent five minutes with our doctor and discovered that he had… drum roll please… shingles! Shingles is a cousin virus of Chicken pox, highly contagious, excruciatingly painful and according to my husband, “Totally lame!”

“What? You are only worried about the it factor and not the possible blinding, immune-busting, forever in your system, factor?”

“No, I wish it were something cool like syphilis. At least then I could be associated with banging French hookers in early 20^th century Paris while ingesting too much absinthe and not enough vitamin C.”

Toulouse Lautrec then tells me that Marcus Welby, M.D. told him that he couldn’t be near Otto or pick him up until Otto gets an emergency booster shot. He cannot come in contact with anyone who has not had Chicken Pox and cannot be around newborns or young children or Otto’s school or pregnant ladies who plan on having newborns until all his symptoms are gone. He cannot eat chicken or say a word that rhymes with pox, such as sox, cocks, lox or fox. And this could last weeks, if not months.

So, that pretty much left the weekend in a quarantined shambles of shitsticks with no end in sight. There was no Friday night Shabbat dinner with friends, there was no museum trip, there was no nookie, no, no, no way, and there were no family fun birthday parties to attend where Dave and I split up the duties and hang out and relax with other pooped parents.

This year has been…well, a little much. And it can always be worse and we know how lucky we are in the big scheme of things and perspective, perspective, perspective. I know.

But our rope is ugly and short and frayed at the ends and crusted with years of sticky sweat and powdered sugar tears. Can someone please just give us a long piece of punk rock, polypropylene rope, the kind that those frozen nut bags use on Mt. Everest to get away from the lives they lead while risking the ones they have? We want to climb out of this lame and into the cool.

STUFF CRUSH FRIDAY- stuff that dotty loves

2011-04-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

Trader Joe's Regenerating Facial Lotion -
$4.99 - 4.0 oz.

On a whim I purchased this because it's tax season, tuition is due and my wallet was having a seizure. To my surprise my face loves it and so does my change purse! I use it at night and under sunscreen in the day time and yes, it makes my skin feel like baby's bottom but less stinky.

Argan Oil - $19.99 4.0 oz.
And worth every glop! My frizzy main has now been tamed. And for the record this is the same as the uber-trendy Moroccan Oil, exact same ingredients but less expensive.

Casey Abrams - Free To Be You And Me
I love this guy, his beard, his stand-up base and his horrendous promo photo! But can he go the distance, America? Only time will tell. Good bye. Pia! Oh mama mia!

Yo Baby Flip Board - $9.99

Voted Fat Brain Integrity Award 2008, whatever that means. But, this is a go to gift for any four year-old as well as a must have for rainy days and skateboard punks under five. We have given this to a handful of Otto's pals as birthday presents and they LOVE them! Be a cool parent and hook up a hipster!

Tom's Of Maine Toothpaste in Mango - $5.69

Yummy!

Nothing says happiness like Otto yelling, "Yay for Mango toothpaste! I love brushing my teeth!"

Fetid addendum to cat conversation

2011-04-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

This morning at breakfast.

Me: Otto, I want to tell you how special I think you are for saying that Joey will always live in your heart.

Otto: Mommy, heart rhymes with fart.

Joey From New Jersey

2011-04-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

Our cat Joey from New Jersey, a name acquired long before Jersey became a hip and trashy place to swap pit spit on camera or unenthusiastically hump your roommate in a hot tub filled with hair gel, is on his last legs. My tone may sound casual and my delivery dull but my heart is cracking and my head is pounding. This feline is nearing nineteen and has caused us more trouble than the invited homeless hobo at an all-you-can-drop acid bath.

“Hey man, groovy wallpaper. And I really dig your floor tiles. They taste like the earth. Think I may pull up a curtain and stay a while. Jerry is God. Or is that dog?”

Since adopting Joey three months before we were married, he has ruined five sofas, three rugs, two comforters and 1,792 mornings. Puke, urine, claw scratches and poop piles have collected as professionally and proficiently as Sunday newspapers on a poser’s porch. With the body weight of an old Brando and the eyes of Laura Mars this kitty has pushed our buttons and blinded us with rage.

On the flip side he has charmed our neighborhood, loved our legs and taken to Otto like a fly to flypaper. Every day that Otto returns from school Joey greets him with a retched meow and a shaky hello. They cuddle and speak their own language and Joey assists in puzzle-completing and train-drawing. It is a cute as a button and heartbreaking as a Hallmark holiday.

Over the last few months he has become seriously old, much like the decrepit man one may see at a lunch counter who orders a coffee black and a cheese Danish while engaging in conversation with the napkin holder as if it were a F-14 fighter jet he once flew over the Pacific. He howls at the walls, poops in his water bowl and stands at attention when no one and nothing comes calling.

After losing our perfect pooch Brody back in September, we are all still shaken and battered from the bereavement we all suffered through. It was an immeasurable loss that I, for one, will never recover from. And I am confident I can say the same for my other team members here.

But cats seem more independent and less life shattering in their inevitable departure. It seems like the feline gets the shit end of the emotional stick but in our case, I think I may be talking tough and full of crap. I love Joey so much, even though he has been as high maintenance as Paris Hilton on a water ski weekend. The pain of losing him is creeping up fast and furiously and is about to be dropped in our laps. I know that Joey’s days are numbered in the half dozens and that we will make the right decision and make sure that he is comfortable and calm toward the end, but it still sucks like a Hoover and hurts like hell. All week I have been telling myself that Dave and I can handle it with a good cry and a dry martini. I just kept asking myself how Otto is dealing with his sadness and what is the best way to help him through another major loss in six months.

And then the following happens…

Yesterday, after watching Joey walk in a few crooked circles while howling at the heating vent Otto turned to me with a Matchbox car in one hand and his apple juice in the other.

Otto: Animals go to heaven when they get old.

Me: Yes, they do.

10 minutes go by...

Otto: Mommy, when Joey goes to heaven Brody will be so happy because they are friends.

(Cue mom fighting back tears)

Me: That's right, monkey but will you be sad when Joey is gone?

Otto: No Mommy. I won't be sad because Joey will always be in my heart.

(Cue mom biting tongue and dabbing eyes)

Me: Wow. You are the most extraordinary human being I have ever known.

Otto: I am NOT a bean. I am a big boy.

Angelyne, Which Font and Color Combo Do You Use?

2011-04-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

My Mommy Bites needs a chemical peel, a nip 'n' tuck and a facelift. And after being swayed by the buxom, bubbled-lipped ladies in Los Angeles on a daily basis, I have decided to let my little MMB get an overhaul like a Playboy Playmate on a KY-covered conveyor belt.

And like all great works of art, (Angelyne's seventh face and every ingenue this side of the 405) I will start the slow process of looking for a great plastic surgeon while sampling different lotions, gels and potions.

This week I am trying out a green algae lip rinse with light floral tones, something that might taste like a dirty Koi pond on a Christmas day. I have also sampled a $.99 black eyeliner and ripped fishnets I found in the dumpster next to Pink Dot on Sunset.

Hope you enjoy the journey and I don't burn your eyes like an expired, $400 under eye cream in the bottom left drawer of Madonna's English countryside master bath vanity.

I Heart You, Water Monster!

2011-03-31T13:42:00.000-07:00

All week I have been thinking a lot about my blog and what it means to me. My Mommy Bites has changed my life and given me a scratchy, hoarse, four-lettered voice that will forever be bellowing out of my being. It has been such a source of joy and solace and comfort for me over the last few years and I have to thank those of you who visit it daily, weekly or monthly. I even want to thank those of you who hate it or refuse to read it because I have a picture of prescription pills on the home page. I too, thank those people who have never even heard of it or hate Led Zeppelin or think I am a potty mouth and a marginal mother. I am in a thankful mood. Just go with it.

The reason I am getting all misty-minded over here is that I came in an electrifying fourth-place (#4) in the Circle of Moms Top 25 Funniest Blog Contest! I never win or place in anything so this is a huge-ass deal and I will dye my roots and wax my nether regions in celebration! Thanks to all the readers and supporters for voting and volumizing the tally. I am in crazy, great company with some super special ladies, The Mad Mom and Shit My Kids Ruined, most notably.

This entire Olympic rant racing got me really thinking about the art of communication and writing and words, in general. I have always loved words, wordplay and anything wordy. I will talk to a brick wall if it will listen and I often got in trouble in high school for never shutting up. In class I would get called out for loud whispers and joke telling and scolded like a child at a Carnegie black tie dinner.

In the hallways my voiced carried like a bullhorn on a lunch break, making most of the teachers edgy and angry when I was nearby. During soccer practice I ran an average of a mile more a day than the other gals due to my motor mouth and my obsession with mocking the coach behind his back.

“Coelho, shut up and do a lap!”

“Really? Like you don’t deserve it, Coach Crunchy? You carry a purse!”

And with these inflated memories of brilliant babbling I always thought I was a great talker and a superb reader, even at an early age. But a few years ago, after Otto’s eighteen-month check-up nightmare where he was refusing to speak, my mother informed me that I never said a word until I was three and chose to fake my ability to read until I was seven. Clearly, I have always had a flare for the dramatic while making incredibly stupid life choices and instilling feral frustration in the ones I love the most.

In second grade my best friend was a girl named Lynn. She was tall, boisterous and belligerent, with long, blond hair like Kim Richards. (The cute, Escape From Witch Mountain Kim, NOT the resident drunk work-boot face, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Kim of today.)

Besides the hair and the attitude, Lynn also had the coolest parent/paramour situation this side of 1977, which gave her mad street cred to me, a child of regular married folks.

Her dad had a funky beard, a convertible forest green Fiat and a gorgeous girlfriend named Chris who was hotter than skinny Stevie Nicks during the coke-fueled Rumors days. Chris was the real life Convertible Beach Barbie and I my skin burned when I stood too close. She was a twenty-three year old Stanford grad student with painted on bell-bottoms and a white on white Pontiac Firebird. Chris, being all things goddess, actually drove me to my very first concert, in that Firebird, gifting me the experience of Andy Gibb live, wearing candy apple red stretch pants and singing, “I Want To Be Your Everything” to me and me alone.

One night Lynn called my house during dinner and asked if I wanted to go with her and her hip dad and gal pal to a movie called Tentacles. I told her to hold on so I could ask my parents.

I covered the mouthpiece and with the best puppy dog gaze said, “Can I go see a movie with Lynn, Craig and Chris tonight?”

My father, being hardcore about family dinnertime but also a serious movie fanatic suspiciously asked, “What movie?”

“Testicles!” I screamed with glee and gusto!

My malapropism caused both my parents to burst out laughing, which in turn, made with my father spit a chunk of French bread through his 70’s mustache curtain and across the table, leaving us all in a puddle of guffaws and sour dough spittle.

Before team super cool picked me up that night, my mom and dad had to explain to me the difference between tentacles and testicles. I truly think that was the first time I fell in love with words and the power they had to make people laugh. I know that my long-standing love affair is still going strong thanks to this blog and the readers who read it. There is really nothing else I can say other thank you, thank you and thank you.

By the way, every single time Otto says he wants to go see the octopus at the aquarium it cracks my shit up.

“Of course, you want to see a huge pair of balls in a large tank, honey! Who wouldn’t?”

A Mud Bunny Weekend Recap

2011-03-27T23:52:00.000-07:00

Saturday, one of Otto’s BFF’s comes over for a sleepover after Otto and I spend hours at IHop, the park and driving around looking at fantasy public school districts/houses we cannot possibly afford without a lottery win or a debutante’s trust fund. Otto and I have to stay out of the house for five hours because Dave has a major writing deadline and needs the apartment empty and work-friendly. Fuck him. I want to make a grilled cheese sandwich and do some laundry. No dice. I drive on.

When the time comes late in the day, I pick up Otto’s awesome pal, D, who is wearing the cutest back pack filled with sleepover paraphernalia and a wool cap that Oliver Twist would give his grimy, left nut to own. They sing and laugh and make fart noises the whole drive home and I am filled with an excited, anticipation of what is to come.

Fast forward – They both eat a gourmet dinner prepared by my insane, chef-y husband who insists on impressing every guest, even the ones under five. They watch Cars, they make more fart noises, the play racetrack smash up and the laugh their little butts off.

Dinner is over and it is bath time, the best of times in this house. I fill the tub with soapy goodness and put every bath toy Otto has (so many…) as well as a vintage Fisher-Price Floating Marina, the centerpiece of all things Otto bath.

The boys climb into the warm water, they splish-splash, they tell hilarious, imaginative stories about dinosaurs and motorboats and boobs and I hop into the shower to clean off the day. Two minutes later I am out of the shower in my towel, making faces at them and trying my best to be as cool and hip as these vaudevillians. I lean over the tub to grab a floating T-Rex to make it talk and fart because; I too, want to be included in the laugh track of their childhood. I want them to think I am funny and who doesn’t love a hacky, prop comic?

I put my hand in the water, wrap my fingers around the T-Rex and spot something floating next to the rabbinical rubber duck wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl. I bend down further hoping the dark mystery mound is a tiny plastic boulder from Otto’s medieval Play Mobile set or a soggy Rolo last seen on Halloween weekend in his candy bag.

My heart starts racing, my newly clean pits start sweating and my eyes start widening. Sitting on the bottom of the bathtub between Otto and D, minding its own business like a quaint, little river rock, sits a fresh and fruity turd that is disintegrating faster than a sandcastle in a storm. Yes, my clean, bubbly son and his super spotless, soapy friend are relaxing and reclining in a huge caldron of poop soup pouring shitty shit water all over each other’s heads and faces and mouths.

Without raising alarm or fainting forward into the crud cocktail I say to the boys,

“Hey guys don’t worry. No one is in trouble. I just want to know who pooped in the tub just in case he needs to poop some more and would care to use that white bowl over there, the one I call a toilet, instead of the tub.”

Both beautiful babes look me square in the face with two pairs of blue eyes that could melt a mountain and say, “I didn’t do it,” in unison.

Then they both go back to playing like nothing has happened, like they aren’t sitting in a rectal river or a sewage sea. Neither one rolls the other under the bus or blames the dookie disaster on the man to his left. And honestly, I am oddly impressed with their commitment to the cause of everything BFF. But, before I can get all misty about their solid gold friendship and lovely loyalty, I wake up and smell the coffee-colored water and whimper into my hair towel.

After hearing my faint cries of dirty distress Dave comes running, takes one look at my ashen face and says he’ll take care of everything. He knows that I have some serious fecal phobias and cannot possibly clean this up without a serious psychotic episode. Okay, I could handle it if I had to but, I really, really, really do not want to and Dave saves the day. Besides, he hates puke and cannot take it when our million year-old cat retches up half-digested cat food and hairballs that look like a cheap, 70’s toupee lying in a storm drain. I have no problem with the vomit so I walk out of the bathroom knowing we are even, Steven next time Joey hurls a hefty one.

Just then my oldest and dearest friend stops by with her four daughters to say goodbye, she’s been visiting from out of town, and her dog pees all over our sofa. It has now becomes collective chaos and maddening mayhem. By the time I get the piddling pooch and the cheerleading squad out of my house Dave has de-crapped the boys, bleached the bathtub and put the dudes down without them ever realizing they were both stewing in a septic-tank’s chicken stock.

All’s well that end’s well and we all had a grand, old time. The kids were amazing and cannot wait to do a sleepover again soon, minus the soaking shit sandwich. And for the record, I just had to share this toilet Twinkie tale with someone besides D’s parents and my crazy neighbor who looks like a parakeet in full clown make-up.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to go throw my head down on a pillow, tuck myself into a down feather burrito and hope that my dreams are not filled with brown butt nuggets and bun fudge sundaes.

Down to the wire and I need your daily votes

2011-03-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

People of the interweb, unite! There are two more days to VOTE everyday! If you like, love or hate what your read please take just a second to vote a few more times for this bloggette @

My Mommy Bites For President Of Needy
OR here @
http://www.circleofmoms.com/top25/funny-moms?trk=t25_funny-moms

I am writing this as a pathetic, dirty-haired candy addict who needs one last push to try and stay in the top five (four, three, whatevs) for Circle of Mom's Blog Contest. It may be degrading and it may reflect on my sad sack situation as a girl with the motivation of a sloth and the wardrobe of a Goodwill rejection bin. But, it would make me happier than a frat boy on a Friday.

Thank you from the bottom of my blackened chicken heart!

Dotty

Wanted...Candy, Career and Calm

2011-03-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

Ah, the insomnia has snuck up on me again and I am sitting here in my dining room/office/cat condo/toy storage area/wine bar/newspaper collection bin wearing one of those pink, fluffy fleece robes that make anyone, especially me, look like the insane lady who lives in the ramshackle house on the corner with five cars on the lawn and rusty back-up generator from 1963 propped up on the sagging porch. It is still dark out, I am NOT an early riser by nature but my brain will not shut off and my anxiety is building up again like Mount Vesuvius at a salad bar of virgins.

Seeing that I have spent the last five days in the house with a feverish boy drawing trains, making him snacks, cleaning out closets and watching kids movies I suppose my anxiety is warranted. I have not written a word, I have not lifted a leg and I have not done a push-up or a downward dog, which means I am a bottle of beer after a good shake or three. The boy has been an angel, taking in stride the fact that he missed his birthday, his play dates AND three days of fun-never-stops school. He really is a rock star with a side of super hero and I bow to his badass-ness.

His fever finally broke two nights ago and he will be heading back into the Petri dish today, which means I am back on my treadmill of tail chasing. After the wacko attacko I had a few weeks ago I know I need to change something in my life. I cannot simply internalize all the stress and fear and disappointment of a freelancer’s existence and end up with an ulcer and hysterical blindness at the IN ’n’ OUT drive-thru. How would I eat a Double-Double animal style if I couldn’t find the call box in which to order and had no one to tell that I HATE lemon in my iced tea and to give me some fucking extra napkins so the inside of my car will not look like the pool house powder room at the Playboy Mansion after Hef’s 101^st birthday bash?

With all the terrible shit going on in the world it is more than clear that everyone, especially, Mrs. Roper over here, needs to step back and take stock of the good. And there is a plethora of good, an overflowing of the goody goods from this hand-me-down gift basket I call my life. The goodness is oozing all up in this shit like a Cadbury Egg on a hot, Easter Sunday. Goody Goody gum drops are dropping from the sky but sometimes they miss the intended target of my mouth and land smack on my head, getting caught in my neglected, dark-rooted mop of hair and finding a magical way to make every strand as sticky and rank as Steven Tyler’s bedside tissue box at the W Hotel.

And it’s those errant sugary treats hiding in my out of control curls that I worry about. The tuition, the union dues, the grocery bills and the future are all twice-sucked gobstoppers that are choking me blue and crushing me into a fine, Pixie Stick powder. I want it all to stop but I know deep inside I am the only one who can make that go away. Will it be as simple as just giving up sugar and pooh-poohing real Mexican Coke and extra thick chocolate shakes? Can the answer be found in never again date-raping a jumbo box of Hot Tamales or forcibly fondling a bar of Valhrona dark chocolate?

No, the answer is in working harder, working better and simply working every angle to start working. Hey universe, if you are listening this bitch needs a fresh start, a new job and a bulk size bucket of Gummy Bears and Red Vines. Baby steps, baby. Baby steps.

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Bumps In The Birthday Road

2011-03-20T21:46:00.000-07:00

For Otto’s birthday today, the rain came in buckets and barrels, the marathon ran by, the traffic was jammed and the party was cancelled. The last minute play date was put in the trash, the out-of-town guests were steered away from the door and the party provisions were overflowing with no one to eat them. Otto’s fever spiked, his cough bellowed but the band played on.

We gave Otto a Bat Cave and a Bat Mobile and a Light Saber and a day on the sofa with movies and TV and hugs and kisses and cuddles. Dave picked up the pre- ordered cake and the pre-ordered balloons, making our living room look like the inside of a clown car with no clowns. Otto never complained, he never whined and he smiled throughout his feverishly stormy fourth birthday with nothing but a cheerful attitude and a happy heart.

As the late afternoon wound down and we started the bedtime ritual, he turned to me with a smear of bright, aqua frosting on his upper lip and a smudge of satisfaction on his face and said, “Mommy, this was the best birthday I ever had in the whole world!”

Looks like we all got gifts today. But mine was the best.

You are the light of my life and the fire at my campsite.

Happy Birthday, Monkey!

Wet and Wild In The West

2011-03-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

It is Otto's birthday week, a stack of stressful days in which I begin to make lists and unravel my intestines from all the worry of giving him a perfect party. Okay, when I say perfect that does not mean I would be eligible for that creepy reality show that features wacko, ill-fitting, Docker-wearing co-parents spending tens of thousands of dollars on birthday celebrations for their bubble-warped children. Please tell me you have seen Outrageous Kid’s Parties on TLC and please tell me you too, threw a dirty flip-flop at your flat screen when the mother of Little Jaxson Jam Jar turned to the camera and told America that she was spending $50,000 on a pirate-themed bash for her precious six year-old pineapple but had no intention of telling her bewildered and bankrupt husband. Must see TV at it's grossest.

No, my idea of perfection in party planning is supplying my guests with a trough of my homemade pasta salad that may or may not look suspicious to any four-year old but tastes as good as gold to a haggard parent with an appetite and anger issues. Along with that, I buy five pizzas cut into weirdly small slices, scatter the table with annoyingly healthy boxes of raisins, baby carrots and confetti, fill two platters with un-peeled Clementines and mini Fuji apples and buy a white trash cake that is as delicious and satisfying as a virginal bite of a Hostess Ding Dong, a Ring Ding or a Suzy-Q. (Twinkie's have been purposely omitted due to the fact I have ALWAYS felt they tasted like a twice-worn tube sock after a summer storm, toe-jam included.)

This year my list included buying and making items to help in activities that promoted action and adventure, as Otto is turning four and his desire to move, run, dance, propel and punch are par for the course. Granted, the party was to be a very, very small affair, only his male classmates. But, we were on track to do some really cool shit such as Piñata (duh), homemade Superman obstacle course (hello), relay race (boo ya) and gun range (sorry S. Palin, just kidding).

As the week picked up speed, so did my colon. I made lists and lost sleep and bit nails and my thoughts ricocheted around my skull and I was no closer to feeling prepared than I had last month. Then, a classmate's mother told me that we would be throwing this little event on the same day as the L.A. Marathon, a traffic stopper, cock-blocker of monumental proportions. This little parade of speedy anorexics slices Los Angeles down the middle and chokes her off until both sides of Sunset Boulevard are blue in the face and gasping for putrid, polluted air.

So, of course I called the train park and explained my situation and the man on the other end told me no other dates were available until May and then he assured me that the marathon was as easy to circumvent as a dead body on a bike path. I believed him and I breathed and I continued on my quest to make sure Otto had a kick-ass birthday, that was, until the next day. (Insert drum roll with screaming mother’s voice in background.)

I happened to catch a local weather report, something that rarely happens, due to my overt disdain for the weathermen in Los Angeles. This subset of G.I. jokes are formaldehyde-infused, over-tanned versions of the dudes who would face rape me in college after playing beer pong with shamrock-colored grain alcohol drinks instead of skunked beer. And, hearing them say things like “wet” and “precipitation” gives me a bad case of the un-fun flashbacks. Not to mention their female counter parts are a group of dense sigh posts whom, if you line them up tit to tit, resemble the Bratz Dolls discount shelf at Big Lots in Culver City.

Anyway, one of these mutated melanomas gave a quick overview of the week’s weather, ending with Sunday, March 20. And after all my planning and all my gnawing I see this map of misery pop up on the screen and tinkle right into my mouth.


Mostly Cloudy	Mostly Cloudy	Sunny	Partly Cloudy	Rain
--	67°	67°	63°	62°
High	High	High	High	High
52°	51°	48°	47°	48°
Low	Low	Low	Low	Low

Needless to day we had to cancel the party with heavy hearts and a handful of guilt pellets. But, Otto has taken the news like a Bronze Medal winner and has been cheerful and amazing about the entire kerfuffle. Of course, we will make it up to him with a dump truck full of cupcakes, a breakfast burrito/pancake birthday morning, a new racecar, a puzzle and a plethora of birthday play dates in the coming weeks.

Lesson learned is simple. A birthday doesn’t have to be a park full of peanuts running around in circles slathered with electric blue frosting and pee stains. It can be as simple as a day with family, doused in kisses and camaraderie watching the rain outside, wash away the birthday blues.

Vote Big and Vote Bouncy

2011-03-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

Gross, isn't it, me begging over here while wearing dirty yoga pants, three day-old hair and a nursing t-shirt from 2007? Still, I need your love and would love your vote because I was just nominated for Top 25 Funny Mom Blogs at Circle of Moms. Click on the link below and vote for My Mommy Bites and make this biter very happy. And as a sign of my appreciation I give you a photo of the best t-shirt slogan since "Rock Out With Your Cock Out."

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