Magnificence The Jiro Mid Air Break Up!

My first time solo on a motorcycle lasted three seconds. In those three seconds I became a rider, earned my broken wings, and discovered that the human body does, in fact bounce. In certain high velocity cases it even skips like a big, fat frozen chicken across a yielding surface, like say, tall haymow.

My motorcycle was a nice little Yamaha 250. I used to go out to the garage, take it off the stand and push myself around the driveway with my feet while my husband shook his head. Oh, I was hot to ride.

When he finally sorted out the electrics I was all ready to go. After all, how difficult could it be? I was one of those kids who rode a bicycle no hands down hills and stood on the seat. I couldn't wait to get the thing going and head down the road.

I turned it over. It gently slipped into gear, causing it to lurch forward unexpectedly. Causing me to reef back on the handlebars in response to the sudden motion.

You know, the throttle of a motorcycle is a twisty handle? It is.
Did you know that you make the motorcycle go fast by turning it towards you?
It does.

I headed down the driveway, remembering to put my feet up on the pegs, (I didn't remember to turn the damn key the other way and kill the engine, but I remembered to put my feet on the pegs.) and headed straight out into the street, gaining speed. As I crossed the bow of an oncoming UPS truck I could feel the heat off the engine on my right arm. On I sailed, over the center line, onto the shoulder, and straight over the lip of a drainage ditch.
And through the intervening space.
And straight into the opposite side.
The motorcycle came to an abrupt stop.

I did not.

I caught the rearview mirrors with my knees as I soared over the handlebars, and as I arrowed onward into the aether like a majestic fois gras I caught the downturn of the handlebar on the inner part of my right calf.



I landed tits first, the first time. The rebound was spectacular.

I landed stomach first on the second bounce.

The third bounce I caught with my face. Fortunately my mouth was open, thus acting as a collector and slowing my velocity so that I only slid after that, no longer airborne, for the space of about three feet or so.

My husband was already there, and I was already experiencing that cold, floaty faraway sensation that presages shock. Not that I was hurt that badly; I just shock out easy.
He walked me back to the house and sat me on the front steps.



"Why is my leg cold?" I asked him woozily.
"It should be hot. You're bleeding, " he noted.
I looked. I was. "Oh wow, my shoe is full of blood, too, " I exclaimed. " Lookit that."

I was piled into the car, still marvelling at my blood-filled shoe, and taken to the emergency room in Bellingham.

Now unbeknownst to me at the time, a guy my husband worked with at the plant down the street had witnessed the entire spectacle. Before we were out of the driveway, everyone at the plant knew. By the time I returned home, everyone they knew, knew. And by the next day people in town that I'd never spoken to before knew, and they knew details I don't remember releasing to the general public. But that in a moment.

Once at the hospital I was hustled into a bathroom with a paper gown and a bag for my clothes, leaving a line of single bloody footprints down the corridor. I wiggled the shoe off first and the sodden sock fell off all by itself. Splat. Beautiful spatter pattern all over the floor. The shoe tipped over and blood poured onto the tiles. I was fascinated by this. " Aw sick! My shoe was full of blood!" I remember calling. I don't know why this impressed me so much, but I guess it was the first time I'd ever had a shoe full of blood, so there you go.

I took off my bra and big chunks of turf fell out into the sink.

I unbuttoned my jeans and the dirt and gravel just cascaded down my legs, all over the floor, in the sink and into the toilet. The nurse rapped on the door and called "What are you doing in there?"sounding indignant.
' Jesus Christ lady,' I remember thinking 'its not like I meant to bring half the real estate in the goddamn county in here with me, ok? You can sweep up later. '




I peeled my pants down my legs. And saw for the first time what had actually happened to my calf. Yes, it was bleeding, it was raw, there was gravel in it, it hurt....

.....and there was human hamburger spattered all the way down the inside of my leg.

I hadn't cut it. I had burst it.

That's when the Yummy Biker came in and found me sitting on the toilet with my pants hanging off one ankle, soaking my jeans with blood, just sort of staring as I called 'Honey? Oh honey? Come look at this....? in a high, funny voice.

The rest of the ordeal was pretty much me hyperventilating and acting like a moron as the doctor trimmed and sewed. But I will never, ever forget that sight. It had looked for all the world like a big, greasy handful of ground beef wiped all over the inside of my pantsleg.

All I have to show for this is a kind of shiny indent on my leg. Hardly noticeable at all through the hair.

A side effect of this incident was the impressive bruising I received. Places I hadn't even realized I'd hit turned every shade of the rainbow. Parts I did remember hitting were really ugly. And to top it all off, as if being a human kaleidescope of barely medicated pain staggering around like the Mummy wasn't bad enough, as if having my nice little motorcycle bent around like the letter 'C' wasn't bad enough, my damn dagmars were mismatched.

One was its usual spectacular self.




The other one was blue.

Bright fucking indigo BLUE

I mean the whole tit, people.


And somehow everyone in town knew it. No, really. Everyone.

I suspect that I am at present married to the person who was responsible for leaking that bit of information. Ha ha!

Yes, but someday, when age has taken its toll, and statistics have proven me longer lived by virtue of my sex, it may fall to me to be the person in charge of changing his catheter bag.
Ha ha!

The Carmine Spider Ominously Laughs

Expect the worst, be pleasantly surprised when it fails to happen

I cannot believe this! I am so happy!
The playboy of the western world, my father-in-law, went ahead behind everyones back and actually hired the caregiver I found!!
Oh my God!!!!
No, really, this is huge. I know he did it to make me happy. Maybe that should come farther down the list of Whats Really Important Here, but hell, this is all about me, baby, and I feel loved.
That he needed a visiting caregiver with nursing experience was beyond question. I cannot express to you the relief I feel knowing that someone is there for him. I cannot believe it! This is great!
I know how this battle is going to end. We all know. But it pleases me that all of us are fighting the inevitable tooth and claw, keeping him in his own home as he continues to charm the gilded youths of Whatcom County and make lavish feasts in his own kitchen, and making sure the Porsche stays gassed up. Right fucking ON!!!!! Fuck age. Just fuck it in the heart.


Why yes, we are related. How did you know?

My grandson eats dirt. He prefers a commercial bagged potting soil but cheerfully makes do with common topsoil. He also has a taste for parking lot gravel and must constantly have his spitty little fists uncurled by main force, while he screams, to extract contraband rocks.
He pulls leaves off trees. Once they have been given a lick he tosses them aside.
I caught him yesterday walking on all fours like a little bear and nipping at the grass. "Is that tasty?" I asked. 'Hm, " is all he said. If his mother doesn't read this I fully intend to continue letting him develop his taste for fescue because its cheaper than mowing the lawn. Plus it cracks me up.
He opened a box of laundry detergent and spread it all over the deck. He then announced this development to me by tracking fat baby footie prints all over my house, which was cute but hard on the vaccuum.
He threw rocks at a bee nest on the side of the garage. Although he was surrounded by bees lazily drifting around his head he managed to remain unscathed, and only started screaming when I rushed him away. And took the rocks away from him.
He barked at a cat that wandered into the yard.
He barked at two girls that walked by on the sidewalk.
Two days ago, he carefully removed my curly bamboo from its' jar, extracted the stones and placed them aside, and then rinsed his sandals in the vase.
'What did you think you were doing??' I asked him later.
"Washing my shoe-goes," he replied, looking at me askance.
Translation: "For the love of God, grandmother, they were appalling; did you see them? You couldn't honestly expect me to go out among people looking like that, could you?"



Why no, I have no idea who this child belongs to. Do you want it?

My grandson humps thing. He humps pillows. He humps his Tonka trucks. He humps grandpas' work boots left drying in front of the heater.
This, I could do without, thank you very much. Raising a little girl was one thing; I almost had a rough idea of what to expect. But this whole weiner situation is playing with my head.
If you leave the diaper on him 100% of the time his ass will rot off. But sure as the sun rises in the east, if the diapers' off he's wandering around the house twanging his dinger or jiggling it around, or stretching it out like a noodle. And those things are really stretchy when they're unedited; I mean dang, its like...I don't know what. Something.
But clad or not, one thing is certain, and that's that sooner or later I will be hearing a repetitive thumping noise coming from the front room. And hiding from it.

why does the blowfish glow? (warning-dickensian childhood interlude)

I am smart.

Oooh, that feels so much better! So freeing! I'm OUT!!! Group hug!

The temptation to add '...I mean, I'm no super genius' or something similarly tempering to the bald assertion 'I am smart' was almost overwhelming. And that reaction right there, my darlings, am what this post be all aboot.

Funny subject. First of all, I feel under under enormous pressure right now to spell everything correctly. And to use proper sentence structure, perfect English and flawless punctuation. And most importantly of all, to try and not swear. Smart people do not use foul language. Ever.

HA! OH, SO IS MY HUMOR LAUGH I AM BEING! HA HA!

Second of all, how many of you reading this already have the oh lordy fidgets? Me too. And why is that??? It's not like its a disgusting disease, for the love of fuck. It's a good thing. Might it have something to do with vulnerability? You do tend to leave yourself open to a lot of snarky judegments and comments when you make an assertion like 'I am smart', don't you? Nevertheless, the fact remains. I am. Have you ever seen me on the Jerry Springer Show? No you have not.

I rest my case.


The social fact remains, though, that college educated people don't want to hear from anyone without a degree. It makes them itch. Folks who barely made a high school equivalency don't want to hear from anyone with a degree. It pisses them off. Yet both squirm and roll their eyes if anything other than pop culture subjects come up in conversation. Quick! Hurry! Make a joke and defuse the thing before it blows!!!!!

Now where and when I came from, It Wasn't Very Nice to be smart and have tits at the same time. I mean it was genuinely considered rude. If you were male, well, then you'd go to electronics classes at the voc tech and everyone was well rid of your boring shit; that was almost ok. But to be female? Fo-git it. You did not use big words, you did not read non-fiction (unless it was a cookbook or maybe Coronet magazine) and you certainly didn't watch adult programming on public television. Education stopped abruptly at 12 grade and a good thing too. If you worked, you left it at work and on Sunday you went to church to regain your rep as a nice lady. Oh my yes. Just because it was the 60's doesn't mean it was the 60's everywhere, or that anyone was paying much attention.

Now that was as much an issue of financial class as anything else. Still, even a well-educated nice lady ( read: probably from a wealthy family) knew about certain things only as a means of adorning her conversation, not because she actually liked the subjects in question.

So what happens when you DO?

Being a smart girl meant one thing and only one thing when I was growing up-it meant that I was a lesbian. My mother 'knew' it, my teachers 'knew' it, one high school teacher thought she'd take advantage of what she thought she 'knew', all the female friends I had and eventually lost 'knew' it, and every guy I failed to screw 'knew' it (but lets face it; who hasn't heard that one, right, ladies?)

But see, thats fine until you realize how many dumbass lesbians there are. (Grabby, too.)


I was passed by my teachers all throughout Jr. High and High school without even having to do the work in some instances, because ( as I now realize) it was pretty obvious from my demeanor that there were Problems At Home. They wanted me to stay in school and graduate so I'd have a better chance of going to college, which was nice of them, in retrospect. Not that I greeted this favor with anything but snarling teenage contempt, but I did graduate, by the skin of my teeth. And I continued to recieve sterling reports from all my instructors with words like 'promise' and 'talent' and 'gifted' and 'college' in them. Which mattered not one bit and was so much wasted paper and ink.

Now, I had been told early on in very specific terms by my parents that I would not be getting a college education because 'it would only give me big ideas that would just hurt me later.' Sound like the Ozarks? Nope. Milwaukie, Oregon. People would ask my parents what college I was planning on attending and mom and dad would laugh and laugh! Oh no, she's not going to college. That'd be a waste of money for a pretty girl like you, wouldn't it, sweetheart? Ha ha! As though they were insinuating that some lucky, lucky guy would have married me long before then! ( a whole 'nother bag of false assumptions there) but cutting me glances just to let me know that I wasn't to think that's what was meant for a moment.

And quite frankly going to college never really entered my head, not seriously. The way I had it planned I was going to move out the minute I was 18 and go to India. The honest truth of the matter is, had I received a higher education at that time in my life I would have taken great pains to waste it completely. Very true. But not on marriage; oh hell no, I wasn't even thinking about marriage. I knew nobody was going to want to marry me ( yet another bitter little appendix full of pus there) I was going to waste my life on drugs and cosmic enlightenment in some far-off exotic locale.

I recall the eye-rolling, smirking reaction my mother had when she discovered me checking out 'Walden' from the library. Yeah, I was 11. She made an issue of catching the librarians eye and giving her a 'oh humor the little faker, shes just showing off' smirk. Odd, coming from the woman responsible for teaching me to read at a first grade level by the time I was four.

Really odd.

As I look back I remember more instances of her shooting me little comments like 'don't go getting big ideas about your life' and 'don't go trying to copy your cousins; they're boys' and shit like that. My fathers' perennial admonishments had to do with how I'd better not even think about getting too big for my britches and how I better not act all sassy like I was growing out of the top of my hat. I mean, eighteen solid years of this shit. Daily.

Really quite odd indeed.

Was this some sort of slavery training? You know, I honestly think it was. These were people who hated their lives and told me in all sincerety that life was not good and was never meant to be good so I better not expect to much from it. I resent it like hell to this very day, as if that weren't already squirmingly obvious.

So I have no degree, and I have no future plans of getting a degree. Although I do have most of a degree in Business. Irregardless of which I like (and own and make) modern art, I prefer movies with robots and explosions, have been known to date girls, and I -deep breath, sit down- use big words. (And I can leg press 230 lbs. Plus, if I wanted to I could write this in Reverse Spanish. Or calligraphy. Or fluent UbbyDubby. See, now I'm showing off. And you are impressed by my having mastered the secret language of the ZoomKids.) Yet I ride a Harley, married a man, am a member of the working class, and occasionally visit the buffet at Harrahs' casino. And say 'fuck' a fuck of a lot. Oh no! she cried. Maybe I have been kidding myself all this time! Smart people don't ride Harleys and they melt like hot polystyrene at the merest whiff of Ranch dressing. And they are lesbians. Like Condoleeza Rice and Stephen Hawking.

Particularly Stephen Hawking.

Anyway I like what I like, and if I want to read about Roman trade routes or forensic entymology then I damn well will. I am happy. All I want to know is why I have this sick compulsion to collect ugly table lamps.

May Almanac

Oh dang! It's May! My natal month!
Lets all sing:

"IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIt's MAY! It's MAY! The lusty month of May!
Tra lalalala, lalalala, lalala, it's May!"
'It's May' rogers and hammerstein 1967
from the film 'Camelot' with richard harris and some other people

Important dates in May:

May1: Fete Du Travail.............
On this day in 1855 the Quebecois first celebrated in song and interpretive dance the hours of unimaginable agony that all mothers experience in childbirth.

May 27: Mt. Vernon Motorcycle swap meet......... Your hosts George Washington and Dolly Madison will be in attendance dispensing Syllabub Under the Cow to all.

May22: Victoria Day................
On this day the Victorians of Canada finally arose from the swoon induced by hearing the word 'childbirth' spoken aloud.

May 5: My great birthday.........
Which is completely amazingly great, and cool, and which should be a national holiday all over the world except in Mexico, where they think they can just be big stealers and make up their own crappy holiday about independence, which is so totally fake because it REALLY is my birthday. I am 46!

May1: May Day Bank Holiday, UK.............
All the banks go on holiday and the entire economy goes to hell. Then they have a big war and the economy recovers. No wait; thats America. Sorry.

May 10: Dia de la Madres, Mexico..................
Another fake Mexican holiday.

May 29: Memorial Day, US....................
On this day Americans everywhere take time out from their busy lives to remember their departed, to reflect on the precious gift of life and it's all-too-short span.

May 30: Memorial Day Observed, US..........
On this day Americans everywhere take time out from their busy lives to remember their departed by getting shitfaced drunk and dying in car accidents.

May 29: Spring Bank holiday, UK.......... Come on, what the hell is this? Is this fair? Another freakin holiday?

May14: Muttertag.............
The countryside comes alive every May 14 as Germans everywhere gather in the forests to play Muttertag. Elderly women are blindfolded, spun about several times and left by the roadside while the rest of the family retires to the nearest Rathskeller.

May 8: Victoire 1945............
Honestly, this is what my calender says. Who is this mysterious Victoire? Is it like the French Directoire? Are there beheadings? In which case I am so there.

May 25: Christ Himmelfahrt. No, really. Look it up. Christ Himmelfahrt.
All that stuff about heaven perfumed with spice? It's curry.

May24: Batalia da Pinchicha, Brazil..................
The friendly natives of this island nation celebrate the defeat of the pinchichas by standing on the roof of the local cathedral and dropping water balloons on nuns. (Similar to Batalia de Pinches, Mexico, where gentlemen of a certain persuasion show us their best side in the annual Petomaine Chorale competition.)

May 1: Dia de los Trabajos................
On this day Mexicans everywhere experience great regret at having made up a bunch of fake holidays because they were so jealous of my totally amazing AND great birthday that it made them cry like big whiner babies who poop in their pants. WAH WAH WAH.

May 14: Mothers' Day, US..................
Another holiday which I get to celebrate because of my incredible (fecundity) coolness. So I lord it over everyone and make them wait on me. Maybe this year I'll get get smashed on margaritas and yell at military helicopters again, like I did two years ago when I almost wrecked the Harley by standing up on the rear pegs and shouting "Canada is not the enemy motherfuckers!" while flipping it off with both hands. At speed. Fascist pricks.