ps - the meth lab down the street blew up this morning... :)

"I gave him a tip, that's why."
"You what, mom?" I leftt-to-right-ear shift my phone.
"I told officer Willis that those people who moved into Dr. Lowrey's home were cookin' up meth," she long-vowels her E with a southern 'gossip without a cause' emphasis.
"How do you know they are cooking meth, Mom?"
"Because you can smell that shit when you walk past their house, Ashley, and I walk around this block every night, since you were big enough to stand, and I know I've never smelled that stench before...they are cooking that shit, I know it."
"First of all, how do you know what crystal meth smells like when it is 'cooking,'? and secondly, how do you jump from narcing to some local goon's flirtations?"
"Aaashhley," she begins her home-brewed lecture of sticks & stones, "any idiot could smell that poison a mile away, and he wasn't just flirting with me because I turned in some druggies," my mother's judgmental tone takes a violent turn as I turn east on 17th toward my Tucsonan metropolitan home.
"Why was he flirting with you?"
"Your mother may be old, but she can still turn heads," she jokes without the joke.
"Well, I guess your lab partners will be turning nothing but glib flattery your way."
"I don't care what they do, as long as that shit doesn't blow up...those meth labs can take out entire neighborhoods, you know?"
"No, mother, I didn't know. I don't read 'Suburban Biddy Weekly.' "
"You hate me, don't you?"
"Yes, mother, I spend my lonely days drawing blueprints of your mental demise by the hand of my mental superiority."
"I knew you thought you were smarter than me!"
"Mother, don't ever use exclamation points, even in speech; it's a pat use of punctuation, and furthermore, sarcasm has yet to register with you...can't you tell when I'm using irony to express my contempt for the general public?" I say before I can fully utilize my mocking tone of ridicule and scorn.
"Ashley, you are so weird, oh!!, my walking buddy is here.., yes we're going to walk by the druggie's house and report any changes."
"Mom, you are 22 across on today's crossword puzzle."
"Whaaat?"
"The clue: person who turns in known drug users. The number of spaces in the puzzle: 4. The answer: NARC. That's what you are."
"I may be a narc, but at least those druggie's are OFF the streets," she yells into the phone, a lifetime NIMBY member re-staking her flag on the property that was always no one's.

---

"Do you want me to stop at this gas station?"
"Yes.,.,.,no,,yes, no, yes,"
"Jesus, what's the answer?
"Well...what do you think?"
"I think you need a decongestant."
"I think you're right. Ok, stop."
"Oh, for fuck's sake!" I exclaim with the threat of exclaiming every second of my 90-degree-turn right into the wheel of my misadventured life.
"I love you," she smiles her soon to be de-congetsted smile.
"Make sure you bring your ID if you are buying Sudafed."
"Why?" she marks her question without the guile.
"Because that's what people use to make meth, so you have to be eighteen to buy it now."
"Even in Vermont?"
"Honey, meth labs are all over the country, even in Vermont," I edit, the expert editor who knows nothing except what she hears from unreliable sources and wikipedia articles,
"But, what the hell do I know?" I ask, an earnest target, an unreliable genius.

---

Dear M,

I received your letter and CD today; thank you for the mix. I honestly thought you were on crack when you wrote the letter, but after a second reading, I could finally piece together the random thoughts. I couldn't listen to all of the CD for some reason. Maybe send another copy. Anyway, I don't think I could advise you on your problems with women, as I seem to have my own waiting on my sleeve. Speaking of tough advice, I received yet another rejection letter in the mail for my manuscript. Ah well, there's always theater, right?

Take care, and we hope to see you sooner than next October.
Love,
Ashley

---

"Hello, is Ashley there?"
"This is she," I respond in my grammatically correct response.
"Hi, this is Patrick," he responds in his gay director voice, "How are you?" he ask as his non-obligatory gay choice.
"Fine."
"Good!" he goody-two-shoes his next word, "Well..." and his non-obligatory pause presents the obligatory non-accidental clause, "unfortunately," followed by my preparation for the rejection that hurts the most, "we decided that we couldn't use you."
BULLSHIT!!!! That's a lovely euphemism for, "We are not sorry that we didn't have the balls to cast a young, talented, and budding star, even though I said you were talented and had lots of natural ability."
Instead he says, "Thanks for coming out, and I hope to see you in a future show."

---

"Are you bitter?"
"Has a cat got a fucking ass???"
She laughs.
I mourn.
She asks if I'm OK.
I ask if she's been around for the last three months of my life.
She says that isn't fair.
I imagine my response, just as I've imagined the entire conversation until now. I say, "The entire fucking world isn't fair. If it were, I'd be published or a famous actor, or a member of the Arcade Fire, hopefully one of the strings or accordion players."
"Ashley--"
"What?"
"You know what. You're--"
"What? Talented?"
"YES!"
"Fuck that. If I had a chance to die, I would."
"No you wouldn't"
"Sum, I'm talking to myself right now. How desperate do you think I am?"

---

ps. the meth lab down the street blew up this morning :)

She gently places her smiley face after the postscript, as if it were part of the channel nine morning news's "in other news," or as the musical afterthought of an amateur musician...

---

"Oh, honey, I'm sorry, I--"
"Don't fucking placate me...I don't need a fucking cheerleader right now, OK?"
"Yes."
"FUCK!" I slam the hammer against the cement floor, just as my father would have done as a 28-year-old-unknown-dissident. I throw a fit. I want to slam the metal tip into my temples. I throw the hammer. I throw my love and anger around like a sledgehammer. I throw.

---

or as the one who thinks experience comes after the notes, the director who thinks acting comes after the production.

---

ps. post script. p. I forgot to tell you. s. I don't know how to express how much I adore you

vino fire, arcade fret

"He made fret noises with what?"
"A bottle of vino!"
"A bottle of wine?"
"Yes! Well..,the neck," I correct, sounding repetitive, repeatedly sounding corrected.
"What a waste of perfectly good liquor."
"What?!!"
"What?" she asks, repeatedly sounding corrective, correcting the repetitive sound of..
"What wasted note of sound have you ever found to correct?" I repeat a corrected sound to no one.
"Ashley, do you have to be obscure all the fucking time?" she asks, repeating noises that fret with a pocketwatch pace to the only one who listens.

---

"You saw the Arcade Fire?" she asks
'Yeah," I say, into an Austin Texas blanketed air.
"How did you move your way up front?"
"A third-person omniscient narrator told me about the propane fire in the paper.,.,.,.,do you know what happens next?"
"No." the narrator answers in an all-knowing (nothing) tone.
"Don't patronize me," I Thesaurus fret verb perturb & defibrillate the condescension from my heartless appearance of kindness.
"Do you have to be so ob--"
"--no, I don't need to alarm the deliberate magnification of abstruse texts that only you and your recondite cronies could understand..,,"
"Fuck you! Neither I, nor my 'cronies' could identify your enigmatic linguistics, even if we had the highest paid nerds in the country to determine your verbal cloaks, so don't--"
"Ok, ok, I just wanted to know if you got to see the Arcade Fire."
"Oh..,,.,,.,.,.,well,., .. , , yes.!. !"
"And that's your answer, punctuation and all?"
"I expressed myself without a ques?ion mar? did'? I"

---

"Did you know Gertrude Stein well, while she was alive?"
"No."
"And what did she tell you?"
"I never met her, so how--"
"Were you born in New England, Sir?"
"I'm not a man, so I really can't--"
"Did you tell Gertrude Stein that her language barriers would never get her published?"
"Are you on crack, man? I just want to get home to my wife and ki--"
"Tell me, sir, how you and Stein got mixed up in that scandalous plot to overthrow the government."

---

"A propane fire blasted through Zilker Park this afternoon, leaving hundreds of 'Austin City Limit' fans waiting in ridiculously long lines, some in which their ADD attention spans could not allow a normal waiting time: fast cabs and a few ambulances were called."

"ALL OF YOU WHO WANT TO SEE THE ARCADE FIRE MOVE TO THE FRONT; ALL OTHERS MOVE TO THE BACK!!!!" I cup my earnest palms.

"Um, Yeah, like all of us are here to see the band," she fibrillates her way out of my sympathetic, 'um-yeah' heart.
"Um, Sir? Sir. sir? sir. sir. sir,." I plead, off the recorded record.

---

"Ashley?"
"~~~~~ {}_+{-==p;-=][~ ::'.;[///"
"Ashley, it's time to go to Texas, and--"
"WHAAAAAT??"
"Honey, remember, we're going to Austin to see the ______Fire?"
"Oh, um, yes," I say embarrassed as a an embarrassing misspelling of embarrass.

---

"Peter Bjork and John."
"Peter who?"
"PEE TER BEE YORK and--" ah, fuck it, I brain wave into a white stripe song.
"And? Who?"
"And Whom," I correct a repetitive sound.
"All-fucking-right," she repeatedly sounds the alarm.
"We missed--'. "
"Missed, what?' she coaxes an em-- into an empircal saul bellow book.
"We missed one of the most important bands in history--Peter Bjork and John--"
"I wouldn't say--"
"--I would, and, I'd say that we got to the festival in time, but the propane fire kept us in line for about a half an hour, and then the--"
"Arcade Fire?"
"No, well, yes, we pushed our way to the front for the Arcade Fire, but their brilliance--"
"Like a fire, right?"
"Um,.,., yes,.,but, i, but--"
"I apologize, I seemed to arrived...."
"Now you're plagiarizing Fionn Regan..."
"True."
"True," I truant my noun's choice in verb.

---

"Oh, DeVotchKa, I know that band."
"Yeah, well, it was this sexy tuba player, and her stringed compatriots."
"Don't you mean--"
"--No," I tell my sexy dream companion.
".....it's not your man that your dreaming of,.,.,,you're too tired to be in love,,.,.,.,.,,.,"
"Do you always confuse commas with periods?"
"As much as I confuse periodic comas with periods of comatose love."
"Amore."
"Amor."

---

"Ashley...ASHLEY!!"
"...what,?"
"Wake up, honey, the Arcade Fire is starting in an hour."
"What's the crap band playing before they go on? Nevermind, I don't care, I'll watch anything to get closer."
"Artic Monkeys."
"Never heard of them."
"Thought you might not, Mr. Burns...I--"
"Wait, Smithers? Am I dreaming ag--"

---

"Class, the example given to us in this actpack comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Do you know his other famous work, Through the Looking Glass?"

The snickering class does not know. I am awake three states away, looking through a glass-full of vino, listening to the fret noise of a whine-less violin, bottle-necked with an extra dry malbec, asking,

"Why waste wine or music with one or the other?"
"Ashley--"
"Shhh, just enjoy the rhetorical nature of the question.....

end quote

---

god bless the polacks for their stringed instruments, the french for their wine, the dutch for their propensity for natural energy, the scotch-irish for their ballads & whiskey, and the canadians for the bastard music molded from all of the above...

18 minutes to go...

"I've only got twenty minutes on my mac battery."
"So why don't you just post something short?"
"Like...pushing my way up front to see the Arcade Fire live is one of those 'things to do before I die' little boxes that now has a 'now I can die' check in it?"
"Yeah!"
"yeah."
"Title it and you're done."

ghost of you (yes is for first class)

"If you were here, would you calm me down?" I sing to no one.
"That isn't a song lyric of your own."
"I know."
"What if you were still in Tucson?"
"The ghost would still linger."
"You are a plagiarizer."
"I will be in Austin Texas tomorrow. Is that plagiarism?"
"Depends."
"On what?"
"Your fingers."
"What?"
"How will you think of me when I'm gone?"
"You aren't making sense."
"Aren't I?"
"Stop."
"Stop what?"
"You're not saving--"
"--what? huh? What am I not saving for you?"
"My sanity."
"Sanity is overrated, I thought you said."
"The ghost of you lingers," I quote a song.
"There you go again--"
"Plagiarizing."
"Plagiarizing," she says.

---

"You might get caught by the cops."
"Why?"
"Because your neighbors will call them."
"Why?"
"Ashley, don't be a jackass."
"No, listen to me," I begin my litigious rhetoric, "I pulled that fan from the sandy banks of the river across they road on their property, so I don't know why pulling something from their property onto their property would be illegal, and I'd use the same persuasive rhetoric with the cops if they did have the wherewithal to call the authorities. Technically," I drive home my point, "it isn't vandalism because I'm only bringing the garbage from their property closer to the house on that same property."
Her political pause and cynical clause indicates a rebuttal of brief silence,
so I continue, "They cannot arrest me for bringing my neighbors belongings closer to the main property, can they?"
"No, I guess they can't, but your moot point will lost to mute neighbors," she cleverly muses.
"Ah, fuck it," I say as I flip the motion light off, and head for the front porch where the junkyard electric fan awaits its toss over the fence.
"What's that Frost poem about good neighbors and bad fences?" I ask myself as I rubber-boot my way across wet grass, and to the fence between us and our rotting neighbors.

---

"What did you do?
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, how did you make them realize--"
"That it wasn't me?"
"Yeah."
"I simply waited for a car."
"A car?"
"Yes, a car."
"But how did you--"
"No more questions. I simply tossed the fan over the fence at just the right time; can we leave it at that?"
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"yes."
"yes, then it's settled, no?"
"No?"
"Yes."
"yes, no, yes?"
"Oh, for fuck's sake, I did it, but you know that already, so can we please go to bed now?"
"Yes."
"YES!"

---

"Are you excited?"
"Yes!"
"Are you leaving soon?"
"Yes."
"It's for your anniversary?"
"Yes."
"You love her?"
"If you weren't in my dream, I'd slap you for stupidity."
"The ghost of her lingers."
"Goddamn you, Freud, I'll...."

"Ashley!! Stop...you're choking me with your fingers."
"Sorry," I wake up with whiskers in my throat.
"We have to get to the airport soon."
"Yes...first class?"

"No, are you plagiarizing priority?"

chemical haircut

"My hair is falling out."
"What?! Ashley, you're only 28."
"Yeah, but I'll be approaching thirty by the end of November,, and I'm not talking about that kind of hair loss anyway."
"You aren't sick are you?" she asks with feignless concern.
"Whaa-at?" I choke on my sip of ten-dollar reisling, "No, I'm not sick, for fuck's sake."
"Then how do you know you are losing hair?"
"Because every time I take a shower, a nest of blonde hair clogs the drain, and the only person in this house with a platinum head is the only person who deserves to be published but isn't because of rampant nepotism in the publishing world."
"I've told you before," she pauses to let the train whistle drown out her advice, "you aren't published because you won't send anything out."
"What do I have to send?"
"Your manuscript might be--"
"Nope," I interrupt with a pop of proclitic emphasis.
"Why?" she question mark whines.
"Got my third rejection today."
"What did you learn from that class about the Romantics?"
"Romanticism is akin to Nepotism."

---

"I've given myself a chemical haircut many times with box colorings and home perms," she feigns the 'don't worry we know what we're doing' smile.
"Right," I nod with an encourageless smile.
"The instructors here at the beauty school know what they're doing, and they would never let a treatment stay in too long," she says and pauses,

and comma-pauses, with more commas,

for way too long, before adding, "Don't worry, you are in good hands."
"But...you've applied the color twice, so isn't that too long to leave a chemical on the scalp?" I trouble-question her learning process as if I were teaching again.
"Let me get Beth," she rushes away from the station.

---

"Oh shit, are you serious, your hair is falling out because you got it colored at a beauty school?"
"Well, yes, but you know, I don't really give a fuck,, I'll just shave the shit off if I have to."
"I couldn't do that."
"It's easy. I've done it several times."
"I know, but how?"
"It's just hair."
"Then why are you so worried about it falling out?"
"I wanted to make sure it was the bleach and not part of my thyroid problem, which is caused by the mood stabilizing meds. I can't solve that problem with an electric razor and a little nonchalance."
I hear her nod with an appearance of casual calm on the other end of the Appalachian Trail.

---

"It's interesting to hear you talk about this, because just as you say that you don't deserve to call yourself a good writer, it relates to your need to feel that you deserve to live at the house rent-free," she pauses to inhale that therapy breath of connection, "It's almost as if your need to feel as if you deserve to live there coincides with your need to be published..in other words, the recognition from the publishing world or the sense of worth a writer would attain from being published is the same sense of worth that would come from getting paid for your services," she waves her hand in that 'I don't really think I know but I do know what I'm talking about' way, and says, "I don't know. I'm just making inferences."
"No, it makes sense, it makes a lot of sense, like when I want to put a comma instead of a period because to me, it just makes more fucking sense, . , know what I fucking mean?.,"
She does not answer.
"It's really a Catch 22," I say and wait for her head nod before adding on, "Getting published would help me feel better about myself and the value of my work (which I already know is pretty fucking valuable), but I can't get it published because my work doesn't have the 'already published' stamp of approval (and who the fuck can afford an agent?), but I can't send it out there because I don't feel as if I'm good enough without getting published.
I wait for another "It's interesting to hear you," comment before the punk-addendum to my entire fucking clash slash ramones/royal life.

---

"Do you drink alcohol?"
"Um," I begin the cliched sterile response, "Yes, I do."
"How much?"
Tiff sterilizes my clincial response, "Beer and wine,, mostly..."
I punctuate her answer with a, "mostly," and a colloquial "atta,"....'at a' meal. Or with friends.
"And what about street drugs?"
"What about them?" I decide not to ask but say, "Marijuana, occasionally," emphasizing that last word.
"Have you been hit or kicked by someone in the last two months?" she asks, after telling me that some of the questions are "random" or "meant to screen for domestic violence."
Do I not look or act like I could be domestically violent?

---

"Fall is your favorite time of year?"
"Yes, of course, are you kidding me?"
"Well...I guess that makes sense."
"Of course it does."
"Ashley?"
"Yes?"
"You aren't sick are you?"
"Depends on what you call sick?"
"You know what I mean."
"No, Summar, I'm not sick."
"Because if you were--"
"--I know."
"I know you know, but promise me that you'll--"
"I promise to tell you if I feel the cycle warning me to read the signs."
"It's just that you're so isolated and--"
"Summar, your name never lied about the seasons."
"That's not enough to feel connected to--"
"--don't worry, honestly, because a chemical haircut is just another way to prove the existence of existentialism--we create our own realities."
"And what is the reality of your chemical haircut?"
"Well,,that's what I have to create..." I whine my own question out of my mark.