Violet Wilson

[written last night]

I feel the need tonight to share some wisdom I've gained from working as a USPS mail processor clerk. You know how sometimes you get a piece of mail in one of those "oopsie" plastic bags because it's been ripped nearly in half and looks like a kindergartner tried origami? And you're like, "What the hell?? It's a plain flat envelope with two pieces of flat paper inside, why the blazes would the machine spindle -that-?" Well, the problem isn't your envelope; the problem is, maybe 5 pieces of mail -before- yours was an envelope in which someone decided to mail a thumb drive, or a rosary, or a lanyard with two keys attached. Or, a fru-fru hotel could decide that the best way to reunite a former guest with his fugly necktie was to fold it in quarters and put it in a plain ole envelope and stick it in the mail, like we encountered tonight. And then -that- piece of mail jams in a machine, and there's a 10-car pileup by the time the machine can stop, and those 10 pieces of mail are crammed into such a small space that we nearly achieved nuclear frickin' fusion. And in most cases, some anal-retentive clerk like me spends 2 to 5 minutes carefully extracting those 10 pieces of mail, including yours, trying not to rip anything any more than necessary, and sometimes failing. In the special cases, like tonight's necktie, I won't even try, because the technician has to come spend half an hour taking part of the machine apart to get the damn thing out. And in the really special cases, the technician will have to come back 4 more times over the remaining three hours trying to recalibrate everything, because now the machine is jamming on anything that isn't a postcard. In between each visit, the anal-retentive clerk will try running more mail, only to have yet more pieces accordioned, and no, she will not actually go postal, largely because her co-workers are commiserating with her, and eventually the number of f-bombs will reach critical mass and again with the nuclear metaphor, only here they decay into sardonic laughter and off-color wordplay involving mail/male and thickness. All because the guy at the desk at a hotel that likely charges 400 bucks a night couldn't be bothered to swing for a 50-cent padded envelope and the buck-thirty or so to send something as light as a tie first-class mail. So anyway, here's a rule of thumb, literally: if it's thicker than your thumb, DON'T FRICKIN' STICK IT IN A PLAIN FRICKIN' ENVELOPE. Because karma's a wench, and she's gonna turn your next tax refund check into confetti and you'll get about two-thirds of it an oopsie bag and you'll be left asking "Why, God, why? It was just an innocent piece of paper in a normal envelope!"

I wrote this at the first Write Here Write Now workshop I attended back in April.  Fair warning: there's a great deal of cursing — in fact, that's kind of the whole point.  

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I never swore before I came to college. I had literally said the f-word once in my life, and that was when I was six and mimicking my father, with no idea what it meant. I mean, the word "mother" was right there in the phrase, so it couldn't be bad, right? I didn't say hell even when I meant the place, because even though I knew that wasn't really swearing, it still felt wrong on my tongue. And then, freshman year in college, I was roommates with Heather.

She sewed, and cooked, and baked, all the things that were too girly for me to do growing up. The first month I knew her, she got drafted into costume designing for the Musical Theatre Guild's production of Oklahoma. 15 pairs of bloomers. She bought a sewing machine at the Woolworth's, and it was about what you'd expect for a sewing machine from Woolworth's. I sat on my bed trying to figure out my calculus homework while she fought with the bobbins.

"God dammit! Mother fucking, ass-sucking piece of shit!"

I started laughing out of shock. I hadn't heard that kind of litany of curses from anyone but my father. But there was such beauty. I'd never noticed the rhyme of "fucking" and "sucking" before. And "ass-sucking": what a perfect, perfect image: the excrement implied but never stated outright. She was hunched over the machine, a pair of pink bloomers hanging off the back of the table, telling it to do things that would only be possible if it were an incredibly limber dog. I would have still been laughing if I could have inhaled. I had to get up from my seat and lie in fetal position on the floor before I could draw in a breath and shriek with giggles.

She came back to campus early after Christmas break that year, and she taught me how to play Parcheesi while I got paid to watch the front desk at the dorm even though there was pretty much no one coming or going. There was some confusion over the rules of the game, it had been so long since she played. Did you get to send your opponent's piece back to start — and also get to move twenty spaces — only if your piece landed exactly on the other person's piece, or just by passing their piece? Fuckit, let's try the second way and see what happens.

What happened was three-hour games, with pieces getting sent back to square one with a frequency that brought out a kind of gleeful rage I'd never had playing board games with my mother and brother. There was a new level of creativity in the curses. She passed one of my pieces, sent it home and got 20 spaces, which sent her past a second of my pieces, that one back to home and another 20 spaces for her. "Fuck you! Fuck you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!" At one point, she blew on her hands cupped around the dice, shook them while chanting, "Six. Six. Six." I put my hands on my hips, even though I was sitting down, and nagged, "Six, six, six, that's all you ever think about." She snorted. "What are you, Satan's wife?" "Well, that makes you Satan, chickie." It was my turn, and I rolled high enough to pass one of her pieces. "And now I shall send your demon spawn back into the fires from which they came!"

My shift was over at 2 a.m., but we stayed up and played through the night. At 8 in the morning, the guy came down to take the morning shift, and we headed upstairs to sleep, passing through the lounge, where a middle-aged woman I'd never seen managed to somehow glare at us while simultaneously avoiding looking at us. Halfway up the stairs, I muttered, "Who the hell was that?" Heather said, "You know Lisa from the third floor?" "The fundy girl?" "Yup. That's her mom."

I pretty much never do silly-homage poetry, but on the way home last night, shivering in 25 degrees after a high in the 50s the day before, the line "Beware the Ides of March, my son" popped into my head.  Today during my lunch break and my homeward commute, I worked out the rest.

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Middle-Marchy
(with no apologies to Lewis Carroll)

'Twas sprinter, and the grimy roads
Did run with water from the rain;
All slushy were the sidewalk curbs,
And the slurry clogged the drains.

"Beware the Ides of March, my child
The winds that bite, the boughs that crack!
Beware the fickle weather mild:
It will change in half a snap!"

She put her YakTrax on her boots;
Already were the sidewalks fraught—
No resting by the maple tree,
The temperature was Aught.

And as she trudged the gritty road,
Above, the looming sky of grey
Let loose its load of stinging snow,
Wind shrieking as it came!

One, two! One, two! Her boots strode through,
The YakTrax going clicker-clack!
Through the door, and home once more,
And met by hungry cats.

"Oh hast thou come, prehensile thumbs?
Spoon the tuna on our plates!
Serve our kibble without quibble,
Lest hunger make us faint!"

'Twas sprinter, and the grimy roads
Did run with water from the rain;
All slushy were the sidewalk curbs,
And the slurry clogged the drains.

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The original, for comparison:

Jaberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I have never done illegal drugs, or drunk alcohol. There's nothing moral about that, it's just that I'm a control freak. The effects people describe from mind-altering substances always sounded way too much like dissociation felt to me; I'd do that on purpose -why-, exactly? But also, in the case of alcohol and pot, they smell repulsive to me. I've described the smell of pot smoke as: Get a cigarette damp, seal it in a plastic bag, and leave it in a warm spot until mold forms, then dry it out for a couple of days and light up!

I mowed my friend's yard earlier this week, over the course of two days. I was bagging the clippings to keep any plantain or crabgrass seeds from planting themselves. Two or three times on both days, dumping the clipping into the compost bin in the corner, I got a whiff of pot smoke. I looked for someone toking up in the parking lot across the street, but no. The neighbors weren't on their back deck, not that I ever smell anything illegal from them. It was a mystery.

I was over at my friend's again today, doing something over in that corner, and finally the lightbulb went on over my head. Last week, I'd pruned the Burning Bush. I wanted the leaves to dry out before I put them with the other stuff over there, because there's this mantra with composting of having equal parts "green" and "brown" stuff, and between weeds and grass clippings, there's plenty of green stuff in summer, but not much brown stuff. Dry leaves are brown, so I put the pruned stuff in the wheelbarrow, planning to dump it on the brush pile in a week or so. And then it rained. And the wheelbarrow bottom is partly watertight. So while the top 18 inches or so of the pruned stuff was drying out this week, the bottom -four- inches or so were, uh, marinating in their own funky juices. And apparently slow-brewed Burning Bush green tea smells like pot smoke. I don't know if you can get high off of it, but feel free to try it out sometime and let me know.

What would you use to glue rocks together?

See, I have a small flower bed in front of my condo, and a plethora of rocks that I put between plants for aesthetic effect.  Some are flat, so I experimented with stacking them two or three high, which pleases me, but of course weather and bunnies and squirrels tend to dislodge them, and I'd also like to try making other structures, and taller structures.  Anyway, the two best ideas I have are (1) some type of mortar mix and (2) aquarium glue.  Anybody have any experience with either of those?  My concern with the mortar would be that in order for it to hold the rocks together, I'd have to use enough that it would show.  Is a quarter-sized dollop enough to hold a couple of 4-5-inch rocks together? 

People often scrawl messages on the hard-plastic backs of the commuter train seats.  I don't often pay attention to them, but last night's seat had "bite me" printed in what I presume is white-out pen, vertically.  The white caught my eye, which led me to ponder the other notes.  There was a partially erased "I love jeebus."  And next to it in blue Sharpie, "I love CaCl."

I finally poked around and dealt with setting up an author page at Amazon.  There isn't really anything on the page that my friends don't already know; I'm largely posting here because you can link from that author page to your outside blog, via rss, and I want to make sure I did that right because I've never tried such newfangled stuff, and the format that Amazon gives as an example, when typed in my browser, redirects to a different format, so I'm not positive it will work right.  So the entire purpose of this post is to see if I see this post when I go to my author page. Of course, the blog link doesn't seem to show up immediately on the author page, for reasons I don't understand, so this whole post might be futile and I might have to do the same thing again in the week.